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20 - Morality in Culture

The Fate of Moral Absolutes in History

from Part IV - Origins, Development, and Variation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2025

By
Richard A. Shweder ,
Jacob R. Hickman  and
Les Beldo
Edited by
Bertram Malle  and
Philip Robbins
Bertram Malle
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Philip Robbins
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Summary

This chapter proposes a way to investigate and evaluate the moral standing of cultural customs different from one’s own without falling into ethnocentrism. As a methodological approach the authors adopt the perspective of “moral realism,” which is the view that there are absolute moral truths that supply all human beings with good reasons for their judgments about what is right or wrong and possess a normative authority that supersedes social consensus and personal desire. According to the authors genuine moral absolutes are abstract forms that provide the skeletal structure for the development of any genuinely moral cultural tradition; while it is their fate to be specified and implemented locally and to assume an historically provincial moral shape. To illustrate this relationship between moral reality and cultural specificity, the authors analyze several ethnographic examples of distinctive and even clashing moral traditions. These include clashes between Brahman Hindu Indian and Western secular views of a widow’s obligations and tensions between Native American whalers’ and whaling protesters’ attitudes toward whaling.

Keywords

moral pluralismmoral realismmoral developmentanthropology of moralityHindu widowhoodNative American whalingHmong religionConfucian ethics
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology , pp. 492 - 520
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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