Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (17):4688–4693 (2016)
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Abstract

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

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Author Profiles

Simon Fitzpatrick
John Carroll University
Stephen Stich
Rutgers - New Brunswick
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Citations of this work

No luck for moral luck.Markus Kneer & Edouard Machery - 2019 - Cognition 182 (C):331-348.
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Norms of assertion in the United States, Germany, and Japan.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118 (37):e2105365118.

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