Evolution of Moral Understanding

The Evolution of
Moral Understanding

C.R. Hallpike

Prometheus Research Group

The Evolution of
Moral Understanding

Published by the Prometheus Research Group, 1012 London Road, Al-
ton, GU34 4EG, United Kingdom.
ISBN 0-9542168-4-9
2004 C.R. Hallpike.
The right of C.R. Hallpike to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act
1988.
The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge the copyright holders
of all the material quoted from published sources. All authors and pub-
lishers cited in the text are listed in the Bibliography.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored, reproduced
or transmitted, for any reason, in any form or by any means, without the
prior written permission of the Prometheus Research Group, nor be circu-
lated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is pub-
lished and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser or recipient.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

The Prometheus Research Group:
is an independent association of academics and other intellec-
tuals interested in the problem of human intelligence and its
place in nature.
seeks to create an integrated account of all aspects of human na-
ture, from the life of the newborn infant to the widest reaches of
history and consciousness.
is critical of the glib biologism and information processing
metaphors of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and
their allies.
regards human creativity, originality and self-knowledge as
real phenomena to be explained, not as illusions to be explained
away.
is sympathetic to a great traditions of structural, phenomenol-
ogical and dialectical thought.
seeks collaborators in all walks of academic and intellectual life.
If you would like to know more about the Prometheus Research Group,
we can be contacted at:
www.prometheus.org.uk

C.R. Hallpike is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University
in Canada, Doctor of Letters of Oxford University and sometime Bye Fellow
of Robinson College, Cambridge. His principle interests are in social and cul-
tural evolution and cognitive development, and he has conducted fieldwork
in Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia. His previous books, including The
Foundations of Primitive Thought (1979) and The Principles of Social Evolution
(1986), are well known.

Contents
Preface 9
I. Relativism 13
1. Introduction 13
2. Cultural relativism 15
3. Moral relativism 30
II. Moral Knowledge 37
1. Anthropology and moral philosophy 37
2. Facts and values 41
3. Human nature and the problem of teleology 45
4. Individual and society 48
5. The four aspects of morality 65
6. Natural law and religion 89
7. Conclusions 91
III. The Psychology Of Moral Development 95
1. Introduction 95
2. Piagets theory of cognitive development 97
3. The development of social cognition 105
4. Piagets theory of moral development 114
5. Kohlbergs theory of moral development 118
6. An assessment of Piagets and Kohlbergs theories 125
7. Conclusions 130
IV. Social Evolution And Moral Thought 131
1. Psychology and sociology 131
2. Social evolution 145
3. Social understanding 153
4. The evolution of moral ideas 165
5. Conclusions 182
V. Atomistic Societies 187
1. Introduction 187
2. Band societies 190
3. Shifting cultivators 203
4. Conclusions 216
VI. Corporate Order 219
1. The implications of corporate order 219
2. Order and Life 227
3. The individual as moral agent 239
8 Preface
4. Moral Thinking 254
5. Open and closed societies 268
VII. Transcendence 271
1. Ideas of law, justice, and order in early states 271
2. Social change and the Axial Age 281
3. Transcendent ethics 296
4. The new awareness of individuality and the inner life 303
5. Virtue 311
6. Human nature and society 324
7. Duty and moral obligation 348
8. The concept of ethics in the ancient world 357
9. The Hedonists 362
Conclusions 371
Bibliography 383
Index of Names 405
Index of Topics 412

Tables

Table 1: Stages in the development of political belief 111
Table 2: Kohlbergs stages of moral development 121
Table 3: Snareys survey of cross-cultural tests of Kohlbergs theory 141
Table 4: Frequency distribution of the moral judgment scores 144
Table 5: Newmans sequence of legal types 151
Table 6: Evaluation of ones own psychological features 179
Table 7: Garati age-grading system 228
Table 8: Chinese moral concepts 279

Preface

This book is the third in a series about social and cultural evolution which be-
gan with The Foundations of Primitive Thought (1979), and was followed by The
Principles of Social Evolution (1986). The study of evolution is primarily con-
cerned, not with vague notions of progress, but with analysing how institu-
tional and intellectual complexity develops, with explaining scientifically the
major qualitative changes that are so obvious in the course of the last ten thou-
sand years since the domestication of crops and animals. Our evaluation of
whether or not this general process has been a good thing is a separate matter
that will depend to some extent on our personal values. I shall only remark
here that it is an indisputable fact that the development of literate civilization
has given far more scope for the realisation of all aspects of human potential,
for good and ill, than is attainable in the small-scale societies of hunter-
gatherers.
We are also often told that evolutionary models involve rigid universal
stages through which all societies are fated to pass in sudden leaps, but this is
mere caricature. While it is true that any analysis of process, whether it be the
course of a disease, the development of an organism, or a sequence of techno-
logical discoveries, is likely to benefit from being broken down analytically into
stages, these are only aids to conceptual clarity. In the nature of things proc-
esses are usually gradual without sharp dividing boundaries, and social evolu-
tion is no exception. The shift from foraging to agriculture, for example, typi-
cally occurred over centuries, but there are nevertheless major organizational
differences between societies of hunter-gatherers and tribal societies based on
the domestication of crops and animals, and between these politically uncen-
tralized societies and states, and these differences can usefully be summed up
as stages. But there is no mysterious hidden force that propels every society
along this path, and there are many contingent, local factors that may prevent
this development, or produce all sorts of variations in it. It would generally be
true to say that modern evolutionary theorists emphasize process rather than
stages.
In The Foundations of Primitive Thought I showed quite clearly that modes of
thought, the ways in which people think about space, time, causality, number,
and classification, for example, are not the same for non-literate shifting culti-
vators as they are for those who are literate and highly educated. This is be-
cause modes of thought are not just a matter of absorbing information and
learning cultural conventions, but also depend on the nature and difficulty of
the problems that have to be solved. In a simple economy of shifting cultivators
it is not necessary to grasp the concept of area as length times breadth, or of
volume and, indeed, the concept of multiplication may be entirely lacking also.
10 Preface
The acquisition of culture is not, therefore, just a matter of acquiring bits and
pieces of information, like the names of things, but also of thinking, of develop-
ing cognitive skills, and some skills presuppose others just as multiplication
presupposes the ability to add. The researches of developmental psychologists
have shown that these skills develop in the individual in a certain sequence,
and that this developmental process is advanced or retarded by different social
environments. It follows that the simpler the culture, the less need and oppor-
tunity there will be for the more advanced skills to develop in its individual
members and, conversely, that only in the more complex cultures will indi-
viduals need to think at the higher cognitive levels.
Since culture is only transmitted by individuals, it also follows that the way
in which these individuals think must have an essential bearing on what they
transmit. An evolutionary interaction between social organization and modes
of thought must therefore occur through the mediation of the human mind,
whose developmental potential is an essential component of the whole process.
But it should be obvious that there is no suggestion here that members of sim-
pler cultures are less intelligent than the members of complex cultures. In the
absence of any reliable cross-cultural data on the extent to which the average
intelligence of different populations may vary, I am quite happy to accept for
the purposes of discussion that there are no significant differences, since my
theory is only concerned with the effects of social and environmental factors on
cognitive development.
The Foundations of Primitive Thought was concerned with our understanding
of the physical world, and in the present book I extend that analysis to moral
and social thought and show how it is related to the evolution of social organi-
zation. While as far as I know this is the first book to use the findings of devel-
opmental psychology to illuminate the ethnographic and historical facts relat-
ing to the development of moral understanding, from the anthropological
point of view it is a continuation of a long and valuable tradition from Wake
(1878), through Hobhouse (1906), Westermarck (1906), Fauconnet (1928), Gins-
berg (1944, 1956), MacBeath (1952), Read (1955), Kluckhohn (1960), and von
Frer-Haimendorf (1967).

Acknowledgements

I should first like to thank the Warden and Fellows of Robinson College,
Cambridge, for electing me to a Bye Fellowship in 198889 and in 1992,
when I collected much of the material for this book in the particularly agree-
able and stimulating environment of the College. I am also most grateful to
the late Dr Joseph Needham and the staff of the Needham Research Institute
in Cambridge for making its facilities available to me, and especially to Mr
Kenneth Robinson, and to Mr Shigeru Jochi who reproduced for me most of
the Chinese characters that appear in this book. The following have read
drafts of this book in whole or in part: Professor Derk Bodde (who also cor-
responded with me at length), Professor Carolyn Edwards, Professor Ray-
mond Hobbs, Professor Rhoda Howard, Dr Jonathan Katz, Mr Donald
LePan, Professor Rodney Needham, Dr Nigel Simmonds, and Dr Ulrich
Wenzel. They have saved me from many errors and made many excellent
suggestions, and I am most grateful to all of them. Needless to say, I alone
am responsible for the use I have made of their advice and for all the opin-
ions expressed here. Finally, I should like to thank my wife and children for
their support and forebearance during the years spent writing this book.

C.R.H.
Shipton Moyne
Gloucestershire
June 2000

I. Relativism

1. Introduction
The topic of moral evolution inevitably suggests the emergence of man from
savagery into civilization, from sexual promiscuity to monogamy, from nudity
to clothing, from blood vengeance to the reform of criminals in model prisons,
and all the other stereotypes of moral progress. But this view of human history
has to confront the awkward facts that while there has probably been an over-
all increase in refinement, some of the most cruel or depraved customs are to
be found in societies which in other ways have been highly civilized. Many
tribal peoples would be shocked to learn of the scale of human sacrifice among
the Aztecs, gladiatorial combat in Rome, the use of child labour in Victorian
Britain, or the obsession with sex in modern Western societies. The emergence
of increasingly complex and sophisticated societies does not therefore seem to
be necessarily accompanied by institutions and customs which possess an ob-
vious moral superiority to those of simpler societies. Some thinkers, like Rous-
seau, have indeed supposed that civilization itself is morally corrupting, but
even if we do not accept this claim it might be concluded that different levels of
social complexity simply have their own characteristic combinations of virtues
and vices: in the course of history the evils associated with anarchy are merely
replaced by those associated with power and greed, so that there is no overall
progress at all.
This approach to moral evolution concentrates on what people do, on spe-
cific customs such as human sacrifice, sexual practices, vengeance and taboos,
but there is another tradition exemplified by the work of such scholars as Hob-
house, Ginsberg, Fauconnet, and von Frer-Haimendorf which considers mo-
rality from a different point of view altogether: the structure of moral codes
rather than their content. By structure I mean for example the extent to which
the motives and intentions of agents are taken into account when assessing
their responsibility for their acts, the range of those to whom consideration is
due, the types of justification given for behaving morally, the clarity with
which such concepts as justice, duty, and virtue are understood, or the ability
to distinguish between morality and custom or law. These concepts clearly in-
volve something which can be called moral understanding: this is far broader
in scope than moral philosophy, and must occur in every society, and it is my
intention in this book to show that moral understanding in this sense evolves
as an aspect of social evolution in general. The general argument of this book
will be that this moral understanding or knowledge has developed, like other
forms of knowledge, by human experience in dealing with new situations in
14 Relativism
the course of social evolution. Just as our understanding of nature has in-
creased with the need to solve new and more difficult problems, so our under-
standing of ourselves and society has developed in the context of increasingly
complex social institutions, and the structure of moral codes has evolved ac-
cordingly.
But the structure of moral codes is obviously much more fundamental than
the diversity of cultural values and personal qualities that are the stuff of much
moral disagreement: the militaristic and the peaceful, humour and seriousness
of mind, formality and informality, honour, chastity, the work ethic, or the dif-
ferent views of life of men and women or of old and young. The claim that
there is a basic structure of moral codes does not imply in any way that all such
differences about what we should be or do can also be resolved by some objec-
tive and universal theory of ethics. Nor is this book about progress, in the
sense of trying to grade societies on some scale of better or worse, so that we
somehow emerge on top, and I do not advocate any sort of reliance on the
principles of biological evolution as a guide to human morality. (For criticisms
of that sort of evolutionary ethics see, for example, Flew 1967, T.H. Huxley
1894, J. Huxley, 1947.)
My specific aims are, first of all, to show that there has been an intimate re-
lationship between the way in which moral thinking develops in the individual
and at the level of culture as a whole. Culture, of which moral thought is one
aspect, cannot develop in isolation from the potentialities of the individual
human beings who transmit and create it, and I shall therefore use develop-
mental psychology as an essential means of understanding cultural evolution.
This use of psychology will allow us to understand the interaction between
social organization and modes of thought in a much deeper way than is possi-
ble for those theorists who assert that modes of thought are simply determined
by social organization and technology. That sort of theory just produces static
correlations between types of social organization and modes of thought, but by
focusing on the kinds of problems that people have to deal with we are able to
grasp the dynamic interaction between social organization and thought which
is invisible to those who try to treat culture in isolation from the human mind.
Our enquiry will also provide a badly needed analytical framework for
cross-cultural comparison in the field of moral thought. Far too often we find
ethnographers contrasting the ways in which we modern educated West-
erners think about moral issues, with the thought of a particular tribal soci-
ety. This failure to compare like with like inevitably produces an exaggerated
sense of cultural difference, whereas if the comparison were instead between
our modes of thought and those of educated Muslims, Buddhists, or Confuci-
ans, for example, they would find many similarities, just as there are between
the members of tribal societies.
But before we can proceed with our enquiry it is necessary to deal first of all
with the claim that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, whether of
morality or of anything else, because it is asserted that all thought is culturally
relative.
Cultural relativism 15

2. Cultural relativism
Common sense and the pursuit of science both assume that there is a stable
external reality including things, animals, and other people whose properties
cannot be altered merely by our wishing that they were different, or by how
we define them, and that we come to understand these properties by experi-
ence and reasoning. While absolute certainty can never be attained, at least
some closer approximation to the truth can be reached by the successive elimi-
nation of errors.
This view of the possibility of objective knowledge has been challenged for
many years by some philosophers, sociologists of knowledge, and anthropolo-
gists, who regard knowledge itself as inextricably bound up with the conven-
tions and language of the particular society in which every individual is
obliged to think. As society changes, so do its forms of thought. Ideas accepted
without question in one historical period are dismissed as absurd in other peri-
ods, and the way in which one culture represents reality may be very different
from the representations of other cultures. This view of knowledge is generally
known as relativism, and by anthropologists as cultural relativism. I shall
concentrate here on the anthropological version of relativism as this encom-
passes most of the other arguments; anthropology is the basic source of our
awareness of cultural diversity, and it is the diversity of world views which to
many seems especially liable to call in question the possibility of any objective
knowledge.
The principle of cultural relativism, briefly stated, is as follows: Judgments are
based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his
own enculturation When we reflect that such intangibles as right and
wrong, normal and abnormal, beautiful and plain are absorbed as a person
learns the ways of the group into which he is born we see that we are deal-
ing here with a process of first importance. Even the facts of the physical
world are discerned through the enculturative screen, so that the perception
of time, distance, weight, size, and other realities is mediated by the con-
ventions of any given group. (Herskovits 1972: 15)
Moral relativism, on this view, is only a special case of the more general ar-
gument for cultural relativism, but I shall exclude the question of morality
from the immediate discussion for two reasons. In the first place, it is possible
to be a moral relativist but to reject the claims of cultural relativism, on the
grounds that while scientific and technical knowledge are objectively true,
there is no such thing as moral knowledge because, for example, moral state-
ments are only statements about our feelings and do not therefore count as
knowledge at all. Westermarck, for example (1906, 1932), who maintained that
moral judgements are subjective because they are based on emotions, neverthe-
less held that there had been an evolution in moral thinking as a result of a
general growth of knowledge and enlightenment. On the other hand, if all
knowledge were proved to be culturally relative the claims for objective moral
knowledge would collapse automatically and so require no specific refutation.
My second reason is that Herskovits and other anthropological relativists rely
on most peoples uncertainty about moral issues to add plausibility to the case
16 Relativism
for cultural relativism in general, and I see no reason why they should be con-
ceded this unearned advantage in debate.
The credibility of cultural relativism has drawn considerable strength from
the disposition of anthropologists to believe that classification is the primary
form of cognition, and once this is granted we move in one bound to the privi-
leged, indeed supreme status of language, as the conventional form in which
all our classifications are expressed. (The work of Sapir and Whorf was, of
course, especially influential in promoting this view of language.) It is further
supposed that classification is an imposition of the human mind upon reality,
and so has an essentially arbitrary character in the sense that it does not derive
from the facts but from the way in which human beings group them. Reality
can then be plausibly represented as a continuum, divided up by subjective
human mental activity:
Our immediate experience of reality is in itself an undifferentiated whole, as
Henri Bergson has said The human mind has carved out of this undiffer-
entiated whole a number of separate and individualized forms. The number
and nature of these forms varies from people to people, and, in the history of
one people, from age to age Whatever aspect of reality appears significant
for our hope and anxiety, or our desire or will, or our acting and doing, that
only is taken out as an independent segment and receives the stamp of a
name, thereby becoming a concept. (Izutsu 1966: 10)
1

It is not therefore the individual as such who does the classifying but the
enduring society into which he is born, which expresses its collective concepts,
its conventions, in its language. So Leach asserts This world is a representation
of our language categories, not vice versa. Because my mother tongue is Eng-
lish, it seems self-evident that bushes and trees are different kinds of things.
2
I
would not think this unless I had been taught that it was the case (Leach 1964:
34). Indeed, the work of Lvi-Strauss in particular has led many anthropolo-
gists to suppose that culture as a whole operates rather like language, e.g. it
is just as meaningful to talk about the grammatical rules which govern the
wearing of clothes as it is to talk about the grammatical rules which govern
speech utterances (Leach 1976: 10). And for interpretive anthropologists such
as Geertz, culture is a kind of text, whose meanings we divine in the manner of
literary criticism.
3

1
It should be noted that Professor Izutsus very illuminating analysis of Islamic moral
terms (which will be cited in Chapter VII) actually owes nothing to this theory of lin-
guistic determinism and indeed to a considerable extent refutes it.
2
It has in fact been shown that there seems to be a regular sequence in the development
of such taxonomies which is not purely linguistic in origin but is closely related to size
discrimination and to the woody/herbaceous opposition. According to Witkowsky and
Brown (1978: 434), the first class to appear in a taxonomy is tree (large plant relative to
the plant inventory of a particular environment whose parts are chiefly ligneous or
woody). Then develops the category they label grerb, small plant whose parts are
chiefly herbaceous (green, leafy, non-woody). Subsequently there appears the category
bush, meaning plant of intermediate size (relative to tree and grerb).
3
The present fashionable emphasis on culture as a system of meaning, and on herme-


If this general theory of how we understand reality is correct, the experience
of any individual must count for little by comparison with the overwhelming
power of his culture in determining how he interprets that experience. This
power is expressed not only in the language of the culture but also in the rest of
the collective representation of reality embodied in culturally defined beliefs
and norms.
How much of mans knowledge and how much of his science is built up by
the individual relying simply on the interaction of the world with his animal
capacities? Probably very little Does not individual experience, as a mat-
ter of fact, take place within a framework of assumptions, standards, pur-
poses and meanings which are shared? Society furnishes the mind of the in-
dividual with these things and also provides the conditions whereby they
can be sustained and reinforced. If the individuals grasp of them wavers,
there are mechanisms which encourage realignment. Knowledge then is bet-
ter equated with Culture than Experience. (Bloor 1976: 12)
It seems obvious that if Bloor is correct the individual can have no idea of
how he is influenced by his culture, which will then exercise an influence on
his thought as powerful as it is unconscious. What is true will therefore de-
pend, not on our individual reason or experience, but on the social authority
which supports or denies collective representations. In the case of any belief,
therefore, we must ask Is it enjoined by the authority of the society, is it
transmitted by established institutions of socialization or supported by ac-
cepted agencies of social control, is it bound up with patterns of their vested
interest? (Barnes and Bloor 1982: 23).
Quite apart from the social authority of ideas, we have become much more
aware than the Victorians of the power of the emotions and of the unconscious

neutics in particular, is popular for two reasons: it is deeply relativistic, and it is intel-
lectually undemanding while allowing its practitioners to speak an esoteric language
which elevates them above the vulgar herd. The study of meaning, the sympathetic un-
derstanding of other cultures, and the description of human diversity are clearly essen-
tial components of social anthropology, but to make them its only aims must trivialize
the subject to extinction, as we can see from Leachs denial that the findings of anthro-
pology have the truth status of either science or history:
Social anthropologists should not see themselves as seekers after objective truth;
their purpose is to gain insight into other peoples behaviour, or, for that matter,
into their own. Insight may seem a very vague concept but it is one that we
admire in other contexts; it has the quality of deep understanding which, as crit-
ics, we attribute to those whom we regard as great artists, dramatists, novelists,
composers (Leach 1982: 52)
This is a rallying call for the woolly minded: cultural meaning only exists in the context
of social relations and institutions, and of interactions with the physical environment (in
a universe of objective constraints, in other words) and good field work requires not
only some of the qualities of the good novelist but those of the good scientist as well.
The defining characteristic of science is not that it should be modelled on physics or
biology (a natural science of society is as ridiculous a notion as a social science of
chemistry), but that it should try to discover general principles underlying diversity and
support its conclusions by relevant evidence.
18 Relativism
to affect our beliefs and attitudes. In the Boasian version of culture, which has
been just as influential as that of Durkheim, both the emotional and the uncon-
scious aspects of socialization were strongly emphasized:
However rational and sensible our beliefs and practices may be, according to
Boas, once learned we have an emotional attachment to them, so that an im-
portant accompaniment of all learning is a strong devotion to the patterns
that are acquired. Boas made this point by saying that cultural beliefs and
practices have emotional associations, in that deviation becomes intolerable
to members of the society. (Hatch 1983: 52) [On the unconscious power of
custom, in Boas view] customs are habitual patterns of thought and
behaviour (most of which we learn as children), and once we acquire them
they become automatic and unreflective, like the rules of grammar. He
did not necessarily imply the existence of an unconscious system in the
modern sense, but he was clear that much of what goes on in human behav-
iour springs not from conscious thought, but from obscure patterns in the
mind (ibid.: 53).
Relativists claim that the data collected by anthropologists confirm this the-
ory of learning because they show clearly that collective representations of re-
ality differ considerably from culture to culture, and that persons brought up
in one society seem to take its cultural assumptions for granted, and are not
capable of stepping outside it and developing a world-view which is uninflu-
enced by the unconscious assumptions in which they have been reared and
which are embodied in their linguistic categories. In the same way, we find that
norms, beliefs, and values are very different in one historical period from those
which are assumed to be correct in another, and these facts, too, are quoted as
providing clear empirical support for the relativist theory of knowledge, a the-
ory which extends, it should be noted, not only to the natural sciences but even
to mathematics and logic, so that the norms of reasoning itself are held to be
culturally relative:
Logic, as it is systematized in textbooks, monographs or research papers, is a
learned body of scholarly lore, growing and varying over time. It is a mass
of conventional routines, decisions, expedient restrictions, dicta, maxims,
and ad hoc rules. The sheer lack of necessity in granting its assumptions or
adopting its strange and elaborate definitions is the point that should strike
any candid observer as a body of conventions and esoteric traditions the
compelling character of logic, such as it is, derives from certain narrowly de-
fined purposes and from custom and institutionalized usage. Its authority is
moral and social, and as such it is admirable material for sociological inves-
tigation and explanation. (Barnes and Bloor 1982: 45)
I have tried to provide a general outline of relativism, and in a weak form,
such as, we are always liable to be unconsciously influenced by the assump-
tions and categories of our own culture, and must be on our guard against
this, it is certainly true, and is an example of how Western culture has devel-
oped greater self-awareness, just as we have also attained this in psychology
and linguistics. We have made ourselves the object of our own scrutiny, and
have learned accordingly.

