Are some cultures more mind-minded in their moral judgements than others?
Name
Barrett and Saxe 2021.pdf
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Accepted version
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Author(s)
Barrett, H Clark
Saxe, Rebecca R.
Date Issued
November 2021
Journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Publisher
The Royal Society
Citation
Barrett, H Clark and Saxe, Rebecca R. 2021. "Are some cultures more mind-minded in their moral judgements than others?." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376 (1838).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Cross-cultural research on moral reasoning has brought to the fore the question of whether moral judgements always turn on inferences about the mental states of others. Formal legal systems for assigning blame and punishment typically make fine-grained distinctions about mental states, as illustrated by the concept of
mens rea , and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less ‘mind-minded’ than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.
mens rea , and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less ‘mind-minded’ than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0288
