The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,386

which include the insula, orbital cortex, cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and temporoparietal junction. Equality Matching is the basis of our sense of fairness and our intuitive economics, and it binds us as neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and trading partners rather than as bosom buddies or brothers-in-arms. Many traditional tribes engaged in the ritual exchange of useless gifts, a bit like our Christmas fruitcakes, solely to cement Equality Matching relationships.174

(Readers who are comparing and contrasting the taxonomies may wonder why Haidt’s category of Harm/Care is adjacent to Fairness and aligned with Fiske’s Equality Matching, rather than with more touchy-feely relationships like Community or Sanctity. The reason is that Haidt measures Harm/Care by asking people about the treatment of a generic “someone” rather than the friends and relatives that are the standard beneficiaries of caring. The responses to these questions align perfectly with the responses to his questions about Fairness, and that is no coincidence.175 Recall that the logic of reciprocal altruism, which implements our sense of fairness, is to be “nice” by cooperating on the first move, by not defecting unless defected on, and by conferring a large benefit to a needy stranger when one can do so at a relatively small cost to oneself. When care and harm are extended outside intimate circles, then they are simply a part of the logic of fairness.)176

Fiske’s final relational model is Market Pricing: the system of currency, prices, rents, salaries, benefits, interest, credit, and derivatives that powers a modern economy. Market Pricing depends on numbers, mathematical formulas, accounting, digital transfers, and the language of formal contracts. Unlike the other three relational models, Market Pricing is nowhere near universal, since it depends on literacy, numeracy, and other recently invented information technologies. The logic of Market Pricing remains cognitively unnatural as well, as we saw in the widespread resistance to interest and profits until the modern era. One can line up the models, Fiske notes, along a scale that more or less reflects their order of emergence in evolution, child development, and history: Communal Sharing > Authority Ranking > Equality Matching > Market Pricing.

Market Pricing, it seems to me, is specific neither to markets nor to pricing. It really should be lumped with other examples of formal social organization that have been honed over the centuries as a good way for millions of people to manage their affairs in a technologically advanced society, but which may not occur spontaneously to untutored minds.177 One of these institutions is the political apparatus of democracy, where power is assigned not to a strongman (Authority) but to representatives who are selected by a formal voting procedure and whose prerogatives are delineated by a system of laws. Another is a corporation, university, or nonprofit organization. The people who work in them aren’t free to hire their friends and relations (Communality) or to dole out spoils as favors (Equality Matching), but are hemmed in by fiduciary duties and regulations. My emendation of Fiske’s theory does not come out of the blue. Fiske notes that one of his intellectual inspirations for Market Pricing was the sociologist Max Weber’s concept of a “rational-legal” (as opposed to traditional and charismatic) mode of social legitimation—a system of norms that is worked out by reason and implemented by formal rules.178 Accordingly, I will sometimes refer to this relational model using the more general term Rational-Legal.

For all their differences in lumping and splitting, the theories of Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske agree on how the moral sense works. No society defines everyday virtue and wrongdoing by the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative. Instead, morality consists in respecting or violating one of the relational models (or ethics or foundations): betraying, exploiting, or subverting a coalition; contaminating oneself or one’s community; defying or insulting a legitimate authority; harming someone without provocation; taking a benefit without paying the cost; peculating funds or abusing prerogatives.

The point of these taxonomies is not to pigeonhole entire societies but to provide a grammar for social norms.179 The grammar should reveal common patterns beneath the differences among cultures and periods (including the decline of violence), and should predict people’s response to infractions of the reigning norms, including their perverse genius for moral compartmentalization.

Some social norms are merely solutions to coordination games, such as driving on the right-hand side of the road, using paper currency, and speaking the ambient language.180 But most norms have moral content. Each moralized norm is a compartment containing a relational model, one or more social roles (parent, child, teacher,