But this weak form of relativism must, however, be repugnant to those who
advocate the strong version precisely because it assumes that we can overcome
the constraints and limitations of our own culture. Moderate relativists, such as
myself, maintain that by the study of other cultures and the history of our own,
we can liberate ourselves from the unconscious limitations on our thought
which are produced by ethnocentrism. In the course of this book I hope to
make it plain, for example, how the moral theory of the Western tradition has
been seriously distorted by cultural factors, and in this sort of way the insights
of cultural relativism can be used in constructing a more objective account of
reality. Moderate and strong relativism are not therefore simply different
points on a single scale of scepticism about the possibility of objective knowl-
edge, but are different theories altogether, because they fundamentally dis-
agree about the possibility of correcting our own ethnocentrism. It is, then, the
strong theory of relativism which I shall now consider because it denies the
possibility of objective knowledge and is thoroughly fallacious.
The most obvious general objection to cultural relativism is that it is self-
refuting. If we consider the proposition all propositions are culture-bound,
then, since that proposition is itself a proposition it, too, is culture-bound and
cannot therefore claim to be objectively true. As Gellner says, Notoriously,
there is no room for the assertion of relativism itself in a world in which rela-
tivism is true (Gellner 1985: 85), but he also says that this logical problem does
not inhibit our intuitive capacity for visualizing a relativists world; a plural-
ity of worlds and truths (ibid., 85), and I would agree that to rest so large an
issue on so fine a logical point is hazardous.
While the person who utters the proposition All propositions are culture-
bound is logically in a similar situation to the Cretan who says that all Cretans
are liars, I suspect that the formal resemblance here is misleading, since cul-
ture-bound is only acting as a label for a very complex theory of knowledge,
whereas liar is a simple and unambiguous term. For this reason the logical
waters of the self-refutation of relativism are muddier than they might appear
(and for a good example of just how obscure they can become see Mary
Hesses attempt to disprove the self-refutation thesis [Hesse 1980: 423]). Bas-
ing the argument that relativism is self-refuting on the logic of propositions
might also be vulnerable to an outflanking manoeuvre, by which the idea of
relativism is conveyed in non-propositional form by a series of questions in
the Zen Buddhist manner, or in poetic imagery, and so on. Rather than concen-
trating on any one proposition which expresses the relativist theory we may
more profitably consider the whole process by which this theory was estab-
lished.
The fundamental difficulty for the relativist is that even to formulate the
theory at all it is necessary to rely on the truth of a large body of facts, on a
number of concepts, and on modes of reasoning associated with these. We are
asked, first of all, to accept that many ethnographers have really gone to study
other cultures, that their reports give an accurate and discerning account of
these different ways of life and thought, and that from the study of these re-
ports we can truly conclude that members of other cultures represent reality in
ways which are significantly different from our own. (It would actually be
20 Relativism
quite easy to compile a long list of cases in which early ethnographic accounts
of alien cultures have exaggerated their differences from us, and which have
subsequently been corrected by more thorough investigation.) Then we have to
acquire an understanding of such concepts as culture, socialization, learn-
ing, classification, language, and so on, and then we must accept that it is
rationally valid to conclude from all this highly sophisticated thinking that the
diversity of collective representations, plus the theory which relates individual
cognition to these representations, really entail the conclusion that all repre-
sentations are culturally relative. Similar assumptions and concepts are re-
quired to use data on the history of science to establish the truth of relativism
historically, and philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Winch (1958) also rely
on a very elaborate set of assumptions and arguments to persuade us that
thought cannot escape from the form of life in which it is embedded (Gellner
1985: 172). Since relativism is an empirical theory, and does not claim that its
propositions about the relations of thought to culture are a priori, analytic
truths, it must therefore rest the lever of its scepticism against some facts, theo-
retical concepts, and arguments which it does consider to be true in order to
dislodge other facts, concepts, and arguments from their claim to be true.
But if this act of dislodging can be performed by the relativist, if it is possi-
ble, in this instance, to use a body of data and to reason correctly from it in an
unbiased way, and so reach the conclusion that relativism is a valid theory,
then it is surely asking rather much of our credulity to claim that this is the
only occasion in the history of the human intellect when men have reasoned
correctly from sound data, when they have seen things in the light as they
really are, and that in every other instance their thinking has been shrouded in
the mist of their collective representations. In short, the real paradox of relativ-
ism is that by the very procedures of establishing itself as true it invalidates its
own premises (or, to put it more bluntly, saws through the very branch on
which it is sitting) because the relativist has to accept that a large amount of
ethnographic data are accurate, that his general theories of culture, socializa-
tion, and human knowledge are true, and that the inferences by which he
draws his conclusions are valid, as the necessary foundation for stating his the-
ory at all, and it is in this sense that relativism can be convicted of radically
contradicting itself. If it is possible to use scientific method to establish relativ-
ism then relativism itself cannot be true, and if the possibility of science is de-
nied then relativism cannot even be formulated.
Relativism not only refutes itself in the general manner that I have indi-
cated, but also makes a number of basic errors in its theory about the relations
between culture and the thought processes of individuals. The key notion in
the theory is that of culture, which relativism treats as though it were some
clear concept of unchallengeable scientific status, like gravity. In reality of
course it is nothing of the kind, but a rag-bag concept well illustrated in the
words of Tylor: Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense,
is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, cus-
tom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society (Tylor 1871: 1). As soon as we reflect on this extraordinarily diverse list
of items, to which should be added language and social institutions, it must be

obvious that the components of culture are maintained in very different ways.
Some are adhered to out of fear of ridicule or punishment, others because there
is concrete evidence in their favour, others as mere local customs, known to be
such and nothing more, others because they give pleasure, others because no
alternative is available, or has been thought of, and some, no doubt, because
they are taken for granted, like language. It is therefore not in the least obvious
that culture is a homogeneous entity which holds all its members in the same
type of inescapable yet intangible grasp, and relativists are prone to exaggerate
the amount of social consensus by which any culture is supported.
While we all use the concept of culture, this is in the broad sense of what is
not innate or genetically prescribed, and public phenomena, rather than pri-
vate feelings or states of mind. In these senses the concept is convenient and
valuable, but this should not make us forget that within these broad limits it
denotes a very wide range of beliefs, customs, and institutions.
Culture is also represented as a totality, a whole each of whose parts is in-
terdependent with the others, so that it distorts the meaning of any one concept
to consider it apart from its context. It is no surprise that relativists tend to fa-
vour holistic conceptions of truth and meaning (Lukes 1982: 9). Only by em-
phasizing its holistic character can culture be made to appear a self-supporting
structure that needs no input from experience, and to the extent that culture is
constantly being affected by the experience of individuals, then it ceases to be a
world of its own, autonomous and complete. A classic case from ethnography
is Evans-Pritchards discussion of Zande witchcraft and oracle beliefs whose
mutual inconsistencies are obvious to anthropologists but are not recognized
by the Azande themselves.
I have collected every fact that I could discover about the poison oracle over
many months of observation and inquiry and have built all these jottings
into a chapter on Zande oracles. The contradictions in Zande thought are
then readily seen. But in real life these bits of knowledge do not form part of
an individuals concepts, so that when a man thinks of benge [oracle poison]
he must think of all the details I have recorded here. They are functions of
different systems and are uncoordinated. Hence the contradictions so appar-
ent to us do not strike a Zande. (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 319) The contradic-
tion between his beliefs and his observations only becomes a generalized
and glaring contradiction when they are recorded side by side in the pages
of an ethnographic treatise (ibid., 319) There is no incentive to agnosti-
cism. All their beliefs hang together, and were a Zande to give up faith in
witch-doctorhood he would have to surrender equally his faith in witchcraft
and oracles In this web of belief every strand depends on every other
strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world
he knows. It is the texture of his thought, and he cannot think that his
thought is wrong. (Ibid., 194)
We may think of Evans-Pritchard as holding the Azande Chair of Theoreti-
cal Witchcraft, and in his capacity as ethnographer he is performing exactly the
same function as that of all specialist thinkers in literate societies, which is to
gather together, to synthesize and reduce to more basic and general principles,
the beliefs and practices of society as a whole and of whose general pattern the
22 Relativism
ordinary member may be unaware. But once the professional thinkers take
over from the amateurs and systematize knowledge into a formal body of doc-
trine, it is much easier for this to be analyzed, criticized, and dissented from by
other professionals. The history of organized knowledge has therefore been the
history of one school of thought generating rival schools of thought in which
the grip of a social consensus is radically weakened.
Not only do the Azande lack the services of professional thinkers, but, as
Evans-Pritchard notes, they cannot dissent from their cultural beliefs not only
because these are unsystematic but because this is the only world they know.
Lack of awareness of alternatives, as Horton (1967) was among the first
anthropologists to emphasize, is one of the most important factors in
preserving the closed world of primitive society, and it is precisely the growth
in awareness of alternatives which makes it possible for members of a culture
to break out of the web of beliefs in which members of simpler cultures are
enmeshed. The traditional thinker, because he is unable to imagine possible
alternatives to his established theories and classifications, can never start to
formulate generalized norms of reasoning and knowing. For only when there
are alternatives can there be choice, and only when there is choice can there be
norms governing it (Horton 1967: 162). The seamlessness or internal
interdependence of a culture is not therefore a universal, but varies
enormously in proportion to social complexity and the availability of
alternative belief systems, and this diversity of thought is itself an incentive to
thinking about thought.
It should be obvious, then, that culture itself will vary in the hold which it
has on the thoughts and behaviour of its members; the relationship between
culture and individual is not some fixed constant, something which is essential
to the human condition, but varies from society to society. It will be at its
maximum in small isolated primitive societies, and be much less significant in
societies such as our own. (I should like to make it clear at the outset that
primitive is used in this book simply as a technical term to refer to small-scale,
face-to-face, politically uncentralized societies which are non-literate, with
simple technologies and subsistence economies [see Hallpike 1986a: 125; 1980:
iii])
The relativist emphasis on the interdependent, holistic quality of culture
also ignores change, and we are presented with the image of a culture as a
timeless entity, constraining the thoughts of its members by a permanent sys-
tem of collective representations. This idea of culture is very understandable in
the case of anthropologists, who study non-literate societies about whose his-
tory nothing much is usually known, while philosophers tend to become en-
grossed in purely conceptual issues which do not raise issues of history. But as
soon as we ask how a particular culture came to be the way it is, this illusion of
a coherent world of representations above and beyond the individual is shat-
tered. Change has to be brought about by human action, and this means by
individuals who choose to do things differently from the way they were in the
past. But here we see the use of the language analogy for the relativist position;
of all cultural phenomena linguistic change seems the most remote from con-
scious human intervention, and the syntactic and phonemic shifts studied by
linguists do indeed seem to inhabit a world of their own, independent of hu-

man volition. Yet even in the case of language the picture is misleading, and
anyone who browses in the Oxford English Dictionary will find there an ex-
traordinary account of innovations in words and meanings brought about to
meet new situations, often by identifiable individuals.
Indeed, once it becomes possible for some members of a single cultural tra-
dition to oppose other members on the basis of articulated doctrines, once it is
possible for an epistemological crisis to be generated within a culture, it is
hard to see that a relativistic culture as convention model of knowledge could
work at all. This is because disputants have to choose between rival theories,
and this process of choice cannot itself be purely conventional. Relativism is
most closely attuned to culture in its holistic, undifferentiated, and uncon-
scious aspects, and becomes implausible almost in direct proportion as cultures
have to deal with argument and the reconciliation of intellectual differences. To
be sure, those differences will be resolved, if at all, within a particular tradition,
but that tradition as we know from the history of thought can still be subject to
radical innovations brought about by particular thinkers.
Relativism not only operates with a timeless and holistic model of culture,
but also depends to a considerable degree on the belief that it is possible to
draw a clear distinction between collective representations and the experience
of individuals, and it is a dogma of anthropology that collective representa-
tions are not influenced by individual psychology. Culture, as anthropologists
always remind us, is learned, and of course this is true, but how is it learned?
Anthropologists and even philosophers generally give the impression that this
is fairly straightforward, a process by which children copy the models of
speech, beliefs, and actions provided by their seniors, and slowly acquire the
details of their culture piece by piece. We may call this the empty bucket theory
of the mind, a bucket which is slowly filled with cultural content, but whose
properties as bucket have no influence on what goes into it.
The evidence of developmental psychology contradicts this view, which
leaves out of account the mental processes by which learning takes place. Of
course, there can be no process without content as well, but process includes
the activity of the learner in relation to the external world and in this process of
interaction with the world (things as well as people) the cognitive skills of the
learner thereby develop and become the basis by which more difficult prob-
lems can be solved. Relativists in particular seem to be entirely oblivious to the
findings of developmental psychology (Sperber 1982: 158160), which provides
some of the most damaging arguments against their case.
Bloor, for example, attempts to draw a neat distinction between our animal
capacities and cultural representations, and considers that very little of this
type of experience is responsible for culturally defined beliefs. Let us examine,
though, a simple example of animal capacities in action. If an experimenter
pours the contents of a short, fat glass of water into a tall thin glass, Bloor
would presumably say that there is the same amount of water in a tall thin
glass as in the short fat one. But how does he know this did his culture define
things in this way, or is this an example of animal capacities at work? Since
adults in our society consider it self-evident that the quantity of water remains
the same in both glasses, they are unlikely to make a point of teaching this to
24 Relativism
children (unless they have read some developmental psychology), but is this
then perceptually self-evident without the aid of culture? If so, how are we to
explain the fact that children below, roughly, the age of six, believe that there is
more water in the tall thin glass? The child can see everything that the adult can
see, yet he reasons differently, concentrating on one dimension height and
ignoring the other diameter. Yet, without adult instruction (since adults are
unaware of the problem), older children in our society come to understand that
it is necessary to consider change both in height and in diameter, and to corre-
late the changes in these dimensions with one another. The notion of animal
capacities can refer only to our senses and physiological reactions withdraw-
ing the hand from a source of pain, dodging falling rocks, and so on but the
understanding of the problem of the two glasses clearly involves a cognitive
process, some kind of reasoning as well, but a reasoning which is not normally
taught by society at all.
Piaget, from whose work this example is taken, and many other psycholo-
gists have studied cognitive growth in all aspects of the understanding of the
physical world space, time, number, causality, and classification and in
every case it is clear that a development of reasoning occurs which is not cul-
turally dependent in the sense of being the result of explicit teaching or of
learning a particular language or the conventions of a particular culture. How
therefore can relativists explain the universal similarities between the stages of
childrens cognitive development in all societies, so that children of the same
stage of development in West Africa, Aden, Iran, Hong Kong, and Geneva give
almost identical answers to the problems set them? Even the desperate expedi-
ent of claiming that our culture simply defines tall thin glasses as holding the
same amount of water as short fat ones (which they dont necessarily) would
not explain the universality of the answers since if relativism were true such
universality would be incomprehensible.
We shall return to developmental psychology in more detail in Chapter III
but here I simply wish to establish that part of the plausibility of the relativists
case depends on treating the mind only as a container for contents and ignor-
ing its processes. This illusion has been supported by the belief that classifica-
tion is the essence of thought, embodied in language, and that our classifica-
tions are essentially arbitrary conventions learned by rote and imposed on the
continuum of reality.
I shall deal with the notion of convention in more detail later and at the
moment will concentrate on the idea that classification is the basis of culture.
There is clearly something very wrong with a theory which represents human
culture as nothing more than a set of conventional classifications and each so-
ciety as marooned on its own island of meaning. I believe that such a mistaken
view has been made possible by the fallacy that classification, and language in
particular, is the only important means by which we impose conceptual order
on the world. This exclusive emphasis on classification, and the whole mys-
tique of language as the paradigm of cognition, is basically mistaken because it
is essentially passive, and represents human beings as though they are only
observers, like the audience in a cinema watching the screen, when in fact they
are constantly acting upon the world in pursuit of goals. In short, the relativ-

