In
2012, Oliver Scott Curry was an anthropology lecturer at the University
of Oxford. One day, he organized a debate among his students about
whether morality was innate or acquired. One side argued passionately
that morality was the same everywhere; the other, that morals were
different everywhere.
“I realized that, obviously, no one really knew, and so decided to find out for myself,” Curry says.
Seven
years later, Curry, now a senior researcher at Oxford’s Institute for
Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, can offer up an answer to the
seemingly ginormous question of what morality is and how it does—or
doesn’t—vary around the world.
Morality, he
says, is meant to promote cooperation. “People everywhere face a similar
set of social problems, and use a similar set of moral rules to solve
them,” he says as lead author of a paper recently published in Current Anthropology.
“Everyone everywhere shares a common moral code. All agree that
cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do.”
For
the study, Curry’s group studied ethnographic accounts of ethics from
60 societies, across over 600 sources. The universal rules of morality
are:
- Help your family
- Help your group
- Return favors
- Be brave
- Defer to superiors
- Divide resources fairly
- Respect others’ property
The
authors reviewed seven “well-established” types of cooperation to test
the idea that morality evolved to promote cooperation, including family values, or why we allocate resources to family; group loyalty, or why we form groups, conform to local norms, and promote unity and solidarity; social exchange or reciprocity, or why we trust others, return favors, seek revenge, express gratitude, feel guilt, and make up after fights; resolving conflicts through contests which entail “hawkish displays of dominance” such as bravery or “dovish displays of submission,” such as humility or deference; fairness, or how to divide disputed resources equally or compromise; and property rights, that is, not stealing.
The
team found that these seven cooperative behaviors were considered
morally good in 99.9% of cases across cultures. Curry is careful to note
that people around the world differ hugely in how they prioritize
different cooperative behaviors. But he said the evidence was
overwhelming in widespread adherence to those moral values.
“I
was surprised by how unsurprising it all was,” he says. “I expected
there would be lots of ‘be brave,’ ‘don’t steal from others,’ and
‘return favors,’ but I also expected a lot of strange, bizarre moral
rules.” They did find the occasional departure from the norm. For
example, among the Chuukese, the largest ethnic group in the Federated
States of Micronesia, “to steal openly from others is admirable in that
it shows a person’s dominance and demonstrates that he is not
intimidated by the aggressive powers of others.” That said, researchers
who studied the group concluded that the seven universal moral rules
still apply to this behavior: “it appears to be a case in which one form
of cooperation (respect for property) has been trumped by another
(respect for a hawkish trait, although not explicitly bravery),” they
wrote.
Plenty of studies have looked at some
rules of morality in some places, but none have attempted to examined
the rules of morality in such a large sample of societies. Indeed, when
Curry was trying to get funding, his idea was repeatedly rejected as
either too obvious or too impossible to prove.
The
question of whether morality is universal or relative is an age-old
one. In the 17th century, John Locke wrote that if you look around the
world, “you could be sure that there is scarce that principle of
morality to be named, or rule of virtue to be thought on …. which is
not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned by the general fashion
of whole societies of men.”
Philosopher David
Hume disagreed. He wrote that moral judgments depend on an “internal
sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species,”
noting that certain qualities, including “truth, justice, courage,
temperance, constancy, dignity of mind . . . friendship, sympathy,
mutual attachment, and fidelity” were pretty universal.
In a critique of Curry’s paper,
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale
University, says that we are far from consensus on a definition of
morality. Is it about fairness and justice, or about “maximizing the
welfare of sentient beings?” Is it about delaying gratification for
long-term gain, otherwise known as intertemporal choice—or maybe
altruism?
Bloom also says that the authors of
the Current Anthropology study do not sufficiently explain the way we
come to moral judgements—that is, the roles that reason, emotions, brain
structures, social forces, and development may play in shaping our
ideas of morality. While the paper claims that moral judgments are
universal because of “collection of instincts, intuitions, inventions,
and institutions,” Bloom writes, the authors make “no specific claims
about what’s innate, what’s learned, and what arises from personal
choice.”
So perhaps the seven universal rules
may not be the ultimate list. But at a time when it often feels like we
don’t have much in common, Curry offers a framework to consider how we
might.
“Humans are a very tribal species,” Curry says. “We are quick to divide into us and them.”
