The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,385

Even a glance at ancient religions like Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism reminds us that they moralize a slew of other concerns, such as loyalty, respect, obedience, asceticism, and the regulation of bodily functions like eating, sex, and menstruation.

Shweder organized the world’s moral concerns in a threefold way.171 Autonomy, the ethic we recognize in the modern West, assumes that the social world is composed of individuals and that the purpose of morality is to allow them to exercise their choices and to protect them from harm. The ethic of Community, in contrast, sees the social world as a collection of tribes, clans, families, institutions, guilds, and other coalitions, and equates morality with duty, respect, loyalty, and interdependence. The ethic of Divinity posits that the world is composed of a divine essence, portions of which are housed in bodies, and that the purpose of morality is to protect this spirit from degradation and contamination. If a body is merely a container for the soul, which ultimately belongs to or is part of a god, then people do not have the right to do what they want with their bodies. They are obligated to avoid polluting them by refraining from unclean forms of sex, food, and other physical pleasures. The ethic of Divinity lies behind the moralization of disgust and the valorization of purity and asceticism.

Haidt took Shweder’s trichotomy and cleaved two of the ethics in two, yielding a total of five concerns that he called moral foundations.172 Community was bifurcated into In-group Loyalty and Authority/Respect, and Autonomy was sundered into Fairness/Reciprocity (the morality behind reciprocal altruism) and Harm/Care (the cultivation of kindness and compassion, and the inhibition of cruelty and aggression). Haidt also gave Divinity the more secular label Purity/Sanctity. In addition to these adjustments, Haidt beefed up the case that the moral foundations are universal by showing that all five spheres may be found in the moral intuitions of secular Westerners. In his dumbfounding scenarios, for example, Purity/Sanctity underlay the participants’ revulsion to incest, bestiality, and the eating of a family pet. Authority/ Respect commanded them to visit a mother’s grave. And In-group Loyalty prohibited them from desecrating an American flag.

The system I find most useful was developed by the anthropologist Alan Fiske. It proposes that moralization comes out of four relational models, each a distinct way in which people conceive of their relationships.173 The theory aims to explain how people in a given society apportion resources, where their moral obsessions came from in our evolutionary history, how morality varies across societies, and how people can compartmentalize their morality and protect it with taboos. The relational models line up with the classifications of Shweder and Haidt more or less as shown in the table on page 626.

The first model, Communal Sharing (Communality for short), combines In-group Loyalty with Purity/Sanctity. When people adopt the mindset of Communality, they freely share resources within the group, keeping no tabs on who gives or takes how much. They conceptualize the group as “one flesh,” unified by a common essence, which must be safeguarded against contamination. They reinforce the intuition of unity with rituals of bonding and merging such as bodily contact, commensal meals, synchronized movement, chanting or praying in unison, shared emotional experiences, common bodily ornamentation or mutilation, and the mingling of bodily fluids in nursing, sex, and blood rituals. They also rationalize it with myths of shared ancestry, descent from a patriarch, rootedness in a territory, or relatedness to a totemic animal. Communality evolved from maternal care, kin selection, and mutualism, and it may be implemented in the brain, at least in part, by the oxytocin system.

Fiske’s second relational model, Authority Ranking, is a linear hierarchy defined by dominance, status, age, gender, size, strength, wealth, or precedence. It entitles superiors to take what they want and to receive tribute from inferiors, and to command their obedience and loyalty. It also obligates them to a paternalistic, pastoral, or noblesse oblige responsibility to protect those under them. Presumably it evolved from primate dominance hierarchies, and it may be implemented, in part, by testosterone-sensitive circuits in the brain.

Equality Matching embraces tit-for-tat reciprocity and other schemes to divide resources equitably, such as turn-taking, coin-flipping, matching contributions, division into equal portions, and verbal formulas like eeny-meenyminey-moe. Few animals engage in clear-cut reciprocity, though chimpanzees have a rudimentary sense of fairness, at least when it comes to themselves being shortchanged. The neural bases of Equality Matching embrace the parts of the brain that register intentions, cheating, conflict, perspective-taking, and calculation,