ists position inherently excludes action and problem-solving as an integral
part of our understanding of the world.
My basic reason for rejecting the belief that we perceive the world as a con-
tinuum (that is, as having no inherent discontinuities or differences) and im-
pose purely conventional classifications upon it can best be explained by an
example. Our word weed, for instance, would be regarded by the relativist as
a classic case of imposing arbitrarily a purely conventional distinction on the
continuum of nature. All that we actually observe or perceive is a virtually lim-
itless range of plants, and we learn to apply names like weed or flower to
different species in a way which is conventional and varies from one period to
another, and indeed, the species that are classified as weeds would also depend
on whether the classifier is a gardener or a farmer, or an average person with
no special interest in plants. But as soon as one abandons this image of men
merely looking at the world and applying conventional names for the things
that are in it in ways which they have been taught, and thinks instead of men
acting on the world then categories like weed take on a very different signifi-
cance.
If we are trying to grow certain plants be they be flowers, vegetables, or
crops it is a fact of nature that other plants will appear among those we have
planted and choke them or, as in a flowerbed, spoil the arrangement we have
planned. The types of plant we consider weeds will therefore depend on the
kind of activity we are engaged in and its purpose. If we are concerned for our
lawn then the dandelion is a weed, but apparently some people like to eat
dandelion leaves in salads, and dandelions are even grown specifically to sup-
ply this demand. For a dandelion farmer, then, the dandelion is a crop, not a
weed, and this illustrates very well that the concept of weed does not depend
on a fixed denotation, on an unambiguous list of species which either are or are
not weeds. The objectivity of the concept weed is quite different from this; it
means, plants which interfere with those we are trying to grow, and, since we
have domesticated most plants that can be of use to us, most weeds will also
be wild plants of no edible or other value. In this operational category of
weed the actual plant species can vary considerably because it is not the con-
tent or denotation of the category that really matters, but the significance of
what weeds do in relation to our purposes. It is not even necessary to have the
actual word weed in our vocabulary, and we could use instead some more
general category such as rubbish, because the concept of weed does not de-
pend on being named, but upon our understanding of what we are trying to do
(grow certain types of plant), and of the way in which weeds hinder this.
No doubt there are many cultures which do not have a word corresponding
to weed in English and one would certainly be surprised to find such a word
in any hunter-gatherer society, but the members of any society engaged in in-
tensive agriculture would certainly understand our operational concept of
weed if it were explained to them because they encounter the same weed
problem in their own lives. The operational concept of weed (whether or not it
has a specific name) is therefore not arbitrary at all, but expresses the way in
which a fundamental human purpose to grow food is liable to be frustrated
by nature, and we find a vast range of other concepts which, like weed, ex-
26 Relativism
press common human experience of interacting with the world and with one
another in society.
So Osgood has established that three of the most important cross-cultural
universals of meaning are: Evaluation (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, posi-
tive/negative); Potency (strong/weak, heavy/light, hard/soft); and Activity
(fast/slow, active/passive, excitable/calm).
What is important to us now as it was back in the age of Neanderthal man,
about the sign of a thing is, first, does it refer to something good for me or bad
for me (is it an antelope or a sabre-toothed tiger)? Second, does it refer to
something which is strong or weak with respect to me (is it a bad sabre-
toothed tiger or a bad mosquito)? And third, does it refer to something that
is active or passive with respect to me (is it a bad, strong sabre-toothed tiger
or a bad, strong pool of quicksand which I can safely walk around)? Sur-
vival, then and now, depends on the answers. (Osgood et al. 1975: 395)
The existence of so many of these operational concepts, which are bound up
with the pursuit of goals in relation to the constraints of the natural and social
worlds, shows that it is fundamentally impossible to treat collective representa-
tions as though they could be uninfluenced by personal experience of this type,
and there are constant metaphorical extensions of meaning from physical to
personal interactions:
What are we trying to say when we call a thing, say the surface of a table,
hard? We mean that it resists change when pushed or pressed, that it sup-
ports other things placed upon it without changing its own form. Hardness
is resistance to change imposed by external forces; it describes a mode of in-
teraction. Correspondingly, what is soft takes on the form of things acting
upon it, as does the tablecloth that follows the contours of a surface. What
now is the sense of hard when it refers to a person? It describes an interaction
that is formally similar. We see a man refusing the appeal of another. This
interaction we experience as a force proceeding from one person, having as
its aim the production of a change in the other, which, however, fails to move
him, or which produces resistance. The hardness of a table and of a person
concerns events radically different in content and complexity, but the
schema of interaction is experienced as dynamically similar, having to do
with the application of force and of resulting actions in line with or contrary
to it. (Asch 1958: 92)
In all societies people try to get others to do things for them, and the experi-
ence of resistance or compliance will therefore give the notion of hardness,
which Asch analyzes, a fundamental relevance to experience, and there is an
impressive array of cross-cultural similarities in the metaphorical associations
of sweet, sour, bitter, colourful, straight, crooked, fast and slow, and so on (see
Hallpike 1979: 160167). Indeed, the relativist claim that we perceive the world
as a continuum is shown to be no more than rhetorical exaggeration as soon as
we reflect on such basic human experience as light/dark, heavy/light,
hard/soft, wet/dry, alive/dead, male/female, and it is the universal associa-
tions of these and many other features of experience that are among the best
refutations of relativism.

In the working of human society, too, there are many inescapable problems
of interacting with one another which generate a comparable range of concepts
that are common to all humanity: the division of labour by gender and age, co-
operation and leadership, the allocation of scarce resources, dispute settlement,
and the regulation of sexual relations. Again, there are no languages incapable
of expressing the ideas of true and false, good and bad, negation, commands,
and questions. We find everywhere the notions of the lie, of property and theft,
of gift and reciprocity, of guest and host, greeting and threat, revenge and re-
ward, and of respect, insult, and joke. These are not arbitrary classifications
imposed on experience but are generated from the basic realities of human
interaction in society and in the physical world. It is because such functions are
necessary to the working of human society as such that once we understand
the significance of actions, gestures or forms of words in relation to these func-
tions, we can rapidly find our bearings in alien societies, even though the ac-
tual connections between particular cultural forms of actions, gestures, and
forms of words in relation to these functions always have purely conventional
elements, and it is the notion of convention that we must now consider in more
detail.
The idea of convention is an extremely important element in the theory of
relativism because it is thought of as almost synonymous with arbitrary. But
the basic idea of convention is simply that of agreement to do something in a
certain way: it is indeed a social as opposed to a natural phenomenon, some-
thing which we might in principle have decided to do differently because we
are not constrained by the nature of reality to do it only in one particular way,
but it is nevertheless strange to assume that people might not have good rea-
sons for agreeing to do things in certain ways. Doctoral robes are scarlet be-
cause it is a convention, not because there is some inherent property in a doc-
toral degree which prevents the robe being green or yellow. But it is obviously
useful on ceremonial occasions to distinguish between degrees of different
rank by colour, and doctoral degrees have a function as professional qualifica-
tions which, unlike the colour of their robes, is not arbitrary at all since it an-
swers a social need. The fact that culture consists of conventions does not
therefore tell us that these are arbitrary in function as well as in form, since we
can always ask why was this convention adopted?. A rule of the road, for ex-
ample, is unnecessary for pedestrian traffic, becomes rather more pressing in
the case of horse-drawn vehicles, and is imperative for the automobile.
Whether we drive on the left or the right is obviously arbitrary, but the need
for a convention is not, and our agreement to establish one, while a convention,
is closely related to our real circumstances and needs. It is therefore quite pos-
sible to ask of social conventions whether they are intelligent or stupid, the best
that could be devised, out of date, and so on. We are at this point as far as
could be imagined from the notion of convention as purely arbitrary. Conven-
tions, moreover, are not just local solutions to functional problems but at the
level of thought may have important properties as aids to more effective think-
ing.
Consider, for example, the case of the Roman and Arabic systems of num-
ber notation. The symbols themselves and the rules for their manipulation are
28 Relativism
clearly conventional; they have to be taught like the details of any natural lan-
guage, and might easily have been different. There is no natural requirement
for number magnitudes to increase from right to left, as they do in the Arabic
system, rather than from left to right, and the relationship between the symbols
and the numbers which they signify is arbitrary as well. If either of these num-
ber systems is used merely for writing down quantities there is little to choose
between them. Roman numerals usually take up rather more space but they are
also considered by many to be more decorative, which is why they are often
retained for monumental inscriptions and on the faces of clocks. But as soon as
we use these notations for arithmetic calculations it immediately becomes ob-
vious that the Roman system is virtually useless whereas the Arabic system is
vastly superior (because its place value is based on magnitude alone and is not
confused by the operations of addition and subtraction, and it also has the
zero). This is why in the ancient world actual reckoning was carried out with
counting boards and sand tables, while the numerals themselves were only
used for writing down the results.
Culture, in short, is adaptive in the sense that it is an accumulation of solu-
tions to what people perceive as problems in the real world and it can do this
because human beings not only think about experience but also have a unique
capacity to transmit detailed information about their experience to other hu-
man beings, and in this way it is possible for knowledge to accumulate from
generation to generation so that it becomes vastly greater in scope than the un-
aided individual could achieve in the course of a single life time. As a result,
the child born into any society is thus the heir to a great body of information
that he does not need to verify for himself, of techniques and solutions to prob-
lems that he would never have thought of unaided and of representations too
complex or subtle for the lone individual to have developed.
The process by which knowledge has accumulated is indeed collaborative
and social, but if this knowledge came in some mysterious way from the cul-
ture, rather than from the experience of individuals, it would be impossible for
culture to be adapted to reality at all. Yet we know quite well that human be-
ings are able to grow crops, to cure diseases, to build houses and machines,
and aeroplanes that really fly, to settle disputes, to win battles, and to govern
empires. No doubt, the individuals who inherit this knowledge take most of it
for granted, and are subject to many unconscious influences for this reason, but
if the knowledge they are assimilating is founded in the experience of indi-
viduals, however anonymous these individuals may be, why should we as-
sume that it is inherently untrustworthy?
It is surely perverse in the extreme to suggest that the main effect of culture
is to prevent us understanding the social and natural world about us, when it is
our capacity for acquiring and transmitting culture that has raised us above the
level of the brute. We are so greatly influenced by our own culture not because
we can never escape from its assumptions, but because in many ways our
predecessors have done a good job and it is easy to rest on their labours. Few of
us have witnessed the effects of drinking potassium cyanide, but if we are wise
we will not experiment with it ourselves but accept the authority of medical
textbooks on the subject. Life is too short to allow us to check personally every

item of information and every idea which is not supported by our personal
experience. Traditional knowledge, therefore, will always be imperfect, but it is
a rational strategy to suppose that it will lead us right more often than wrong.
Experience, no doubt, is often ambiguous, and the same fact can be repre-
sented from a number of different points of view, each of which is partially
correct, so that a number of different models of reality may all seem to be sup-
ported by the evidence; and the more vaguely defined an idea, or the greater
its subtlety, the harder it is to bring it into any conclusive confrontation with
the facts, and the easier therefore to produce a variety of explanations all of
which are viable. Much of the so-called relativity of knowledge can be attrib-
uted to this very obvious feature of human experience, and when little is
known about a subject, the wider will be the range of explanations that can
seem plausible. The Yagwoia Kukukuku of Papua New Guinea say that the
sun is a man and the moon is his wife; the dew is the moons urine and the sun
is red in the morning because he is embarrassed by his wifes urination, which
he quickly dries up by his heat (Hallpike 1979: 141). It would be difficult for a
Kukukuku to dispute this, even if he had the idea of doing so, because the Ku-
kukuku have very little knowledge which is relevant to the problem, but obvi-
ously this account of sun and moon could not survive among those with
greater information about astronomy and meteorology.
The reliance of individuals on the traditional beliefs of their culture is there-
fore most simply explained by the fact, obvious to children, that their elders
know more than they do. Even when they are wrong, we should remember
that conformity draws much of its strength from the mental sloth and credulity
of man, rather than from the overwhelming force of culture. Many are too stu-
pid to see that traditional beliefs are mistaken, or too cowardly to challenge
them when they do. We are all familiar with academics who refuse to change
their minds when confronted with arguments and facts which to the neutral
observer seem to refute their theories. Is this because of the overwhelming
power of the collective representations in this or that discipline over the indi-
vidual? Or is it because those who have publicly committed themselves to a
theory over many years find it too embarrassing and painful to admit that they
have been wrong? Let us not be too ready to blame culture for our own fail-
ings.
We can then have no reason to deny that some cultural traditions may have
accumulated more knowledge than others about certain aspects of reality, and
may reason about this in more conceptually adequate ways. When two cultures
differ in their interpretations of reality, our confidence that one cultural tradi-
tion is more likely to be correct than the other will be based on such considera-
tions as: 1) the opportunity for individuals to gain relevant experience; 2) the
opportunity to store and transmit this experience (e.g. by writing); 3) the num-
ber and quality of full-time specialists who have devoted themselves to the
study of this experience; 4) the availability of relevant techniques of analysis
(e.g. mathematics); 5) the awareness of alternative points of view, and the op-
portunity for debating these; 6) familiarity with other cultures, and with the
history of ones own; 7) the degree of methodological self-consciousness and
awareness of ones own cultural biases.
30 Relativism
The most effective method for minimizing the hidden ethnocentric assump-
tions and biases of our culture is comparative and systematic knowledge of as
many other cultures as possible, and this is precisely what the Azande, for ex-
ample, do not have, and why we should prefer Evans-Pritchards account of
their witchcraft and oracles to their own. Relativism is only one of a number of
developments including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and history, in
the course of which those cultures which score highly on points 17 have made
man himself the object of his own scrutiny; and as I have previously said, in its
weak form cultural relativism is a valuable addition to our knowledge. Indeed
it is ironic that even the strong relativist must admit that any society which un-
derstands the idea of the relativity of knowledge is by that very fact superior in
its grasp of the human condition to those societies which are still wrapped in
ethnocentrism, unaware of the enculturative screen.
While the relativist is free, of course, to assert that any of our opinions may
be distorted by cultural bias (just as it may be distorted by muddled thinking
or ignorance), this claim is quite empty unless in each specific case he can show
that such a bias actually exists and has affected our judgement. By so doing,
however, we would then be in a position to correct our judgement by remov-
ing the cultural distortion, which is the proper use of a moderate or weak rela-
tivism. If the strong relativist wished to avoid this unpalatable conclusion and
asserted that some cultural bias is never detectable because it is too deeply em-
bedded in our thought processes, we could certainly not refute him. And we
could not refute him because his theory would be, in principle, untestable and
would therefore have no claim to be scientific at all (Schmidt 1955: 782).
To the extent that all cultural representations of reality are liable to be dis-
torted by one-sided views, prejudices and false assumptions, and limited evi-
dence I accept the value of a weak cultural relativism, but would recommend
the strong variety only as a kind of intellectual sheep-dip for the simple-
minded a valuable treatment if they are pushed through it fairly rapidly, but
fatal to the intellect if they remain in it permanently.
3. Moral relativism
If the strong form of cultural relativism fails then arguments for moral relativ-
ism must look elsewhere for support, to some special quality of moral judge-
ments themselves which distinguishes them from ordinary knowledge. In so-
cial anthropology, which is dedicated to the understanding of other cultures,
ethnocentrism is the chief intellectual obstacle to be overcome, but while the
ethnographic fieldworker is quite properly required to restrain his own moral
opinions from distorting his accounts of those he is studying, this in itself could
provide no theoretical support for the principle of moral relativism. It is clear
in fact that this has been, primarily, the cultural diversity of moral values and
beliefs, about which anthropologists have provided so much evidence, and this
intellectual scepticism has been reinforced by the opposition to colonialism in
liberal Western circles.
Since the supporters of moral relativism believe that it provides an intellec-
tual basis for tolerance and so should be supported by all people of good will, I
Moral relativism 31

shall begin by showing that this is actually a dangerous and self-defeating illu-
sion. In the words of Herskovits, Cultural relativism is a philosophy which in
recognizing the values set up by every society to guide its own life, lays stress
on the dignity inherent in every body of custom, and on the need for tolerance
of conventions though they may differ from ones own (Herskovits 1972: 17).
Despite these amiable sentiments, it is not very difficult to see that the toler-
ance and freedom from ethnocentrism which Herskovits wishes to encourage
are themselves the distinctive values of one particular culture, or even sub-
culture (that of educated Western liberals). But The principle of respect for
other cultures can only be binding within the cultures that respect it and can-
not consistently with relativist theory claim general validity (Ginsberg 1956:
124). On Herskovitss own assumptions, those cultures that are ethnocentric
(and they are the majority) have just as much claim to our respect as those, like
our own, that condemn ethnocentrism; and toleration, far from being a univer-
sal moral norm, becomes nothing more than a local idiosyncrasy. Even worse,
far from leading to the belief that all cultures have equal value, It is equally
logical, as many a philosopher has seen, to reach the conclusion of nihilism and
to treat all cultural values as equally worthless (Bidney 1968: 547).
Indeed it is difficult to see how moral relativism could even require indi-
vidual members of any culture, once they had grasped the implications of rela-
tivism, to respect their own moral code:
If, according to relativism, our moral judgments and decisions are based on
moral principles, and if these principles are not the sort of things we can
know to be true, i.e. if they are merely the effect of a process of encultur-
ation, then does not relativism imply that these principles can have no real
authority over the individual? In other words, if an individual should ask
himself How can the principles which have thus been inculcated in me
really oblige me to do some things and refrain from other things? the answer
would seem to be They cant!. (Young 1978: 294295)
Herskovits rejected this extreme individualistic interpretation of relativism by
claiming that Cultural relativism must be sharply distinguished from concepts
of the relativity of individual behaviour, which would negate all social controls
over conduct (Herskovits 1972: 77). But, as Young points out Unfortunately he
failed to realize that his interpretation, while rejecting nihilism, has equally
disastrous implications. It amounts to the view that the code of any culture
really does create moral obligations for its members, that we really are obli-
gated by the code of our culture whatever it may be. In other words, Herskovits
interpretation turns relativism into an endorsement of tyranny (Young 1978:
296). Herskovits himself seems to confirm this implication of relativism when
he says There is, indeed, some reason to feel that the concept of freedom
should be realistically redefined as the right to be exploited in terms of the pat-
terns of ones own culture (Herskovits 1972: 9).
If, however, it can be shown that there are certain objective principles of
ethics, it may be that tolerance or some form of international law has objective
moral value, but the demonstration of this could never be accomplished by any
kind of relativism. Furthermore, it will not necessarily follow that simply be-
cause such an objective theory of ethics has been developed by some members
32 Relativism
of Western society therefore this type of society must be superior to any other.
It is perfectly possible that by objective moral criteria Western society itself
might be shown to have important defects.
We are now in the position to examine the claim that the great variability in
moral values, standards, and judgements found in different societies shows
that morality has no objective basis and is simply a matter of social convention.
It is first of all necessary to note that a difference in values or opinions need not
imply a disagreement: we would expect to find that courage and military prow-
ess were more admired in a warlike society than in a peaceful one, and even
within a single society the qualities admired in coal-miners would not be iden-
tical with those admired in professors. But these are merely differences if the
members of peaceful societies do not condemn the values of military societies
and can accept that they themselves would need to give greater emphasis to
martial values if they lived in a more threatening environment, or if miners and
professors realise why their different modes of life require an emphasis on dif-
ferent values.
Many differences of cultural and moral values are therefore related to cir-
cumstances, so that
what is right in one set of conditions may be wrong in another set of con-
ditions, or to put it in another way, that in estimating the moral quality of an
act the circumstances or situation in which it occurs must be taken into con-
sideration. Relative in this sense means related to surrounding conditions,
and carries with it no necessary reference to subjectivity or to the mental
make-up of the person or persons judging (Ginsberg 1956: 100).
Even those who believe in objective principles of ethics do not therefore expect
to find a uniformity of practice or values and there may be: 1) variations arising
from differences of opinion or knowledge regarding the non-moral qualities of
acts or their consequences; 2) variations due to the different moral import of
the same acts in different social situations and institutional contexts; 3) varia-
tions due to difference in emphasis of balance of the different elements in the
moral life; and 4) variations arising from the possibility of alternative ways of
satisfying primary needs (see Ginsberg 1956: 1012). So blood-vengeance, for
example, would have a very different moral significance in the context of tribal
life from blood-vengeance in our own type of society.
Disagreement, unlike difference, refers to an incompatibility of opinions
that is absolute and takes no account of circumstance. Using relativity in the
sense of disagreement the standard argument to demonstrate that there is no
rational or objective way of deciding between moral judgements or of estab-
lishing moral principles is their variability from one culture to another: moral-
ity is a matter of latitude and longitude, as one proverbial maxim puts it.
The content of moral prohibitions varies wildly not only as between one so-
ciety and another but even within the same society as between one social
class and another or between one historical period and another. Breathing
apart, it is difficult to think of any kind of human activity which has not, at
one time or another, been considered wrong. The Jains of India say that it is
a sin to kill mosquitos; the Jews think it wrong to eat pork; in England it is
indecent to describe the sexual act in one syllable instead of three. It is
Moral relativism 33

wrong to wear outdoor shoes in a mosque; in some Catholic churches it is
wrong for a woman to bare her head. The wrongness of such acts differs in
intensity, but there is no fundamental difference in kind between local con-
vention and morality of manners and fashion and those which bear the
deeper stamp of morality and religious duty, and the common belief that
our more deeply felt moral constraints are shared by all humanity is simply
a delusion. (Leach 1968: 49)
1

This demonstration of moral variability is achieved by treating all differ-
ences as disagreements, and by the tendentious device of lumping together
very specific social rules of every imaginable type, and ignoring the obvious
fact that differences on this superficial level may conceal important similarities
at a deeper level. As we observed in the previous section, some modern socie-
ties drive on the right and others on the left, but all agree that the common
good requires a rule that one must drive on one side or the other; violation of
such a rule would not only be unconventional, and illegal, but also immoral in
many circumstances because it would endanger the lives of others. If we look
at Leachs list of conventions it is not hard to see that while rules about how we
refer to sexual matters differ in detail, we are likely to find that all societies
have some rules about this. Muslims and Catholics may differ in their dress
requirements when entering a mosque or a church, but the existence of some
rules about dress, and especially about behaviour generally, in sacred places is
close to universal. It is because of these deeper cross-cultural resemblances that
we can find our way about in alien societies, and the distinction between local
conventions of manners and fashion and those which bear the deeper stamp of
morality and religious duty is not a delusion but the pons asinorum of moral
understanding (see in particular von Fritz 1952). As Linton said,
Behind the seemingly endless diversity of culture patterns there is a funda-
mental uniformity It is easy to see why this uniformity exists. All human
societies are composed of members of the same basic physiological and psy-
chological needs of individuals. Moreover, the organization, operation, and

1
This use of anthropological data on the variability of moral values to question the ob-
jective truth of any of them is not at all new, and was first developed as a philosophical
argument by the Greek Sceptics, Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 B.C. to c. 270 B.C.) being the first
notable figure in the Sceptical tradition. (It is the 5th Mode of Philo of Alexandria and
the 10th Mode of Sextus Empiricus, see Annas and Barnes 1985: 151171). But I use the
words to question rather than to deny deliberately, since the Sceptics did not assert
categorically that there were no objective values, but used the anthropological evidence
only as grounds for suspending judgement:
Ask any moral question e.g. is incest really wrong? and the modern Sceptic
[relativist, for our purposes] will answer: No objectively speaking there is
nothing wrong with incest, for there are no objective values at all. From the
point of view of the Pyrrhonist, who will answer the same question with a scep-
tical shrug to indicate his suspension of belief, the reply is profoundly unscepti-
cal. (Ibid., 163)
Indeed, Annas and Barnes describe it as negative dogmatism.
34 Relativism
perpetuation of societies involves the same basic problems whether the soci-
ety is in Australia, Africa, or Arkansas. (Linton 1952: 646)
Cultural traits that occur in the great majority of societies, near universals,
are likely to be as significant as true universals and to require the same sort of
explanations that draw upon the common features of the physical world, hu-
man nature, the mind, and the inherent constraints of social organization.
Where the possibility of variation seems very large, as in the case of language,
even statistical universals are very significant. So, approximately one third of
the worlds languages describe the pupil of the eye by a word meaning little
person because close scrutiny of the pupil reveals a little person looking out
at you: your own reflection (Brown 1991: 45). Given the limitless range of pos-
sible words for pupil even this degree of similarity between languages is very
striking. The point about universals (developed very well in Browns excellent
book) is that they reveal very clearly the limitations of the relativistic belief in
the autonomous power of each culture to define the world in its own idiosyn-
cratic, dream-like fashion, and point instead to those pan-human constraints
which operate in all societies.
Universals are not therefore as hard to come by as Leach supposes, espe-
cially if one includes in universals those rules and ideas which occur very
widely in different and unrelated societies. Obvious examples would be the
prohibition on sexual relations within the nuclear family, or on stealing, lying,
and violence within the group. But it is too readily assumed, however, that
universality of moral judgement, where discovered, would automatically pro-
vide some sort of guarantee of correctness, of moral authority, for that judge-
ment or opinion, e.g. by seeking out specific moral principles held in com-
mon by all societies, one might be able to validate universal moral standards
(Renteln 1988: 64). The first problem with this assumption is that we can find
many examples of moral opinion that are or were universally held, especially
outside the modern liberal West, which anthropologists would not consider
very enlightened: that women are inferior to men, that it is perfectly acceptable
to cheat or even kill those from other groups or societies, and that slavery is
right and natural, while, in general, there is a pervasive ethnocentric attitude to
other cultures; absolutism, not relativism, is the human norm.
But, secondly and more fundamentally, even if we found moral universals,
what would this prove? Let us take, for example, a moral universal that even
most anthropologists would probably accept as normatively valid that of
sexual modesty. Does it follow, however, that because no known society treats
copulation as a matter of indifference, to be indulged in casually and in public
whenever one chooses, that it is therefore morally wrong to do such things?
Just as the ethnocentrism of most societies is not taken as supporting the belief
that ethnocentrism is morally good, so advanced thinkers might condemn
sexual modesty as a regrettable survival from a repressive social order that
should ideally be replaced by a cheerful abandonment to our erotic impulses.
Unless, therefore, we can devise moral criteria that are independent of cross-
cultural support we can have no means of distinguishing a universal moral
truth from a universal prejudice.
Moral relativism 35

The search for universals of moral opinion is therefore no more likely to
provide us with guarantees of ethical truth than it is of scientific truth. E.B. Ty-
lor said all this a long time ago:
Popularly, what everybody says must be true, what everybody does must be
right There are various topics, especially in history, law, philosophy, and
theology, where even the educated people we live among can hardly be
brought to see that the cause why men do hold an opinion, or practise a cus-
tom, is by no means necessarily a reason why they ought to do so. Now
collections of ethnographic evidence, bringing so prominently into view the
agreement of immense multitudes of men as to certain traditions, beliefs,
and usages, are peculiarly liable to be thus improperly used in direct defence
of those institutions themselves, even old barbaric nations being polled to
maintain their opinions against what are called modern ideas. As it has more
than once happened to myself to find my collections of traditions and beliefs
thus set up to prove their own objective truth, without proper examination
of the grounds on which they were actually received, I take this occasion of
remarking that the same line of argument will serve equally well to demon-
strate, by the strong and wide consent of nations, that the earth is flat, and
nightmare the visit of a demon. (Tylor 1871(I): 1213)
Conversely, the variability of moral opinions might simply be the result of
the great difficulty in discovering ethical truth: It might be argued that the di-
versity of moral judgements affords no more proof of their subjectivity than the
diversity of judgments regarding matters of fact throws any doubt on the pos-
sibility of valid scientific judgements about them (Ginsberg 1956: 99). As Locke
showed in using ethnographic evidence for the diversity of moral judgements
(Locke 1690: I.iii.912), the fact that different societies have different moral
standards only proves that awareness of moral truths is not innate, not that
they can never be discovered, and Locke was certainly not a moral relativist. If,
for example, it could be demonstrated that his theory of individual rights is
correct, then those societies whose customs and opinions violate individual
rights would be as mistaken as those who think that the earth is flat, or that
disease is caused by witchcraft.
Yet we still have a lingering belief that universality is somehow relevant to
deciding on the objectivity of moral opinion; there is, I think, an element of
truth in this, though it is not what it is often supposed to be. Universals are ac-
tually important not as authoritative sources of moral opinion but because they
refute the idea that culture is arbitrary or the product of free invention, and
show that it exists within certain constraints, and has to accommodate to social
and natural reality. If human nature were almost unbelievably malleable, as
Margaret Mead (1935: 280) and so many other anthropologists have claimed,
and if social institutions were simply arbitrary conventions, it would be mean-
ingless to talk about moral understanding at all, because there would be noth-
ing to understand. But to the extent that we find such universals as disapproval
of stealing or violence within the group; admiration for generosity and cour-
age; endorsement of the principle of good for good and evil for evil; the uni-
versal significance of gifts and reciprocity, the lie, insults, joking, guest and
host, property and theft, we have evidence for a wide variety of constraints, of
objective conditions of existence in which the possibility of moral ideas as a
36 Relativism
form of knowledge, a mode of understanding, at least makes sense. What that
understanding actually consists of is another matter, and cannot be reached by
simply collecting universals we have to understand why they are universals,
and what their significance is within some general system of moral truth.
Cross-cultural surveys of moral opinions cannot, then, be a short cut to discov-
ering which of them are true, and we have to think for ourselves about the very
nature of ethics. Moral problems are real problems, not just undecidable mat-
ters of taste, or arbitrary conventions, and Kluckhohn explained why: Human
life is a moral life precisely because it is a social life and because in the case of
the human species the minimum necessities for orderly and co-operative be-
haviour are not provided by biologically inherited instincts (Kluckhohn 1960:
391). In the next chapter we shall explore the implications of this.

II. Moral Knowledge

In the previous chapter I proposed that the social life of man imposes certain
fundamental constraints on our relations with one another, and that these are
the foundation of moral ideas. Anthropological and historical evidence shows
overwhelmingly that as societies increase in complexity, the ways in which
people think about basic moral issues develop in a similar way despite the ob-
vious differences in cultural values around the world. These historical devel-
opments also resemble the development of moral thought in individuals which
has been established by the researches of Piaget, Kohlberg, and many other
developmental psychologists. All this strongly supports the belief that the basic
features of moral thought are not like preferences for different kinds of food or
styles of dress, and are not simply the products of local culture and history, but
have a more fundamental and objective basis.
It would, of course, be possible to give an account of moral development
that simply demonstrated the concordance between the findings of anthropol-
ogy and history on the one hand and developmental psychology on the other,
but such a way of proceeding would be unsatisfactory in a number of respects.
In the first place such an exercise could be construed as merely a demonstra-
tion that the social structure determines the superstructure of values and be-
liefs. The problem with social determinism of this type is that it can give no
explanation of the growth of understanding because it treats human thought as
causally dependent on, or a reflex of, the social and natural environment. My
purpose, however, is precisely to show how understanding increases, not just
that modes of thought change in some regular relation with social forms, and
the notion of understanding presupposes that there is something to be under-
stood, and therefore requires an explication of ethical reality. This, therefore, is
why such emphasis is given to psychological theories of cognitive develop-
ment in Chapter III, since one cannot have a theory of cognitive development
without also assuming that such development involves a more adequate grasp
of reality.
1. Anthropology and moral philosophy
The whole subject of morality, however, is also vast and deeply embedded in
the assumptions of Western culture, not least in the traditions of its moral phi-
losophy, and so we are not yet free at this stage to discuss how moral under-
standing may have developed in the course of social evolution, because a
number of fundamental objections can still be raised against the whole enter-
prise. These would not be based on the assumptions of cultural relativism,
38 Moral Knowledge
which were disposed of in the previous chapter, but would be of a more phi-
losophical or theological nature, such as:
1. Moral judgements are based on a certain kind of intuition, or express
certain kinds of sentiment, and in neither case can they therefore
claim to be the kind of verifiable knowledge which is implied by
statements that moral understanding evolves or develops.
2. Moral understanding is attained by the logical analysis of ethical con-
cepts, and progress in this cannot be related, as such, to changes in
social organization. Nor can a survey of false moral ideas by anthro-
pologists, historians, or psychologists contribute anything to our un-
derstanding of ethical truth.
3. It has long been known that values cannot be derived from facts, and
it is therefore inherently impossible to try to base any theory of ethics
on the social condition of man.
4. Moral rules can only be derived from divine commandments, not
from the human condition, so a sociological theory of ethics is fun-
damentally misconceived.
If any of these objections were valid it would be an immoveable obstacle to
the enterprise that I am proposing, and they must therefore be answered before
we can proceed. Again, it might be claimed that the basic ethical beliefs that
have been developed by modern Western culture, such as the primacy of the
individual over society, universal human rights, and the central importance of
equality and justice, should be the criteria by which we assess the moral ideas
of other cultures and this claim, too, needs to be addressed. It is also necessary
to realise that the developmental psychologists, notable Piaget and Kohlberg,
whose theories of moral understanding we shall use in the next chapter, based
a number of their assumptions on some of the fallacies of modern philosophy
and without rectifying these we should not be able to claim that their theories
are free from cultural bias. And in a broader context we must recognise that we
too, like Piaget and Kohlberg, have been influenced by the general currents of
moral philosophy in Western culture since the Renaissance.
To minimise our own ethnocentrism we must therefore step back from our
own traditions in this respect and try to assess the culturally based assump-
tions on which they rest. This means, in particular, examining with some care
the basic tenets of modern moral philosophy and scrutinizing its claims to ob-
jectivity. We shall see that it has a number of major shortcomings, for example:
1. The idea that values cannot be derived from facts; in other words,
that evaluation has no basis in reality, because all teleological think-
ing was rejected after the Renaissance.
2. An extreme individualism, associated historically with commercial-
ism and Puritanism, in particular, so that the individual is regarded
as prior to society and the idea of a social order transcending the in-
dividual has become very hard to comprehend.
3. The rationalistic belief that some single criterion of moral judgement
can be found, such as utility or justice.
Anthropology and moral philosophy 39

4. The promotion of rules to the position of first importance in ethics, at
the expense of virtue.
We shall find that the moral philosophy of all the ancient literate civiliza-
tions differs significantly from that of the modern Western world in all these
respects, and we shall therefore have to decide if this is because we are concep-
tually more advanced than they were, or because of certain peculiar assump-
tions of our own culture that are actually false. Before we consider the findings
of developmental psychology, anthropology, and history, it will therefore be
necessary to establish the fundamentals of what could be meant by moral
knowledge in the rest of this chapter.
It will be one of my basic contentions that modern Western moral philoso-
phy does not supply us with the kind of objective theory of ethics we need be-
cause it has essentially been about the analysis of concepts duty, good, right,
ought, moral and so on. Such concepts are thought to have an independent
existence, outside time and place, like those of mathematics and logic, and the
business of philosophy is therefore to discover the true relationships
1
between
these basic ideas. Is the right or the good the more fundamental ethical con-
cept?; Do we have an intuitive knowledge of goodness?; Are value judge-
ments essentially prescriptive?; and so forth. But if we try to apply this type of
moral philosophy to other cultures and different epochs the results are quite
unrewarding. In the vast body of ethnographic works on non-literate peoples,
for example, one will not even find that duty, ought, or rights are central
concepts in anyones moral thinking. Nor will it shed any light on how the
structure of moral thought develops either in the individual or in the course of
history.
Part of the problem is that philosophers have simply been remarkably eth-
nocentric, and have treated their own conceptual landscape as a universal as-
pect of human thought. So, someone who traces the development of the moral
vocabulary in English soon discovers that such timeless concepts as ought
and duty have a history and that in past ages they were not understood as
they are now, partly because the organization of society was different.

1
This indifference to the social context of thought on the part of many philosophers has
extended to psychology. Piaget recalls a conversation which he had on the relevance of
developmental psychology to philosophy with G.E. Moore at Cambridge:
the question is of no interest at all, [Moore] said, in substance, because the
philosopher is concerned with true ideas, while the psychologist feels a sort of
vicious and incomprehensible attraction for the study of false ideas! To this I re-
plied that the history of science is full of ideas which we judge today to be false:
How do you know, therefore, that your true ideas will not at a later date be
judged to be inadequate? This would seem to point to the existence of progres-
sive approximations, therefore of a development. Thats all the same to me,
since my specific work is only concerned with the search for the true. (Piaget
1972: 21n.6)
Moores attitude was no doubt extreme, but how many moral philosophers since his
day have shown any interest in Piaget or Kohlberg?
40 Moral Knowledge
Collingwood, a philosopher with a very acute sense of the history of ideas,
noted the lack of this sense among the British moral philosophers of his day:
It was not difficult to see that, just as the Greek polis could not legitimately
be translated by the modern word State, except with a warning that the two
things are in various essential ways different, and a statement of what these
differences are; so, in ethics, a Greek word like dei cannot be legitimately
translated by using the word ought, if that word carries with it the notion
of what is sometimes called moral obligation. Was there any Greek word or
phrase to express that notion? The realists said there was; but they stulti-
fied themselves by adding that the theories of moral obligation expounded
by Greek writers differed from modern theories such as Kants about the
same thing. How did they know that the Greek and the Kantian theories
were about the same thing? Oh, because dei (or whatever word it was) is the
Greek for ought. (Collingwood 1939: 63)
Collingwoods view has become more widely understood in moral philoso-
phy, and Bernard Williams, for example, has very rightly emphasized that
ethical concepts are social in nature: It is an obvious idea that if we are going
to understand how ethical concepts work, and how they change, we have to
have some insight into the forms of social organization within which they work
ethical understanding needs a dimension of social explanation (Williams
1985: 131 and see Foot 1978: 18990).
In order to transcend such fallacies it is necessary to consider the nature of
man as a social being, and this in turn requires us to expand our horizons be-
yond our own culture and think comparatively. The contribution of anthropol-
ogy to moral philosophy is not therefore just to supply exotic facts for grinding
in the philosophical mill but to provide, hopefully, a wider view of the human
predicament, and once we do this the nature of moral philosophy is radically
transformed from the mere analysis of concepts and linguistic usage into some-
thing much more sociological in nature.
As my references to Williams and Foot have hinted, in the last twenty or
thirty years there have been significant changes in moral philosophy that have
increasingly recognized this social dimension, and a number of legal scholars
such as Hart, Finnis, and Simmonds have made important contributions. There
has been a growing awareness that linguistic analysis is not enough and that
we need to locate morality within a living social tradition, and there has also
been a general revival of interest in ancient moral philosophy, especially that of
Aristotle, which has involved a renewed emphasis on virtue, while attempts to
base ethics on any single criterion of moral obligation are becoming increas-
ingly discredited. The assumptions of liberal individualism have themselves
been questioned by a number of philosophers who are often referred to as
communitarian (see in particular Mulhall and Swift 1992). It should therefore
be emphasised that some of these trends in recent moral philosophy (see also
Nussbaum 1992 and Gray 1992) are sympathetic to the view of ethics that I
shall be advancing.
Only by constructing, albeit in very general terms, an objective theory of
ethics can it therefore be seen how Western moral philosophy has been dis-
torted by cultural influences, and also demonstrated that, contrary to the
Facts and values 41

claims of the relativists, it is possible to become aware of the peculiarities of
ones own culture.
2. Facts and values
In a famous passage, Hume pointed out what has subsequently been taken as
an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always
remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of
reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations con-
cerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead
of the usual copulation of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposi-
tion that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is im-
perceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or
ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, tis necessary that it
should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason
should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new rela-
tion can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it.
(Hume 1740: 1.1.27)
Hume was obviously correct if he was claiming that we cannot logically
deduce, from a proposition that such and such is the case that therefore we
ought to do anything of a specific nature about it, since logical entailment re-
quires that the conclusions be contained in the premises. It also follows from
this general argument that judgements to the effect that something is good,
bad, right, wrong, and so on cannot be deduced from statements of fact either.
Evaluative propositions are therefore quite clearly different in some way from
statements of fact and from logical deductions.
Humes Law (No ought from is) (Hare 1963: 108) has fostered the
belief among philosophers that not only is evaluation different from descrip-
tion but that they are independent of one another. This inevitably weakens the
link between the realities of human life and morality, which has therefore be-
come a sui generis phenomenon floating in a mysterious realm of its own. Not
surprisingly, this has generated a number of insoluble problems; for example,
if moral propositions and value judgements are true then what must there be
in the real world which corresponds with them?
If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or re-
lations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the uni-
verse. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by
some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from
our ordinary ways of knowing everything else When we ask the awk-
ward question, how we can be aware of this authoritative prescriptivity, of
the truth of these distinctively ethical premises or of the cogency of this dis-
tinctively ethical pattern of reasoning, none of our ordinary accounts of sen-
sory perception or introspection or the framing and confirming of explana-
tory hypotheses or inference or logical construction or conceptual analysis,
or any combination of these, will provide a satisfactory answer; a special
sort of intuition is a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clear headed
objectivist is compelled to resort. (Mackie 1977: 3839)
42 Moral Knowledge
So G.E. Moore attempted to prove in Principia Ethica that moral goodness
is an objective yet indefinable and non-natural property of human actions or
states of mind: just as we can perceive by our senses that something is yellow
without however being able to define what yellowness is, so by our moral
intuition we can see that some acts or states of mind are good without being
able to define this moral goodness at all. Indeed, he described attempts to de-
fine good as happiness or adaptation or anything else as the Naturalistic Fal-
lacy, and a great deal of subsequent effort in moral philosophy has been spent
in avoiding this supposed fallacy at all costs.
One strange consequence of Moores theory is that non-ethical uses of
good a good steak, a good book, a good train to Cambridge must therefore
each denote a separate non-natural type of goodness appropriate to whatever
we are evaluating. Different uses of good thus generate an indefinitely large
set of unrelated homonyms: It seems probable that this word [good] is essen-
tially a collection of homonyms, such that the set of things, roughly, those in
connection with which we heard it pronounced in early years (a good bed, a
good kick, a good baby, a good God) have no common characteristic (Ogden
and Richards 1949: 124125).
Even more significant is the problem that since we can only recognize moral
goodness by the use of some sort of intuition, and peoples intuitions about
goodness may differ, how then are these differences to be reconciled? For ex-
ample, Moore claimed that personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments in-
clude all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine (Moore
1903: 189). Lytton Strachey considered that Moore had shattered all writing on
ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley (cited in
MacIntyre 1984: 16) but others have been less impressed. Roy Harrod, for ex-
ample, had this to say about the enjoyment of beautiful objects and the pleas-
ures of human intercourse: There is no need to quarrel with these items; they
are both of them, undoubtedly, supreme goods. But what a world is left out! As
Keynes observed in his memoir: it is remarkable how [wholly] oblivious he
managed to be of the qualities of the life of action, and also of the pattern of life
as a whole. Looked at from a broad point of view, Moores list of goods is
cloistered and anaemic (Harrod 1951: 79).
If the so-called moral intuitions of different persons are so discordant it is
hard to resist the conclusion that they are nothing more than statements about
their feelings and do not correspond to anything objective at all. Hume argued
along just such lines, and claimed that value judgements are simply expres-
sions of our emotional attitudes. He maintained that all ends can only be pre-
scribed by our feelings, the passions and that reason was simply the slave of
the passions.
Consequently, if morality is defined as prescribing ends or aims of conduct,
there can be no such thing as moral knowledge; it would rather be a matter
of moral feeling or sentiment. To say you know that a certain action is mor-
ally virtuous is rather like saying you know a certain joke or situation is
funny. Virtuous conduct provokes in the spectator a pleasurable reaction
called moral approval; just as entertaining conduct provokes in the normal
spectator a pleasurable reaction, called amusement. (Basson 1958: 93)
Facts and values 43

Humes view has been extremely influential, and it was held for example by
Westermarck (1906, 1932), Stevenson (1944, 1963), and Ayer who wrote:
sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything.
They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the cate-
gory of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry
of pain or a word of command is unverifiable because they do not express
genuine propositions (Ayer 1971: 144).
Something has clearly gone badly wrong with the whole analysis of evalua-
tive terms in the English-speaking tradition of moral philosophy, and it is not
actually very difficult to see what this is. Good (and all the other evaluative
terms, for that matter, such as bad, right, and wrong) do not of course denote
any kind of property at all: if we call something good we mean that it satisfies
the relevant criteria of excellence in whatever we are evaluating. As Herbert
Spencer said long ago,
In what cases do we distinguish as good, a knife, a gun, a house? And what
trait leads us to speak of a bad umbrella or a bad pair of boots? The charac-
ters here predicated by the words good or bad, are not intrinsic characters
[my emphasis]; for apart from human wants such things have neither merits
nor demerits. We call these articles good or bad according as they are well or
ill adapted to achieve prescribed ends. (Spencer 1897 I: 21)
Those who think (if there have ever been such people) that goodness could
literally mean happiness (for example) are therefore confused, as Moore
claimed: happiness would not be goodness, but a relevant criterion for calling
something good. But Moore was utterly wrong in treating goodness as a
property instead of as a relational term. In the same way, Humes distinction
between is and ought statements is superficial because it overlooks this rela-
tionship between evaluation and purpose or function. For most of the time, of
course, purposes and functions remain implicit because we understand quite
well what boots and umbrellas are for, and it is clearly the lack of explicit refer-
ence to purpose or function in evaluative statements which creates the illusion
that they are strangely different from propositions of fact or logic. But if to the
factual premise this watch is accurate to a second a week, we add the teleo-
logical premise the purpose of watches is to tell us the time, then the evalua-
tive conclusion this is a good watch is logically valid, and not puzzling at all.
Spencers analysis of evaluation would have been quite familiar to Aristotle:
Within the Aristotelian tradition to call x good (when x may be among other
things a person or an animal or a policy or a state of affairs) is to say that it is
the kind of x which someone would choose who wanted an x for the pur-
pose which xs are characteristically wanted. To call a watch good is to say
that it is the kind of watch which someone would choose who wanted to
keep time accurately (rather than, say, to throw at the cat). The presupposi-
tion of this use of good is that every type of item which it is appropriate to
call good or bad including persons and actions has, as a matter of fact,
some given purpose or function. To call something good therefore is also to
make a factual statement. To call a particular action just or right is to say that
it is what a good man would do in such a situation; hence this type of state-
ment too is factual. Within this tradition moral and evaluative statements
can be called true or false in precisely the way in which all other factual
44 Moral Knowledge
statements can be so called. But once the notion of essential purposes or
functions disappears from morality it begins to appear implausible to treat
moral judgments as factual statements. (MacIntyre 1984: 59)
As MacIntyre points out, once we can see the connection between evalua-
tion and purpose or function, we realize that the alleged gulf between facts and
values, between is and ought, is an illusion, because the world of man is one
from which purpose and function are inseparable. Good and bad are actually
rather unusual and untypical of evaluative words by being completely devoid
of factual content, and in most of the words which we use to assess conduct
and character, evaluation and fact are closely combined: cowardly, boastful,
generous, deceitful, honest, polite, loyal, unreliable, and so on.
Now it is undoubtedly true that the moral values expressed in these words
are associated with feelings and emotions, but this is obviously because they
concern the social life in which we are deeply involved. We get stirred up
about the goodness of men because we are men (Hare 1952: 141). It is clear,
however, that it is possible to use evaluative judgements without any emotion
being involved, as when assessing the conduct of figures in history. Hare is
surely right when he says the emotivity of much moral utterance, which
some have thought to be of the essence of evaluative language, is only a symp-
tom and a most unreliable one of an evaluative use of words (ibid., 141).
It is precisely because we are biologically functional organisms, inhabiting a
social world of functional systems, and using purposefully designed artefacts
that we have such frequent occasion to evaluate, both morally and otherwise,
but evaluation is only incidentally prescriptive just as it only incidentally
arouses emotion. So, if I praise my watch as exceptionally accurate this is not
necessarily a prescription to my listener, who perhaps already has such a
watch himself; it may, for example, be an explanation of why I have kept it for
many years, or a justification for admiring modern technology. Some evalua-
tive statements are used to justify ones own actions against social pressures,
while others are used to explain social events. Smith is extremely dishonest
may be the answer to the question Why was Smith sacked from his job?, not a
criticism that one wishes to be conveyed to Smith. Nor is one prescribing any-
thing to anyone when one makes statements like all power has a tendency to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Prescriptions can certainly be
derived from such statements, although they are not very interesting, e.g. do
not be tyrannical, do not be corrupt, but when Lord Acton wrote this he was
not interested in such trivial moral exhortations he was explaining why some
of the Renaissance Popes had been notably unchristian in their behaviour.
More generally, we can commend many sorts of decision such as giving up a
lucrative job to care for the poor, or volunteering for bomb-disposal, without
prescribing such choices to anyone in particular. Prescription, then, like emo-
tion, is likely to be an aspect of many moral evaluations, but the essential na-
ture of these derives from the fact that in human social life there are inevitably
ends and means, some more effective or appropriate than others. The prescrip-
tive view of ethics is also closely linked with the belief that ethics is essentially
about rules and duty, a belief which is by no means the whole truth. (But it
should be emphasised that I am not of course denying that general moral
principles, such as Behave to others as you would like them to behave to you,
Human nature and the problem of teleology 45

ciples, such as Behave to others as you would like them to behave to you, are
indeed prescriptive. My point is that these general prescriptive rules do not
necessarily produce unambiguous prescriptions in specific cases of evaluation.)
If evaluative judgements in general derive their meaning from purpose and
function, what are the special characteristics of moral judgements? Clearly, in
the first place, they apply only to human beings and not to animals or things,
but there are various types of human behaviour or dispositions of character
which are not thought of as morally relevant, particularly the many forms of
technical activities that can be well or badly performed in relation to their ends.
Indeed, it is possible for a person to perform well in some activity, such as rob-
bing banks, and yet for us to regard such behaviour as morally bad. Moral
evaluations are therefore not only about human behaviour, but behaviour con-
sidered from some very general point of view, namely its appropriateness for a
human being as such. This then raises the further question: what are the pur-
poses or functions which are characteristic of human beings?
3. Human nature and the problem of teleology
While the idea of purpose obviously makes good sense when it refers to the
things that we make, or to our various goals in life, it seems very odd to ask
what we are for. The idea of the purpose of Man seems to assume either the
existence of a Creator, to whom we are in the same relationship as our artefacts
are to us, or some teleological theory of nature in which after the fashion of an
organism everything, including man, has its proper place. This view of nature
as a rational scheme of things is, of course, very different from the modern
view: it was widespread in the ancient world and is especially associated with
the philosophy of Aristotle and the Stoics. Aristotle explained change in gen-
eral, and the activity of living things in particular, by the concept of telos, con-
ventionally translated as end or final cause, which is closely related to the
form of the thing in question. The five elements have motions which are ap-
propriate to their nature (earth, for example, is heavy and tends to move
downwards, while fire is light and moves upwards) and, correspondingly
every living thing acts for the sake of ends proper to its type. Plants live the
life of growth and reproduction, animals have sensation and appetite on top of
these, and man has all of these plus reason (Woodfield 1976: 6). The most dis-
tinctive feature of Aristotelian teleology is that it is immanent in nature this
means that the source of a things end-directed movement is to be found within
the nature of the thing itself, not in some external agency (ibid., 6). Aristotles
concept of end does not therefore necessarily involve any self-consciousness
on the part of a thing, and ends need not be purposes of a Creator. This theory
when applied to inorganic nature was effectively destroyed by Renaissance
science: the nub of the criticism is that appeals to natural tendencies are non-
explanatory unless there is or could be evidence for them which is independent
of their alleged manifestations (ibid., 7). The rationality of nature, like the exis-
tence of God, cannot therefore be made one of the premises of any system of
ethics which claims to be objective, since metaphysical theories of this sort
seem to be unprovable.
46 Moral Knowledge
But, putting all claims about teleology and the purpose of man on one
side, Aristotles question What is the good life for man? remains perfectly rea-
sonable because it does make sense to ask what is good for any living organ-
ism, what is to count as its being in a flourishing or healthy state, whereas it
makes no sense at all to ask what is good for solar systems, or crystals, or
lumps of lead, because they are not alive. While it is meaningless to ask
whether it is good or bad for the lead to melt it, it is certainly good for fish to
keep them in water of a suitable temperature, and bad for them to be dropped
into boiling fat. Survival, health, avoidance of pain, and ability to reproduce
are all aspects of what can correctly be called the inherently preferable states of
every living organism, including man; evaluative language is therefore essen-
tially appropriate to living organisms as opposed to lifeless things, because
organisms are goal-seeking in relation to these inherently preferable states.
Good, therefore, in ethics may refer not only to purpose and function in hu-
man life, but to the very conditions of human life itself, and the concepts of
benefit and harm are therefore fundamental to ethics.
1

So to answer Aristotles question we do not need to speculate about the ra-
tionality of the universe, or what mans ends might be in relation to the uni-
verse, or even how man acquired his nature: we simply discover the require-
ments for human well-being, in the same way that we can discover those re-
quirements for the well-being of any other organism. It is, in short, possible to
retain the functional aspects of moral language without committing ourselves
to any teleological theory of the universe.
Just as fish need water to survive, so man needs society, because only in so-
ciety can he develop his distinctively human characteristics at all, yet unlike
the social insects, for example, he has no instinctive patterns of behaviour to
rely on but must devise rules for regulating social life by using his reason.
When ancient Greek thought first discovered the opposition of nature and
convention, it also discovered that an essential part of human nature is to live

1
Statements about what is good for, or in the interests of, living organisms such as man
are clearly less universal in scope than statements in physics, because those are true
independently of any organism whatever. The force of gravitational attraction between
two bodies was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them be-
fore man appeared in the universe, and would continue to be true if he no longer ex-
isted. But statements like the unexamined life is not worth living, or all power has the
tendency to corrupt only have meaning within the context of human existence, and
might therefore seem vulnerable to the charge that they are anthropocentric or even
subjective. To this extent they are analogous to the secondary qualities of colour and
taste, unlike the primary qualities such as mass and velocity. If our basic needs were
different, if, to take an extreme example, we could somehow be rational but yet able to
pursue a solitary existence with complete self-sufficiency, our moral values would nec-
essarily be different as a result. So, too, if our sensory apparatus were different we
should not perceive colours and tastes as we do now. But that is very different from
claiming that our perception of red or green, or our ideas of the good life for man as
he actually is, are illusions. Moral values are therefore objective, part of our actual exis-
tence, if by reason and evidence we can show that there is such a thing as human flour-
ishing, and of what it consists (see Finnis 1983: 60066 for further discussion of this).
Human nature and the problem of teleology 47

by convention (Williams 1983: 358). By referring to man as rational,
1
how-
ever, it must be emphasized that I am in no way endorsing the view that hu-
mans are passionless beings, or that they habitually conduct themselves in a
highly logical manner, or even that they can be relied upon to maximize their
own (or each others) interests. In the sense that I am using it, rational simply
implies that human beings, lacking an instinctual basis for behaviour, have to
make choices and evaluate different possible courses of action in the context of
culturally based systems of rules and categories. They have to construct their
own social order, and this involves the conscious use of their minds in the
various transactions and calculations of daily life.
It is obvious therefore that any human society must be based on conven-
tions or rules as the minimal basis of co-operation and mutual assistance (and
of competition for that matter) which require the control of each individuals
desires and emotions by reason, and it is these sorts of considerations which
are the basis of ethics. The inescapable and very general demands of ethical
principles, their overridingness, as Hare puts it, therefore derive from the
human condition itself.
Yet it might be objected that the requirements of human nature cannot con-
stitute a morally obligatory law because if we have no choice about how to be
human we can therefore have no obligation, or, if we do have a choice, then
there can be no law. More generally, it might be claimed that to base morality
on nature is to ascribe a moral authority to nature which itself must then be
justified why should we obey nature?
We may agree that nature itself cannot be the source of any moral law,
unless it is thought of in teleological terms.
2
It is not the moral duty of mother

1
It will be recalled that Aristotle (1097b341098a3) compares plants, animals, and man,
and concludes that while man shares life, nutrition and growth, and perception with
other living organisms, he alone is rational, and therefore that the life of reason is mans
distinctive end. But as an argument about ethics, as distinct from biology, this is mis-
taken.
Practical reasonableness makes its claims upon us because it is a basic aspect of
human flourishing. Its claim is: to direct the way in which we seek to participate
in each and all of the basic human goods. It is architectonic: directive, in charge
But its claim to be architectonic should not be explained in Aristotles fashion:
viz., reason is what distinguishes us from other animals, so : or again, more
plausibly: reason (nous) is the best (or the highest) thing in us. Neither the
metaphysical typology nor the metaphysical ranking is the sort of explanation
we need in philosophical ethics; rather, they themselves, particularly the rank-
ing, are to be explained as expressions and recognitions of the directive claims
that our intelligence makes upon us because of the goods (and other truths) which in-
telligence makes evident and thus available to us. (Finnis 1983: 7001)
2
This sort of appeal to Nature leads inevitably to justifications of the right of the strong
to dominate or exterminate the weak, or of unrestrained competition, on the grounds
that biological evolution has been based on the survival of the fittest. But as T.H. Hux-
ley, for example, realised only too clearly, Nature in this sense is fundamentally inimical
to the requirements of human society, which he compared to a garden which has to be

48 Moral Knowledge
cats to teach their kittens to kill mice, because they can have no choice in the
matter and simply follow their maternal instincts. Man, on the other hand, is
the only creature who not only has clear needs but also has the possibility of
conscious choice and therefore has the capacity to organize his society and his
personal life in ways that are not determined by instincts. But it is possible to
regulate society in a variety of different ways some of which are more appro-
priate than others to promote human flourishing, and as individuals we can
make wise or foolish choices in the course of our lives which promote or di-
minish our well-being. If we were rational but totally self-sufficient beings, for
example, our morality would be very different, but given that our nature is
what it is there is nothing arbitrary or metaphysical in the claim that we can
infer certain general ends from it. But this does not require us to make nature
into a substitute for God. It is not our moral duty to obey our nature, to be hu-
man, but simply inescapable. Our only problem is how to be human more ef-
fectively, but we cannot be other than human to some degree. The person who
claims that he does not wish to be human or can define himself as he chooses is
merely striking a philosophical pose; we have no idea what it is like to be a gi-
raffe, or an elm tree, and could be neither even if we wanted to. It would be
equally absurd to claim that there is no sound reason for preferring life and
health to disease and death, or knowledge and wisdom to stupidity and igno-
rance. Aristotle said that the end of man is eudaemonia, variously translated as
happiness or flourishing, or well-being and that the distinctive character of
man is rational and social, and within the context of our previous discussion of
ends as inherently preferable states he was obviously correct. Much of the
remainder of this chapter will therefore be concerned with the requirements of
human social life as the essential foundation of all moral systems, regardless of
the particular cultural values of different societies.
4. Individual and society
If ethics is the attempt to answer the question What is the good life for man?,
and if man as a matter of fact is both rational and social, then we must decide
how individuals are actually related together in a society.
Unlike the cells of the body, individuals do not perform their social func-
tions by purely physical mechanisms of causality; they are self-conscious and
in a basic sense self-interested, so that the normative relation between individ-
ual and society is perhaps the most fundamental question in the whole of eth-
ics. In order to answer it we must ask what kind of entity a society is: does it,
for example, have a super-organic existence that gives it interests of its own
transcending those of its members, or is it nothing more than a quantitative
aggregation of individuals? On the other hand, can we legitimately conceive of

defended against the ever-encroaching wilderness: That which lies before the human
race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature,
the State of Art of an organized polity (Huxley 1894: 445).
Individual and society 49

a pure individual as such, independent of society, who has rights that owe
nothing to society but are simply part of his humanity?
Moral philosophy has been profoundly influenced by the Western liberal
tradition, which differs radically from that of all other cultures in its answers to
these questions. This might be because it is more advanced than them, just as
Western natural science is more advanced, or it might be because, however
ingenious its arguments about individual and society, they are in fact distorted
by certain cultural influences, and I shall try to show that this second possibil-
ity is actually the case.
Dumont distinguishes between the Western liberal tradition and that of
other societies in terms of individualism and holism:
On the one hand, most societies value, in the first place, order: the confor-
mity of every element to its role in the society in a word, the society as a
whole; this is what I call holism. On the other hand, other societies at any
rate ours value, in the first place, the individual human being; for us, every
man is, in principle, an embodiment of humanity at large, and as such he is
equal to every other man, and free. This is what I call individualism. We
may immediately remark that in the holistic type the requirements of man as
such are ignored or subordinated, just as are the requirements of society in
the individualistic type. Now, it so happens that, among the great civiliza-
tions the world has known, the holistic type of society has been overwhelm-
ingly predominant; indeed, it looks as if it had been the rule, the only excep-
tion being our modern civilization and its individualistic type of society.
(Dumont 1977: 34)
Until the sixteenth century the European view of the social order was holis-
tic, too, as Dumont defines this.
From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckets secre-
tary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIIIs chaplain in 1537, the analogy by
which society is described an analogy at once fundamental and common-
place is the same It is that of the human body.
Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension with
a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded until the rise
of a theoretical individualism in England in the seventeenth century (Taw-
ney 1938: 37).
Order, as Dumont defines it, is of profound significance for ethics, but the
understanding of it has largely disappeared from moral philosophy (or become
misrepresented as totalitarianism) because Western society has been increas-
ingly dominated by individualism, and especially by what we may call the phi-
losophy of the market as the paradigm of social relations. In the market situa-
tion individuals confront one another in an egalitarian, competitive, and self-
interested manner, since not just goods but labour itself is a commodity, and
the market is therefore inherently opposed to holistic, hierarchical types of so-
cial order. And because material considerations are clearly of pre-eminent im-
portance in the market, utilitarian calculations of pleasure and pain will be cen-
tral in a market philosophy, rather than any idea of happiness in the sense, for
example, of the well-ordered personality in harmony with itself.
50 Moral Knowledge
Other important cultural factors in generating this extreme individualism
seem to have been the methodology of scientific materialism, especially its at-
omism which seeks to resolve every phenomenon into its basic units, which in
the case of society have been assumed to be individuals; and the Protestant
conception of the individual soul as in a direct relationship with God, unmedi-
ated by Church or priest.
The moral self-sufficiency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his
sense of social solidarity. For, if each individuals destiny hangs on a private
transaction between himself and his Maker, what room is left for human in-
tervention? A spiritual aristocrat, who sacrificed fraternity to liberty, he
drew from his idealization of personal responsibility a theory of individual
rights, which, secularized and generalized, was to be among the most potent
explosives the world has known. (Tawney 1938: 207)
But Western society since the seventeenth century has not been based, of
course, solely on the market, though it has been increasingly permeated by so-
cial relations of a market type. The family and kinship in general, the solidarity
of the nation in times of war, the need to protect society from criminals, the
sense of the history of ones society and traditions as providing the individual
with a sense of identity, the pursuit of truth in scholarship and science, and
religious values, are all powerfully opposed to the market model because they
all stress the holistic aspect of society, or the demands of truth as opposed to
subjective preferences.
Our culture, to a greater extent than any of its predecessors, is therefore
made up of a number of conflicting paradigms of social relations and the place
of the individual within them, but in this section I shall examine the distinctive
features of liberal individualism, which is so closely linked with the philoso-
phy of the market.
The works of moral and political philosophers since the Renaissance have
typically presented us, in reaction to Christian and Aristotelian thought (Mac-
Intyre 1984: 5161), with a picture of man as a lone individual looking out on
the rest of the world and tormenting himself with such questions as Why
should I be moral?, Why should I obey authority?, Why should I be con-
cerned with the interests of others? and so on, a world view in which the indi-
vidual is the rock bottom reality and society therefore becomes a derivative
and rather vague and problematic aggregation of individuals. From this per-
spective it is extremely difficult to justify any action that is not motivated by
self-interest, and true disinterestedness will therefore appear either as irra-
tional or an illusion. This conflict between self-interest and self-sacrifice is, of
course, especially acute for those biologists in the Darwinian tradition who try
to construct theories of ethics that justify social co-operation; see, for example,
Alexanders discussion of reciprocity (1987: 15361).
An important philosophical gambit used by seventeenth century philoso-
phers to make individualism persuasive was the idea of the State of Nature,
which we must now examine in some detail. The State of Nature, as conceived
by Hobbes and Locke, does not mean anything resembling the nature of the
modern biologist, and when they refer to society, this is not society as an
anthropologist would understand it either. The State of Nature is essentially a

model of how human beings would behave if they were not under the control
of the state, what manner of life there would be, where there were no common
Power to feare (Leviathan, Ch.13, p.97). In this hypothetical condition (which
has some resemblance to how the Indians of North America were thought to
live by seventeenth century Europeans), men are fully rational and can speak,
they have families and can engage in a variety of technological activities such
as agriculture and building houses. But the main feature of their behaviour is
competition. This is especially marked in Hobbes, for whom men are essen-
tially selfish: Men from their very birth, and naturally, scramble for everything
they covet, and would have all the world, if they could, to fear and obey them
(English Works, VII, p.73 cited in Peters 1956: 153). Desire, especially for our
own power and material goods, and aversion, especially from the power of
others over us and the prospect of death, are the mainsprings of human action:
The appearances, our pretensions to generosity or to disinterestedness, are but
cloaks to hide the struggle between pride and fear; the reality beneath is the
thrust and recoil of a pleasure-pain calculating machine (Peters 1956: 153).
Therefore, it must follow that in the State of Nature, during the time men
live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condi-
tion which is called Warre; and such a Warre, as is of every man, against every
man (Leviathan, Ch.13, p.96). Essential or natural man is less disagreeable in
Lockes picture, and in one passage he represents the State of Nature as a
State of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and Preservation and not to be
confounded with the State of War (II, 19). But elsewhere he says that, because
of the lack of government, every mans property is constantly exposed to the
invasion of others; his enjoyment of it is very unsafe, very insecure, and life is
full of fears and continual dangers (II, 123); while passion and revenge are
apt to carry men too far in their own causes (II, 125).
The State of Nature is therefore a literary device to persuade us that it is le-
gitimate to think about man as essentially an individual, whose inherent char-
acteristics owe nothing to life in association or co-operation with others. But to
maintain the plausibility of the model, human beings are not presented as ape-
like beings but as self-sufficient entities capable of leading fully human lives,
rational, each calculating his own advantage, talking, working, making agree-
ments, and so on. This is very much the atomistic view typical of seventeenth
century science in general (MacPherson 1962: 30), but it was directed against
the whole idea of an inherent hierarchical order in society: Man, for Hobbes
and Locke, is essentially free and equal so that all subordination, especially of
subjects to their rulers, requires to be justified. It is very significant that they
both give great emphasis to physical attributes as a basis for equality; Hobbes,
in particular, is intensely materialistic, and the first chapters of Leviathan are
taken up with a minute description of the physiology of those human machines
whose essential equality rests on the similarity of their physical attributes:
Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that
though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or
of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the differ-
ence between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can
thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend,
52 Moral Knowledge
as well as he. For, as to this strength of body, the weakest has strength
enough to kill the strongest. (Leviathan Ch.13, p.94)
And Locke says there being nothing more evident, that Creatures of the
same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Na-
ture, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal to one another
without Subordination or Subjection (II, 4).
In the history of moral thought this emphasis on the physical resemblances
between all men has had two very different implications. When contrasted
with the social it can be used to stress what is fundamental to Man as such,
what all human beings have in common, by contrast with the purely conven-
tional distinctions of nationality, religion, and class, that create artificial barri-
ers to the brotherhood of man. In the Merchant of Venice (III.1), after bitterly
complaining that Antonio has cheated and ridiculed him because he is a Jew,
Shylock says
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, af-
fections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, sub-
ject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by
the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not
bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And
if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
Here our common humanity, transcending social and cultural differences, is
expressed with reference to our bodies, our needs and our senses, which are
the same for all of us. But the natural, expressed in the images of the human
body, can also be used in the opposite way, to emphasise our isolation from one
another: physically, my pleasures are not your pleasures, and you cannot share
my pains. As biological organisms our first concern is to maintain ourselves in
the struggle for existence, to get sufficient food and shelter, and to defend our-
selves. Here the natural becomes the basis for a radical atomism, and society
is reduced to a mere collection of these isolated units, the physical individuals
who compose it. When nature is used in the first sense it connotes universal-
ity and the law of nations, known to all men because they are rational, but in
the second sense it becomes the law of the jungle, and man becomes homo
homini lupus, the universal predator on his own kind, for whom reason is pri-
marily valuable for calculating how best to secure his own advantage in the
struggle for survival with other individuals. Nature had come to connote, not
divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the
individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free
play (Tawney 1938: 167).
Property is of central importance in this struggle for survival, and Locke
considered that even in the State of Nature individuals have the inherent right
to anything with which they mingle their labour:
property to Locke seems to symbolize rights in their concrete form such
as his freedom, his equality, his power to execute the law of nature, [and
which] can become the subject of his consent, the subject of any negotiation
with his fellows (Laslett 1988: 103).

This extreme emphasis on the primacy of the individual means that when
Hobbes and Locke have to deal with the problem of authority they are obliged
to treat it as the product of a social contract
1
which individuals have, tacitly or
explicitly, consented to establish for their own personal safety and for the secu-
rity of their property. Government, for Hobbes, is therefore a compromise
agreed to by a group of individuals, each of whom would like to dominate the
others, but fears that they may in fact do the same to him. It is a truce between
egoists, a means by which they can pursue their own aims under a system of
law by which violence and anarchy are restrained by the ruler. While Hobbess
ruler is absolute and Locke, of course, was concerned to restrain the exercise of
tyranny, and supposed that this could be done by a constitutional form of gov-
ernment, his own view of social relations in civil society is just as egoistical as
Hobbess. In this view, society is therefore nothing more than a convenient de-
vice whose value to us consists in its contribution to our own survival.
Both saw society not just as the product of a contract but as a market for la-
bour as well as for products, because all are free to sell their labour to another
for the right price:
If it is labour, a mans absolute property, which justifies appropriation and
creates values, the individual right of appropriation overrides any moral
claims of the society. The traditional view that property and labour were so-
cial functions, and that ownership of property involved social obligations, is
thereby undermined (MacPherson 1962: 221) Society consists of relations
of exchange between proprietors [of labour as well as goods]. Political soci-
ety becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and for
the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange. (ibid., 3)
Dumont points out that in traditional societies, the relations between men
are more important, more highly valued, that the relations between men and
things. This primacy is reversed in the modern type of society, in which rela-
tions between men are subordinated to the relations between men and things
(Dumont 1977: 5). So, in medieval European thought,
Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible
office. Its raison dtre is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner
such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform
those duties, whether labour on the land, or labour in government, which
are involved in the particular status which he holds in the system The
owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he per-
forms and should lapse if he repudiates it. (Tawney 1938: 141)
It might be suggested at this point that these two contrasting views of soci-
ety are simply a matter of taste, of culturally determined fashion, but in fact

1
The idea of a social contract between people and ruler goes back far beyond Locke and
Hobbes to the Middle Ages. Ullmann argues that a contractual element was a necessary
feature of the feudal relationship itself, including that between the king and his barons,
and cites Rufinus (twelfth century): When the king is instituted he enters into a tacit
agreement with the people, with a view to ruling the people in a humane manner
(Ullmann 1967: 82 n.41).
54 Moral Knowledge
there are good reasons for thinking that seventeenth century individualism is
an impoverished and unrealistic conception of society, and it is now time to see
why. Locke tries to lend credibility to his labour theory of property by selecting
as his examples of labour in the State of Nature those very simple types of
physical activity in which a man seems to need no help from others: picking up
acorns under an oak, gathering apples from trees in the wood, digging ore
from the ground, killing a deer, catching a fish, or drawing water in a pitcher.
But this attempt to give plausibility to the autonomous individual whose own
physical exertions are enough to sustain him without the co-operation of others
is an illusion. How does the man know that apples are good to eat, or that his
acorns must be cooked before he can digest them, or what use to make of the
ore he has dug up? The answer is that he has learned all this from other human
beings, members of his own society. One man may kill a deer, or catch a fish,
but he did not acquire those skills, nor the fish-hooks and bows and arrows
that he uses, by his own unaided efforts, and in the hunt for deer or fish he was
probably helped by others as well. George Bernard Shaw says somewhere that
we are not born free: we are born in debt, to all those who have gone before us
and upon whose work and thought we rely, and to our contemporaries, with-
out whose co-operation we would not survive.
While the State of Nature was much more a logical model than an attempt
to reconstruct primitive society, it nevertheless relied on certain empirical as-
sumptions. It is therefore important to realise that seventeenth century theories
of individualism were based on very confused notions of man and society,
while knowledge about real stateless societies was minimal. From ancient
times, no clear distinction had been made between what we would describe as
inherited (or innate) characteristics and those that are acquired. Human beings
were thought of as possessing from birth all their mental faculties pre-formed,
including their ability to use language, so that what they acquire from society
is simply specific customs and knowledge, and these have always been known
to vary from culture to culture. Herodotus, for example (The Histories, Bk.2)
describes the experiment of one of the Pharaohs to discover what language
children who were isolated from all human contact would naturally speak
the answer was Phrygian and Montaigne believed that a child, bred in some
uncouth solitarinesse, far from haunt of people (though it were a hard matter
to make triall of it) would no doubt have some kinds of words to express, and
speech to utter his conceits (Montaigne 1632: 254). The figures of Mowglie and
Tarzan in modern literature continue the same tradition which is, however,
completely false.
Our idea of society remains superficial so long as we take it, as the word
suggests, as a sort of association which the fully formed individual enters
voluntarily and with a definite aim, as if by a contract. Think rather of the
child, slowly brought to humanity by his upbringing in the family, by the
apprenticeship of language and moral judgement, by the education which
makes him share in the common patrimony including, in our society, ele-
ments which were unknown to the whole of mankind less than a century
ago. Where would be the humanity of this man, where his understanding,
without this training or taming, properly speaking a creation, which every
society imparts to its members, by whatever actual agency? This truth is so

lost from sight that it is perhaps necessary to refer our contemporaries, even
if well-read, to the stories of wolf-children, so that they may reflect that in-
dividual consciousness has its source in social training. (Dumont 1970: 5)
Human nature is certainly not a blank page, on which culture may write
what it will, but the genetic endowment of each individual requires the society
of other human beings in order to manifest itself and develop its potential. In
the eighteenth century, responding to various European cases of children dis-
covered in a wild state, Linnaeus classified them as Homo ferus and since his
time many more cases have been reported (see Malson 1972: 8082 for a list,
and also Singh and Zingg 1966). We now know that children brought up from
infancy by animals, or alone in the wild, or in solitary confinement, do not de-
velop any distinctively human characteristics at all, either of intellect or per-
sonality. Some studies of these wolf-children, such as Itards of Victor, the
Wild Boy of Aveyron, or the Rev. Singhs study of Kamala in Midrapore, have
been very detailed, and the general profile that emerges is one of complete ab-
sence of speech which is only learned with extreme difficulty or not at all, and
the restriction of reasoning to that of a child of about two or three. Anger and
fear seem to be the only emotions developed by children in the wild state, and
laughter, tears, sympathy, and affection only appear as a result of prolonged
human contact. Sexuality, too, remains greatly inhibited even after puberty.
Social life does not therefore simply supply content for use by a set of innate
and preformed faculties, but these very faculties depend for their development
on a social environment from the moment of birth. It therefore follows that the
attempt by Hobbes and Locke to persuade us that the essence of man can be
captured by treating him as an isolated individual, a purely physical entity
whose nature can be comprehended by excluding society, is scientifically false.
If then it is asked if any man is naturally bound to obey another, one
would reply that the question is meaningless, because human existence is by its
very nature a social existence, and obedience can only be understood as a type
of social relationship that is appropriate for many different roles and institu-
tions: parents and children, rulers and subjects, and in military and bureau-
cratic organizations, for example, so that the state, which is a necessary mode
of organization for large scale societies, inherently requires hierarchical subor-
dination and inequality. Social life is not something which is added on to the
life of the individual: without social life there is no individual life at all, in a
human sense, but only that of a rather ineffectual animal. Human rationality is
only a potential that, without an upbringing among people can never material-
ize, and in this sense the individual is inescapably a social being. (It will be un-
derstood that these observations do not apply to hermits, or to Japanese sol-
diers who have survived alone on Pacific islands for many years and similar
cases of human isolation, because such persons have already developed their
humanity by growing up in society.)
What sense, therefore, can be made out of the notion of inherent, natural,
individual rights to liberty, to the executive power of punishing crime and ob-
taining restitution for torts, and to property, that Locke believed were brought
into society as inherent individual rights from the State of Nature? Locke tried
to link his State of Nature with Greek and Christian ideas of natural law:
56 Moral Knowledge
The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every
one. And Reason, which is that law, teaches all Mankind, who will but con-
sult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another
in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions. For Men being all the Workman-
ship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one
Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business,
they are his Property whose Workmanship they are (II, 6)
And in an equally muddled combination of rationalistic metaphysics and
Deism the American Declaration of Independence states: We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and
the pursuit of Happiness [my emphasis]. But since the existence of God is not
susceptible of proof, He cannot be appealed to as an authority, and in any case,
to judge from the Old and New Testaments, let alone the Koran or other reli-
gious texts, the Almighty has been notably silent on the topic of individual
rights. Nor can we accept the supposed rationality of nature as a settled basis
for appeals to the traditional notion of Natural Law. As Russell said, The view
of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from his prede-
cessors cannot be freed from its theological basis; when it survives without
this, as in much modern liberalism, it is destitute of clear logical foundation
(Russell 1946: 649).
The metaphysical and theological antecedents of natural right theory have
been largely forgotten, as Russell says, and now we frequently find them as-
serted as self-evident propositions, e.g. The moral rights of individuals are
prior to law and society The demands of law and society derive from inher-
ent moral rights, rather than vice versa (Kohlberg 1984: 177, 179). If by natural
right we mean something that is inherent in a human being as such, inde-
pendent not only of God or a rational Nature, but also of society in the sense of
any enduring human community, then the idea of a non-social inherent indi-
vidual right is simply meaningless. A right is A justifiable claim, on legal or
moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way (OED),
that is, it is a rule governing certain aspects of human behaviour, and as such it
assumes by its very nature that it applies between human beings in some sort
of social relationship rather than belonging to isolated individuals. For if, for
example, the right to property is said to inhere in the man who mingled his
labour with some material object, the game that he has killed, for example, then
that right would be violated not only by other men who seize that object, but
also by animals, such as the hyenas who steal the hunters catch. Indeed, the
lightning that burns down my house has violated my property rights as surely
as the arsonist who puts a match to it. If a right could exist in individuals in
this way it would be like Moores goodness, some kind of queer pseudo-
physical property, analogous to height or eye-colour, but of a non-natural type.
The only possible basis of the inherent rights of individuals is nature, not
the individual, and, moreover, the nature of ancient philosophy:
The Greeks found in the natural facts of blood relationship the true basis of
the law of intestate succession; and in the general recognition everywhere of
self-defence as a justification for killing or injuring another they believed

they had reached the rules shared by men with the beasts, and which must
be accepted as binding, whether written or not, because implanted at birth in
all living things as such. In the same way the duty to contribute to the sup-
port of ones parents in old age, like the duty of parents to rear and nurture
their offspring, seemed to be enjoined not only by law but also by nature
(Jones 1956: 62)
If we do not accept this philosophy of nature (which would also lead to all
sorts of conclusions repugnant to modern liberals, such as the inherent rights
of parents over their children), we are brought back again to a fundamental
property of any notion of rights as inhering in individuals, or as prior to soci-
ety, which is that a right is also a rule about how human beings should behave
to one another, and it is meaningless to talk about rules without at least some
general social context in which those rules could be defined and applied. But
since inherent human rights are, by definition, prior to society, any attempt to
draw specific conclusions about how society should be organized from these
rights must inevitably fail because such rights will conflict and so require
qualification. Resolution of these conflicts would, in turn, have to be based on
some scheme of priorities establishing either that some rights are more impor-
tant than others, or that some sorts of people (e.g. the innocent as distinct from
the guilty) are more important than others, and such a scheme then reintro-
duces the concept of social order. Even a notional right to life would be sub-
ject to qualification, since otherwise this right would be violated by killing in
self-defence as much as by murder.
It might be asked, however, why natural rights could not be qualified yet
still be natural rights. The answer is that if we do this they lose the distinctive
qualities of rights, which are their prescriptivity and indefeasibility, and be-
come goods. One suspects that some, at least, of the proponents of natural
rights have really had this in mind all the time, and it has been a fundamental
part of my argument that there are indeed inherent goods both for individuals
and for social organization. Examples would be security of ones own person
and property, taking part in the decisions of the various groups to which one
belongs, being treated with fairness, being healthy, and so on. By talking of
goods, inherently preferable states, we automatically allow the necessity of
their mutual qualification and some kind of rank ordering between them, as
well as their importance in fulfilling human needs, but also achieve some of the
things that a doctrine of natural rights aims at without its inherent contradic-
tion and its false conception of the individual.
Once we have cut rights down to size in this way we may allow them a le-
gitimate place within the social order. For example, we may accept that there is
a right of self-defence. If someone assaults an innocent person he commits an
act, as a member of a society, which is unjust and unlawful and which, there-
fore, any other member of society is entitled to prevent by force. If it is just and
proper for one person forcibly to restrain an assailant who attacks another per-
son, how then could it not also be just and proper for the victim to defend him-
self? There is therefore an obvious right of self-defence, but it does not need to
be derived from a pre-social condition of pure individualism and transported
into society from the woods and caves of some allegorical state of nature. In-
58 Moral Knowledge
deed, it is precisely because the right of self-defence is not natural but social
that it is not unqualified: it does not justify a criminal, for example, in using
violence to resist arrest by the police; and the same constraints will be found to
apply to all other so-called inherent or natural rights to liberty, property, free
speech and equality for example.
There can be no objection to saying that since the purpose of government is
to maintain order and prosperity, and since the peaceful ownership of property
is one of the benefits of social life, it is reasonable to require the government to
show good cause why property rights should be abrogated in any specific case,
and a good cause would not include the political convenience of the members
of the government if this had no reference to the good of society as a whole. It
may be necessary for the state to expropriate private land without consent for
the common good, but compensation should be paid to the owner because it is
unjust that those who will benefit from the use of the land should do so at the
expense of ruining the original owner. Yet this does not require us to believe
that the right to own property is natural and inherent in a human being as
such. One can be opposed to the communal ownership of property not because
it violates any natural rights of individual ownership, but because communism
is socially harmful: for example, it destroys generosity and gratitude; what is
the property of all is cared for by none; and it inevitably produces a corrupt,
inefficient, and tyrannical bureaucracy.
Universal suffrage can be defended not on the grounds that voting ex-
presses the natural right to equality, or is the executive power brought into so-
ciety from the State of Nature, or is part of consent to the social contract, but
because in modern states it is an important practical device to prevent dictator-
ship and also educates people in their social responsibilities. Since modern de-
mocracies with universal suffrage have a marked tendency to vote themselves
more social programmes than they can afford, it might be suggested that the
vote should be restricted to property owners, as less liable to be swayed by this
sort of consideration, but the argument against this would not be that it vio-
lated human rights, but that it would be unworkable in an egalitarian political
ethos. It would certainly be absurd to suggest that every society, ancient or
modern, without universal suffrage has been guilty of violating human rights
without knowing it.
The concept of natural individual rights, then, is a thoroughly confused and
misleading idiom of thought; rights by their very definition are social, and we
shall find that it is usually possible to reformulate claims about individual
rights in social terms, as I have illustrated in the preceding discussion of self-
defence, property and the vote. Where it is not possible to give such a social
explication we can be sure that the alleged rights are fictitious. To sum up,
therefore, the role of rights is not in articulating fundamental moral or po-
litical principles, nor in the protection of individualistic personal interests of
absolute weight. It is to maintain and protect the fundamental moral and po-
litical culture of a community through specific institutional arrangements or
political conventions (Raz 1986: 245). (For a much more detailed critique of the
place of rights in ethics, see ibid. 143216).

The notion of rights, however, is only one aspect of an individualistic theory
of society, and it is now time to explore the broader moral implications of the
theory. If the individual is the basic reality, and if society is only a secondary
phenomenon and aggregation of individuals, it follows that the states of these
individuals are the fundamental data of ethics. So Sidgwick quite consistently
held that pleasantness and painfulness are the only characteristics in virtue of
which any state of affairs is intrinsically good or bad (Broad 1930: 1467), and,
of course, only individuals, not societies, can feel pleasure or pain. But this at
once produces a fundamental contradiction between ones duty to oneself and
ones duty to others or between Egoistic Hedonism and Universalistic He-
donism. Broad summarizes the problem as follows:
If it be admitted that there is a Total or Universal Good, then it is no doubt
my duty to aim at maximizing this, and to regard the good which resides in
me and my experiences as important only in so far as it is a part of the Total
Good. In that case I must be prepared to sacrifice some or all of my good if
by that means and by that only I can increase the Total Good. But the consis-
tent Egoist will not admit that there is a Total or Universal Good. There is
my Good and your Good, but there are not part of a Total Good, on his
view. My duty is to aim at maximizing my Good, and to consider the effects
of my actions on your Good only in so far as they may indirectly affect mine.
Your duty is to aim at maximizing your Good, and to consider the effects of
your actions on my Good and in so far as they may indirectly affect yours. It
is plain that there is no logical inconsistency in this doctrine. And Sidgwick
goes further. He says that it is plain that x is concerned with the quality of
xs experiences in a way in which he is not concerned with ys experiences,
whoever y may be. And it is impossible to feel that this distinction is not
ethically fundamental. Thus Sidgwick is left in the unfortunate position that
there are two principles, each of which separately seemed to him self-
evident, but which when taken together seemed to be mutually inconsistent.
(Broad 1930: 158)
What we may call Sidgwicks dilemma is the result of treating society as
no more than an aggregate of sovereign individuals whose private states of
consciousness comprise all that is intrinsically good or bad. The only method of
resolving this dilemma is to postulate that society should be conceived as a
contractual relationship, a truce between egoists, in which each individual
trades off some of his goods, notably liberty, in order to gain the benefits of
co-operation and security. This was the solution adopted by Hobbes and Locke
to the cognate problem of political authority, and it remains the dominant the-
ory of liberal individualism in which justice, equality, and liberty must neces-
sarily be the central values.
So Rawlss well known book, A Theory of Justice (1971), assumes that society
1

is essentially a device whereby individuals can maximize their own advantage

1
In more recent publications Rawls seems to have retreated from the claim that his the-
ory is applicable to all societies, to the more limited position that it is simply an exposi-
tion of the assumptions of Western political culture. He has also qualified his theory of
justice so that it is now concerned only with peoples political relationships, with their

60 Moral Knowledge
through self-interested co-operation. The particular version of the social con-
tract theory he develops envisages the rules of a just society as those which
would be chosen by individuals without any knowledge of their place in soci-
ety, their class position or social status, or their natural assets of intelligence or
health. The rules would thus be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, and since
all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favour his
particular condition the principles of justice are the results of a fair agreement
or bargain (Rawls 1971: 12). It is very important to note that here the self is
defined essentially as choosing, as willing, and we shall consider this point fur-
ther in 5(c) on virtue. But now let us examine the nature of the social contract in
this theory. The whole idea of a social contract only makes sense on the initial
assumption that the individuals comprising society are rational egoists. One
feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation [the
contract] as rational and mutually disinterested. This does not mean that the
parties are egoists, that is, individuals with only certain kinds of interests, say
in wealth, prestige, and domination. They are conceived as not taking an inter-
est in one anothers interests (ibid., 13). Notwithstanding Rawlss disclaimer,
this is a good definition of egoism one can be an egoist without being power-
mad, or actively obnoxious and it is repeated elsewhere, e.g. I have assumed
throughout that the persons in the original position are rational. In choosing
between principles each tries as best he can to advance his interest (ibid., 142),
and the principles of justice are those that free and rational persons concerned
to further advance their own interests would accept in an initial position of
equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association (ibid., 11).
It therefore follows that the first principle of justice is liberty each person is
to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a
similar liberty for others (ibid., 60); and the second principle is equality: social
and economic inequality are to be arranged so that they are both a) reasonably
expected to be to everyones advantage, and b) attached to positions and of-
fices open to all (ibid., 60) and The higher expectations of those better situated
are just if and only if they work as a part of a scheme which improves the ex-
pectations of the least advantaged members of society (ibid., 75). (Liberty and
equality are to some extent incompatible, and there has been a great deal of
argument within the modern Western tradition about which is the more impor-
tant socialists favouring equality while liberals have stressed freedom. But
the distinction is not clear-cut, and Rawlsian liberalism has a strong welfare
or redistributive element, unlike that of Nozick (1974), for example, which is
more individualistic).
The notions of self-sacrifice and altruism are at once rendered anomalous
by such a system; so Rawls, briefly and hesitantly, refers to the interesting
class of supererogatory actions. These are acts of benevolence and mercy, of

status as citizens, rather than with their pursuit of the good in their private lives. This
distinction seems unworkable, and I shall refer to it again at the end of the book. For a
lucid and comprehensive assessment of Rawlsian theory and the general issues dis-
cussed in this section the book Liberals and Communitarians (Mulhall and Swift 1992) can
be strongly recommended.

heroism and self-sacrifice (ibid., 117) the love of mankind shows itself in
advancing the common good in ways that go well beyond our natural duties
and obligations. This morality is not one for ordinary persons, and its peculiar
virtues are those of benevolence, a heightened sensitivity to the feelings and
wants of others, and a proper humility and unconcern with self (ibid., 478). But
humility and unconcern with self are not proper at all in the Rawlsian society
they are ridiculous and irrational and contradict the very assumptions on
which his theory of justice is based. Yet we only have to think of the millions of
parents who sacrifice material pleasures in the interests of their children, or of
the many thousands whose jobs are spent caring for the sick and the insane,
often poorly paid or even dangerous, as in the case of firemen or life-boatmen,
to realize that altruism is very much a matter for ordinary people and not for
the Mother Teresas of this world alone. Let us think of all the soldiers who
have died in this century alone fighting for their country and for what they
believed to be right. By Rawlss calculation they would all have maximized
their own interests far more effectively by running away, and the fact that we
put up statues to soldiers who do not run away shows very clearly the limits of
the market philosophy of liberal individualism. Such a theory of ethics, which
makes irrelevant or even absurd a great deal of what has been taken to be es-
sential to the moral life, not only by Western tradition but by many other tradi-
tions as well, might be correct but it might also give us still further grounds for
concluding that something is radically wrong with the whole individualistic
model.
In the first place, it is obviously false to claim with Hobbes that human co-
operation is principally motivated by selfishness and fear. Any one who has
observed children knows that while they are indeed self-centred, they also
have an intense desire to be accepted into society and to take part in its activi-
ties and to be praised and loved, and are able to reciprocate these sentiments.
The desire to be like ones fellows, to fit in, to be one of the group and be es-
teemed by it is fundamental to man. The requirements of social living naturally
cause frustration, anger, and disappointment at times, but it is a gross distor-
tion to represent society as a kind of cage into which naturally free creatures
have been thrust against their will and against their basic inclinations.
Nor can it be claimed that in fact self-interest can be the only real motiva-
tion for appearing to act altruistically because our underlying motive in doing
so must always really be to increase our own social reputations. This ignores
the possibility of actions and indeed of self-sacrifice that spring from the love
of others (whatever their relationship to us) and out of admiration for some
hero, or code of conduct, or institutions such as our country, our regiment, or
our religion. The school teacher who gives her life trying to defend the pupils
in her care from a madman does not do so in the hope of a handsome reward
from society, since she may not expect to live to receive it. She may act out of
love for the children and from her ideal of her role as teacher, and there are
countless other examples in every society. Self-sacrifice, in short, is not only
very common, but is eminently justifiable as soon as one abandons the false
assumptions of the individualist model.
62 Moral Knowledge
The more insidious fallacy, however, is the belief that only the states of in-
dividuals, their pleasures and pains, and their mental states beliefs, knowl-
edge, motives and intentions can be regarded as real. The British Constitu-
tion, for example, cannot feel pain; it cannot laugh or cry, or feel guilt or com-
passion, and cannot by itself do anything at all, since only real individual peo-
ple can cause things to happen in the world of space and time. So there is the
inevitable temptation to regard such institutions and the whole social order as
unreal, and as nothing more than the combined product of the purposes and
actions of individuals, or else, if they are real, then to suppose they must be
some sort of super-organism. The root of this illusion is the failure to distin-
guish between individual experiences and states of mind in their private aspects
and their public, communicable aspects. A rule relating to conduct, for example
let it be first come, first served is in one sense dependent on the private
states of individuals. They must each understand the rule, which involves a
mental process, and they must be aware of others and of their relative places in
the queue, and so on, and without such inner states of individuals the rule
could not exist. But the point is that the rule can be communicated and taught
to others and their behaviour consequently influenced by it; while the rule can
only be maintained by real human minds, it has its own social properties
which are not purely psychological. The British Constitution, for example, is a
complex set of such rules, developed by individuals over time in response to
circumstances, and the behaviour of individuals is guided by the rules embod-
ied in the Constitution. Equally significant is the fact that such institutions have
properties of their own which result from the way in which the various rules
interlock with one another and so take on an organic quality of their own.
Changes of the rule system may occur easily in some direction and with more
difficulty in others, and some forms of constitution are therefore more viable in
new circumstances than others. Social institutions such as the British Constitu-
tion also embody moral values, and are appropriate objects of respect and loy-
alty for this reason because we ourselves, as moral beings, have been shaped
by our participation in such institutions, which has made them in a very real
sense a part of us. Unfortunately, this organic quality of institutions has be-
come confused by the Hegelian type of doctrine that the state has a life and
existence of its own; as Russell says,
A person is a complex whole, having a single life; can there be a super-
person, composed of persons as the body is composed of organs, and having
a single life which is not the sum of the lives of the component persons? If
there can be such a super-person, as Hegel thinks, then the State may be
such a being, and it may be as superior to ourselves as the whole body is to
the eye. (Russell 1946: 771)
The traditions of a society do indeed embody the valuable traditions of centu-
ries of accumulated experience, and provide the necessary order without
which any good life for individuals will be impossible. But the fact that a soci-
ety has systemic properties is a very different matter from saying that it is
comparable to a living biological organism in the Hegelian sense.
Once we cease to think of all states of individuals as private, and recognize
that some are communicable in the form of ideas, rules, categories, and all the

constituents of a social order, we can recognize the distortions which are inher-
ent in the doctrines both of state worship and of natural individual rights. A
social order and the common life which it makes possible are in fact an essen-
tial basis for the development of any human individual life at all, and for us to
mature as moral agents. It consists of customs, beliefs, values, rules, and insti-
tutions that exist independently of any specific individuals, and while it can
only be transmitted and maintained by individuals, as members of the social
order they derive from it their humanity and their capacity to function as hu-
man beings and moral agents. Personal friendships, marital relations, ones
loyalty and sense of pride in ones workplace or ones country, are among the
most valuable and rewarding aspects of many peoples lives. Such relations are
culturally determined forms of human interaction and it is through learning
their value that one acquires a sense both of the possibilities of ones own life
and of ones obligations to others (Raz 1986: 216). Our society existed before
we were born and will outlast us, and it is greater in this sense than any of its
members, but this does not mean that the individual may not criticize his own
society, nor that the individual is worthless and the society is everything. What
it does mean is that in establishing basic principles of how we should live the
requirements of a well-ordered social life cannot be treated as dependent on
some definition of individual rights which can be established without taking
the social order into consideration, because that order is an intrinsic good for
its individual members.
By attacking the exaggerated claims on behalf of the individual in Western
culture and reasserting the importance of the social order as an essential ele-
ment in the well-being of individuals themselves, I do not however wish to
deny the basic moral significance of freedom. This is because the essential re-
quirement of a moral action is that it should be voluntary that is, not made
under external duress or some overwhelming inner compulsion. While I have
no intention of discussing the philosophical problem of free will, our ideas of
moral responsibility only make sense on the assumption that agents can choose
to act in one way or another, and in this elementary sense freedom of will
clearly exists for human beings and is a necessary condition for our being
moral agents at all.
But the liberal, for whom autonomy is the central value, forgets that free-
dom without skill is empty and pointless. The musical novice is free to crash
about on the piano unhampered by the rules of key and harmony, but such
freedom is evidently worth nothing at all. Only by submitting to the discipline
of actually learning to play will the novice acquire the ability to accomplish
anything of value, and the same is true of children learning to be moral. By dis-
ciplining and teaching children by example and precept we are not depriving
them of liberty but fostering their moral growth. While adults do not need the
sort of tutelage that is appropriate for children, we all continue to need the dis-
cipline of social rules, conventions, and sanctions to a greater or lesser degree
in individual cases for the rest of our lives. Because it is only by practising
our relationships with others, and taking decisions, that we grow as moral
agents, this inevitably involves the possibility of error: just where the line
should be drawn between the need for social control and the need for indi-
64 Moral Knowledge
viduals to learn by trial and error is impossible to say, however, with any pre-
tence to exactitude, and will to a great extent depend on the particular forms of
social life that exist in different times and places.
It is obvious that there are pathological extremes both of personal autonomy
and of social restraint. A society in which there was unlimited personal free-
dom would be one in which freedom itself was not worth having. On the other
hand, tyrannical social orders, especially modern totalitarian regimes, are mor-
ally disastrous because they reduce individuals to a kind of child-like status of
conformity through fear. The opportunity freely to participate in the working
of ones own social institutions is therefore part of what is involved in matur-
ing as a moral agent, but this does not imply that all must have an equal say in
the process.
Equality, like freedom, is a fundamental concept of morality because we
recognize that all human beings, whatever their particular social identity, have
some claim on our moral concern, and equality is therefore a central notion of
justice and of doing to others as we would like them to do to us. But there is no
reason why this moral equality should be translated directly into some form of
social equality. In the working of social institutions at every level there are
relevant differences between individuals in aptitude, experience, intelligence,
and other qualities that justify inequalities, which will vary according to the
particular circumstances of the society. Traditional hierarchical social orders
based primarily on birth can obviously encourage arrogance and servility (as
can modern dictatorships) but the requirement to respect those of higher social
rank than ourselves is not obviously demeaning or demoralizing in itself, espe-
cially when the reciprocal obligations between those of different ranks are ob-
served. Egalitarian societies may also work well in some circumstances, but the
morally dark side of this type of social order is envy and hatred of excellence,
and the desire to level down all distinction and achievement to the low stan-
dards of the masses. All in all, therefore, there seems to be no principled reason
for regarding either hierarchical or egalitarian societies as innately superior to
the other it all depends on the moral spirit in which they are operated.
Tyranny, however, as I have already noted, is a different matter because
there is no moral principle on which governments can base the right to do
whatever they please without concern for the well-being of those they rule. The
only justification for political authority is the general good, but if only the gov-
ernment is allowed to decide what the general good is, one may well concede
that the distinction between this and tyranny is purely academic. Customary
restraints on rulers are therefore valuable, and so is some institutionalization of
the Rule of Law, whereby rulers and ruled can co-operate on the basis of
clearly defined rules for the common good. While the idea of the rule of law
has developed primarily in the Western tradition, it can certainly be granted
that this aspect of our culture, unlike liberal individualism, is not an ethnocen-
tric illusion but a contribution to our knowledge of how we should live that is
objectively valid.
The four aspects of morality 65

5. The four aspects of morality
Having established the fallacies of individualism, and the fundamental moral
relevance of the social order, we can now move on to consider the fallacy that
there must be a single principle from which all moral rules can be deduced. I
shall show that this false, and that morality necessarily has four different as-
pects utility, the social order, virtue, and human status and in these aspects
of morality we take up again those fundamental constraints on human social
life to which I referred at the end of Chapter I.
There are many occasions when we have to choose not between what is
clearly right and clearly wrong, but the greater of two goods, or the lesser of
two evils, and decide, for example whether to tell a lie or keep a promise.
Should I perform my caste duty as a king, even if this involves killing many
people in battle?; If it is right to denounce criminals to the state, should I de-
nounce my father for stealing a sheep?; and in the Republic (331c) Plato asks if
it is just to return a sword to someone who has gone mad since he lent it and
now demands it back. Would we not think it right to pretend, for example, that
we had lost it even though this would be a lie and also a breach of the rule
about returning borrowed goods, because these rules are less important in the
circumstances than the danger to life and limb if the madman can retrieve his
sword? While prima facie rules about telling the truth, keeping promises, re-
turning borrowed goods, and refraining from theft are valuable guides to con-
duct, there are occasions when they conflict and we must then try to decide
what to do by appealing to some more general moral principle, such as the
greater importance of life than property.
There is however the danger that in the search for such general moral prin-
ciples, philosophers especially will persuade themselves that there can only be
one such principle utility, justice, or love, for example and one of the com-
monest assumptions of moral philosophy is therefore that it should be possible
to deduce all ethics from a self-evident single principle:
Much of moral philosophy in the past has been unconvincing because it has
not dwelt sufficiently on the different views that can be taken about what is
morally important. It has been bedevilled by monistic theories, such as Utili-
tarianism or some version of Kants theory, in which the attempt is made to
demonstrate that one type of justification can be given for everything which
there are reasons for doing or being. Keeping promises, telling the truth, the
pursuit of poetry rather than push-pin, being courageous, and being just
have all been fitted into a monolithic mould provided by some fundamental
principle. The result has been an artificial type of theory that has never quite
rung true. Utilitarians, for instance, who have usually been decent people
with developed moral sensitivities, have invented highly dubious, and quite
untested empirical speculations to demonstrate that their conviction that
they should be just and truthful, which they would never really dream of
giving up, rests on alleged consequences for human welfare. (Peters 1971:
237)
(See also MacBeath 1952: 3; Williams 1985: 1796; and Finnis 1983: 77, 934.)
66 Moral Knowledge
The result of this approach to ethics is that we are encouraged to believe
that there must always be the right answer to all moral dilemmas, if only one
were clever enough to think of it: We must all agree that one of the kinds of
behaviour possible on any occasion is better than others, and that it is our duty
to do this (Carritt 1930: 1). While in some cases this may be true, in others it is
not, and I shall argue that while we can indeed appeal to such general princi-
ples as utility, justice, and benevolence, the application of these in the situa-
tions of real life is often a problem to which there is no single right answer. To
this extent moral behaviour is more like a craft than a science: we can tell a well
made table from a badly made one, but there may be tables that are excellent in
different ways. This does not mean, however, that moral decisions in such
cases are only matters of subjective personal taste, but they are often a question
of individual judgement rather than a puzzle-solving exercise like deciding
whether the amount of water in the tall thin glass remains the same when it is
poured into the short fat glass.
The belief that there must be a single overriding moral principle was the in-
evitable result of the rejection of the Aristotelian tradition. As MacIntyre says,
moral arguments within the classical Aristotelian tradition whether its Greek
or its medieval versions involve at least one central functional concept, the
concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential pur-
pose or function (MacIntyre 1984: 58). Once ethics is no longer based on the
nature of man as a rational and social being it can only try to reconstruct itself
from selected bits and pieces of the original whole utility, justice, duty, or
benevolence, an intuitive moral sense, or pure reason, or the nature of moral
language itself. Not surprisingly, as MacIntyre (1966) has shown, any theory of
ethics built on such one-sided and partial foundations is bound to be inade-
quate, and the repeated collapses of such theories have contributed to the belief
among the educated that ethical problems are insoluble.
These theories have the superficial attraction of lending themselves to sim-
ple and elegant solutions which appear comprehensive. The calculus of pleas-
ures and pains of the Utilitarians, or the calculations of Rawlsian distributive
justice, seem intended as formulae or algorithms for generating the solutions to
all possible moral dilemmas, but this appearance of scientific rigour is illusory
because it is achieved by ignoring the diverse aspects of human nature and the
human condition. The belief that there is always one correct solution to moral
dilemmas also reinforces the idea that ethics are inherently about rules, and
that these rules are the means by which we work out what our duty is in each
situation. This emphasis on rules and duty is yet another characteristic of mod-
ern ethical thought which makes it very different from that of other societies. In
this section I shall try to show that it is illuminating to treat ethics as having
four related but mutually irreducible aspects: utility, or welfare, much of which
is derived from our physical and psychological nature and needs; moral ac-
tions that are rooted in the social order roles and rules and including such
notions as duty, justice, and responsibility; the moral agent, including virtue,
motives and intentions and the inner life in general; and finally the nature of
human status itself, since we cannot discuss the norms of human conduct and
character unless we also know what we mean by human. These are fundamen-

tal features of any human society whatever and as such provide the foundation
of ethics.
a. Utility
Man, like the animals, has a number of intrinsically preferable states in which
he can be said to flourish: the human list would include long life, health and
pleasure, success, confidence, and the esteem of ones fellows, rather than
death, disease, pain, poverty, failure, despair, ridicule, and misery. These are
inescapable preferred states of human beings because of their biological, social,
and psychological nature, and they are certainly not arbitrary, conventional, or
subjective, since there are no rational grounds for choosing death, disease, ig-
norance or misery as ends in themselves.
It is possible, on religious grounds for example, to argue that tribulation is
better for the soul than material pleasure and worldly success, but this is an
argument about means, not ends. The means, tribulations, are conceded to be
undesirable and unpleasant in themselves, and only to be welcomed because
they are a means to ultimate salvation. Indeed, it is only because tribulation is
inherently unpleasant that it can perform its necessary religious function at all.
The fact then that people are willing on occasion to undergo unpopularity, suf-
fering and even death does not show that these states are equally preferable to
comfort and life, depending on how one feels, but that they are only part of a
larger whole and that this larger whole is life in society and, the religious be-
liever would add, life in relation to God.
It is important to note that the evaluation, for example, of disease as bad
and health as good cannot itself be evaluated other than by saying that this is
rational for sentient, intelligent beings. There can be no infinite regress by
which each evaluation must itself be justified by some further evaluation. But
the use of the terms good and bad in relation to these preferred states has gen-
erated enormous confusion among moral philosophers, notably the Utilitari-
ans, because they have falsely supposed that pleasure and pain are the only
things which can be intrinsically good or bad in a moral sense. (We noted ear-
lier that this is an inevitable consequence of treating individuals as the primary
reality.) Thus, it would be said, the Good Samaritan was good because he did
good to the wounded man lying by the wayside by looking after him and de-
creasing the amount of his pain. But this reasoning is confused. Physical states
of pleasure and pain, or of health and sickness are good or bad in a sense
which is different from the goodness of motives and intentions and again from
the goodness of certain types of action. As Cicero says (De Fin. IV.49), health,
strength, riches and fame are called good, but they are not praiseworthy. I may
say after a good breakfast that I feel better, but clearly this would not imply
that I had become more virtuous or done a good deed by eating my breakfast.
To buy someone else breakfast if he is hungry and too poor to afford one is a
good act, and may be done either from a good motive (to help someone in dis-
tress) or a selfish motive (to be praised for ones generosity or to impose an ob-
ligation upon him). It is only because all human beings share the same basic
goals of life, health, avoidance of pain, and so on that they have any secure ba-
sis for co-operation: if many people actually enjoyed being robbed and beaten
68 Moral Knowledge
and left naked and bleeding in a ditch we should not regard the Good Samari-
tan as good at all, but as an interfering busybody. It is because we can all
agree on the nature of good in the utilitarian sense that we can co-operate and
so perform acts that are also good in the deontological and aretaic senses.
Pleasure and pain therefore in the forms that we have considered are the goals
of all human beings, and are the basis of co-operation; they are good and
bad, but in a sense distinct from the deontological and aretaic good and
bad.
But the concept of utility has important limitations as an ethical principle,
particularly when it is used by the Utilitarians as a single criterion for calculat-
ing the rightness of every type of action. If we are considering two alternative
actions with regard to a specific type of good, then in some situations the utili-
tarian calculus may be appropriate. For example, if the government believes
(sensibly enough) that public drunkenness is harmful, then it is reasonable to
debate whether the imposition of licensing hours for public houses, or unlim-
ited hours for drinking, will produce less drunkenness, and so more utility.
The harm in both cases is the same, and we have at least some ways of measur-
ing it.
But once utility is treated as a single criterion for general computational
purposes in making moral decisions, it is open to a number of fatal objections.
First of all, if utility is restricted to pleasure it might just conceivably be meas-
ured, but what we should be measuring would be so impoverished as to have
little relation to any notion of flourishing or well-being. Indeed, in the an-
cient world moral teachers and philosophers went out of their way to deny that
the search for pleasure could lead to true happiness, which in their view re-
quired indifference to physical satisfactions, because bodily desires may inter-
fere with our peace of mind. The attempt to reduce all possible states of being
enjoying Bach, working at scientific pursuits, being a useful member of some
social group, religious experience, etc. to the same as that involved in eating a
beef sandwich is evidently ludicrous, while to say that all these states of being
share a nebulous common property, pleasure, renders the concept quite
vacuous as an explanation of what people actually do, and it is reduced to
nothing more than the trivial claim that any act is done because the agent
wanted to do it which is simply what we mean by a voluntary act. One may
attempt to salvage the doctrine by distinguishing between higher and lower
pleasures: J.S. Mill, for example, says that
Human beings have faculties more elevated [my emphasis] than the animal
appetites [and that] There is no known Epicurean theory of life which
does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feeling and imagina-
tion, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value [my emphasis] as
pleasures than to those of mere sensation It is quite compatible with the
principle of utility to recognize the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more
desirable and more valuable than others. (Mill 1954 [1859]: 7)
But Sidgwick, also a Utilitarian, rightly objected that such qualitative dis-
tinctions between pleasures render the concept of pleasure too ambiguous for
any precise and consistent use: the less pleasant consciousness must not be
preferred to the more pleasant, on the ground of any other qualities that it may

possess (Sidgwick 1893: 121), such as being more elevated or valuable, and
he therefore endorsed a purely quantitative measurement of pleasure. It is
therefore obvious that when Mill and others in the Utilitarian tradition try to
make qualitative distinctions between the values of different types of pleasure,
they require at least one additional criterion by which the pleasures themselves
are to be evaluated, and this criterion could not itself be that of pleasure. If we
consider that a life devoted exclusively to gluttony is inferior to one which also
includes the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and service to others, we are
at once introducing such considerations as the rational nature of man which is
distinct from our animal nature, and the social nature of man which transcends
the individualism on which Utilitarianism is based. Or if utility is said to con-
sist of the satisfaction of informed desires (Griffin 1986) we inevitably intro-
duce the consideration of virtue, because the temperate and wise person will
have more informed desires than someone without these qualities. The intro-
duction of these considerations, however, means that we are then being asked
to compute relative amounts of what are in fact incommensurables. Health,
education, material prosperity, craftsmanship, and a sense of purpose in life
are all goods, but of such different kinds that the idea of computing different
combinations of them with regard to some notional common denominator
called utility or benefit is illusory.
The inherent impossibility of finding some homogenous common denomi-
nator such as utility means that the calculation of consequences, which is cen-
tral for any type of utilitarian theory, is therefore impossible too. The emphasis,
in the first place, will inherently be on material consequences because these are
the most easily calculated; it is easy to do good to persons by giving them food
or taking them to the doctor, but much less obvious how we can make them
better as people, or give them peace of mind. This focus upon the material con-
sequences of acts is one of the reasons why virtue is of such small significance
in the Utilitarian tradition.
We also cannot actually know what the consequences of our acts are likely
to be in the detail that the Utilitarian calculus would require. For example,
Fletcher (1966: 115) argues that if we are in a burning building and we have the
choice of rescuing our father, or a doctor who has a cure that will benefit thou-
sands, it is our duty to save the doctor rather than our father. (He calls this type
of act Utilitarianism the agapaic calculus, in a strange attempt to show that
Christian agape is the same as utility.) The obvious retort is that, first, how do
we know that the doctors reputation is genuine and that he is not a charlatan,
or that he does not have a fatal heart condition that will kill him in a week, and
so on? As Hare (1981) has persuasively argued, this sort of utilitarian argument
assumes a wholly unrealistic level of knowledge on the part of the moral agent.
Equally important, it might well be argued that sons have a debt to their fa-
thers which outweighs, in such a life-and-death situation, any obligation to a
stranger.
In fact, the emphasis on the consequences (material or otherwise) of acts
really tells us very little about what we ought to do in real life situations, about
our social behaviour in general, which is largely a matter of my station and its
70 Moral Knowledge
duties, of doing what is appropriate for us in our particular social circum-
stances.
It is notorious that Utilitarian theories have great difficulties in explaining
the duties of specific obligations. For example, they have suggested that
what we ought to do on a given occasion is the action which will bring about
the greatest balance of good over evil in the circumstances. Now if this the-
ory is put forward as representing the ordinary mans reasons for calling
something right, just, or what he ought to do, it is patently false. (Nowell-
Smith 1954: 232)
Our daily lives are taken up with performing duties that are inescapable
parts of our jobs, or our roles as father or neighbour, not actions which we
choose specifically because of their actual pleasure-to-pain ratio. The same is
true in scientific or creative work, where what we do is decided by its per-
ceived relevance and significance within our own field of endeavour. Indeed,
once we start thinking of good actions as those which are fitting or appropriate,
or in an organic fashion, as contributing to the functioning of some kind of lar-
ger whole, the very notion of treating rightness as something that could be
calculated from a kind of pointer reading on a utility-scale, like the boiler pres-
sure of some Victorian steam engine, seems completely misplaced and incon-
gruous. In deciding on a course of action, then, it is the significance of a task in
relation to ones station in life, ones circumstances and ones capabilities,
which are determinative, while whatever pleasure may be obtained is therefore
the result of this significance.
An orderly social life requires rules, but if we attempted to act only on the
basis of the probabilities that our acts would increase the sum of human hap-
piness, no orderly social life would be possible because consequences are in-
herently less calculable than rules, and it would be virtually impossible to pre-
dict each others actions if we were all trying to calculate the consequences of
our acts in this way. (A rule Utilitarianism, as distinct from an act Utilitari-
anism goes some way to meeting this objection, but only at the expense of in-
troducing the concept of social order as a distinct criterion of action.)
Finally, Utilitarianism is also quite clearly unrelated to justice:
If our only obligation be to produce happiness, then we can have no obliga-
tion to do justice also, except as a means to greater quantities of happiness.
(Carritt 1930: 38) To say, then, that our duty is to give as much pleasure as
possible is a definition both too wide and too narrow. We do not think we
ought to give every kind of pleasure to everybody and we think we ought to
give some people some things other than their greatest pleasure. And we
think our distributions of satisfactions should be just. (Ibid., 4041)
If the Utilitarian replies that justice is part of the general good that we
should be trying to calculate, one would point out that this only introduces the
problem of incommensurability again. Benthams justice maxim that everyone
is to count for one, and none for more than one is logically quite extraneous to
the pure theory of Utilitarianism. No doubt it makes the mathematics of pleas-
ure/pain calculations easier, and it links Utilitarianism with the liberal version
of human equality, but even on empirical grounds there is no reason to accept
it. Some people are obviously more refined and sensitive than others, so that

the intense pleasure of a single exquisite aesthete may far outweigh the dim
sufferings of a dozen half-witted peasants. If there could be such an aristocratic
Utilitarianism, there has certainly been a totalitarian one, since the Communist
justification for liquidating millions has been that their sufferings will be more
than compensated by the pleasures of even more millions in the future. Utili-
tarianism therefore has no necessary connection with liberal individualism,
though in combination with it Utilitarianism has reinforced the whole market
ideology of society.
The philosophical puzzles generated by Utilitarianism are the result of tak-
ing a valid general principle of ethics and attempting to make it the only prin-
ciple of moral reasoning. As soon as we realise this, and treat the criterion of
utility as a principle to which we may properly appeal in certain situations,
there is no reason to deny it an important place in our decision-making. In
Platos dilemma about returning the borrowed sword to the madman utilitar-
ian considerations play an important part in telling us that the preservation of
life is more important than rules about property in this case. We may consider
it a moral duty to buy our children Christmas presents, but the performance of
that duty involves buying presents that give pleasure and not pain.
One of the most important criteria of a good government, maintaining the
prosperity of its people, is utilitarian, and this includes the duty of promoting
public health at least in the circumstances of modern society where the neces-
sary technology and administrative organization are available. Yet however
great the general benefit might be from medical experiments conducted on
human subjects, it would be considered unjust for these benefits to be obtained
by seizing people on the streets and handing them over to the vivisectionists.
This would not only be a violation of justice, but a more profound violation of
that order which must be sustained in a society, and it is to order that we must
now return.
b. The social order and moral action
(i) Order
To survive we rely on the orderliness of the physical world, and if we could
not predict seed time and harvest, summer and winter, and all the manifold
regularities of nature any attempt to pursue the good life for man would be
hopeless. In addition to the problems of physical survival which man shares
with animals, we also require a social life. Man is not of course alone in having
a social mode of life, which is found among a variety of insects and animals,
but because he has the faculties of speech and thought his society cannot rely
on the purely instinctive regulation of behaviour by which non-human species
maintain a social existence, and needs conscious regulation by convention.
Human beings must therefore create their own social order, analogous to
that which they find in nature, and can only co-operate on the basis of rules or
conventions: for sharing and reciprocity, for the allocation of resources, and for
defining notions of property and theft, for controlling competition and retalia-
tion, establishing how to greet one another, how to behave to ones seniors and
72 Moral Knowledge
juniors, and how to treat different categories of kin and neighbours. Rules thus
relate not only to behaviour but also to social categories, to roles, such as par-
ent, child, debtor and creditor, noble and commoner, judge and policeman, and
so on. Rules impose duties, and in order to count as rules at all they must be
supported by punishments or by sanctions of some kind, but the most funda-
mental aspect of rules is that they provide regularities of social life, since with-
out regularity there is no predictability, and we cannot know what to expect
from others and hence how to achieve our own purposes or to co-operate with
others and even to compete with them. Rules and roles and social categories
are thus the basis of order, a notion which has almost vanished from contempo-
rary moral philosophy. Modern notions of social order are reduced to law
enforcement and to bureaucratic institutions for regulating economic transac-
tions, or performing other utilitarian functions for the benefit of the individual
members of the society. This is a thoroughly inadequate basis for understand-
ing the central moral ideas of human societies around the world, for whom
order in the anthropological sense is fundamental.
It is our awareness of order which provides us with the sense of what is ap-
propriate, or proper, or fitting or right to be done in many circumstances that
extend far beyond the domain of the ethical to the whole of social existence. A
house without a roof and which is intended for occupation ought to have one;
an English sentence ought to contain a verb; a particular ceremony ought to be
conducted in a certain manner and so on. Parents are mourning beside the
grave of a child and the father says For a child to bury the parents, thats right,
thats natural, but for the parents to bury the child, thats wrong, and to each
of the seven ages of man there are dispositions and forms of conduct that are
appropriate for one age but not for another. There are places for joking and
places for solemnity, persons between whom sexual relations are appropriate,
and those between whom they are inappropriate, places for formality and re-
serve, and places for relaxed informality, occasions for competition and occa-
sions when there should be co-operation. Order also implies truth, constancy,
reliability, and trustworthiness, and is necessarily opposed to the lie which de-
stroys trust, and to falsehood in general which creates confusion. It is these re-
quirements of order, not the logic of moral language, which therefore provide
the basic ethical concepts, and for this reason the moral ideas of cultural tradi-
tions that, like the Bible, do not use words like ought, must, right, wrong,
duty, or virtue are still comprehensible to us. The universal images of order
are those of the straight, the upright, the true and the clear, the level and the
even. Right as in the heraldic motto maintenez le droit, did not refer to the abil-
ity to reach the correct solution to moral dilemmas, but to sustaining the
proper order of society, and wrong for our ancestors was to wrong, to injure
wantonly, to destroy that order.
There are two very important aspects of order that we must now examine,
and these are duty and justice.
(ii) Duty
Any social order whatever is based on roles, of kinship, occupation, ownership,
and so on that are to a large extent defined in terms of the behaviour proper to

each role my station and its duties. A variety of social relations also create
temporary roles and duties debts, promises, contracts, and other agreements,
for example. In this sense the idea of duty is straightforward enough, and
whether or not there is an explicit word for duty and in many languages
there is not the implicit notion of an obligation is universal.
Our own word duty derives from the Anglo-French duet, meaning action
or conduct due to a superior, homage, submission, due respect, reverence, and
its original sense survives in the modern expression excise duty. The more
general term for duty in the Middle Ages was dever, from devoir, work or
function (c.f. Latin officium, function, duty) and don dever in Middle English
meant (a) to do ones duty as a Christian, priest, lord, knight, tenant, or official,
and (b) to do ones best, all that one can (OED). Obligation is a late borrowing
from the Latin obligare, to bind or tie around, especially by an oath or promise
between two parties, and its more general meaning of moral obligation seems
to have first occurred in the eighteenth century (OED). Our modal auxiliaries
ought, should, and shalt also derive from very specific connotations:
ought is from ahte, past tense of azan, to owe, and should is from sceolde,
past tense of sculan, to owe, from which verb shalt likewise derives (OED).
Thus here, too, the language of duty was concerned with highly specific obliga-
tions between people in relation to their roles and contractual agreements.
There are indeed prima facie duties, such as to return the things we have
borrowed, to tell the truth, to keep promises, and so on but, as we noted ear-
lier, these may often conflict. It is easy, for example, to think of situations
where we have no duty of truth or fidelity to certain people burglars who ask
us where we keep the silver, for example, or foreign oppressors who ask us if
we know who are the members of the local resistance. Such men as these have
no claim to be told the truth in the first place because it is they who are disrupt-
ing the social order, and in this sort of situation we must therefore go beyond
the prima facie rules of duty to more general moral principles.
Since, especially with increasing social complexity, there can be conflicts be-
tween our duties in this sense, these can only be resolved by appealing to more
general criteria, such as justice, or equity, or utility, or benevolence, and the
increased abstraction of the concept of duty in the history of our own language
expresses this development of moral understanding. So, too, does a conception
of the ethical or moral, as a more general class of obligation distinct, for exam-
ple, from legal obligation. To this extent a philosophical idea of duty as moral
obligation is perfectly proper, and a necessary conceptual tool in a complex
society. But once we appeal to general principles, there is as I have said the in-
tellectual temptation to suppose that there must be one such principle that will
give us the right answer to all moral dilemmas, e.g. Always act so as to achieve
the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the Categorical Imperative,
Act as if the maxim of thy actions were to become by thy will a universal law
of Nature (Kant 1946: 46). This inevitably leads to what Geach calls the false
moral philosophy which teaches that anyone who does not do the unique act
which is optimific in his circumstances is acting wrongly (Geach 1977: 23). The
whole field of morality is then subsumed under duty, which requires us to
calculate our correct moral obligation in every situation in life. In the ancient
74 Moral Knowledge
world, in so far as we can talk about a generalized notion of duty, it had the
sense of what is proper, appropriate, or fitting in the circumstances (an organic
notion).
There are however many situations in which more than one morally
praiseworthy action is possible, and there is no certain means of deciding
which is the best. A good example occurs in the Bible, when David and his
army are besieging the Philistines at Bethlehem (I Chron.11). (The historical
accuracy of this passage need not concern us, and I am not attempting any kind
of scriptural exegesis.) There is a well outside the gate, and David exclaims
how much he would like a drink of its water. Three of his officers overhear
him, and at great risk and probably after sustaining some wounds, they bring
him some of the water. Instead of drinking it, David pours it out to the Lord,
saying Shall I drink the blood of these men that have put their lives in jeop-
ardy? The Utilitarian would no doubt deplore the waste of water and the di-
minished sum of pleasure that resulted: three men had been wounded, and
their commander was as thirsty as ever. The advocate of justice might com-
plain that he should have shared the water with his officers, while the com-
mon-sense critic would probably say that David should have thanked them
very much and then drunk the water, but none of these criticisms seems to
carry much conviction. Some other possible responses would have been obvi-
ously wrong: if he had tossed the water on the ground, saying that he was no
longer thirsty, or grumbled that there was not enough and sent them back for a
refill, for example. But there is no objective test to decide if the right answer to
this moral dilemma was to thank the men and drink it, or to share it with them,
or to do what David did. Pouring out the water to the Lord was no doubt a
gesture that was only possible in that type of culture, and would have been
thought wildly eccentric if done by General Montgomery while commanding
the Eighth Army, but despite the cultural difference Davids action has a moral
grandeur about it of personal humility and gratitude that simply thanking the
men, or sharing it with them, would perhaps have lacked. But there are no
rules for deciding how to act with moral grandeur. This example illustrates
very well the limitations of the puzzle-solving approach to moral decisions, or
in judging the actions of others.
To treat all correct moral actions as a matter of duty also obscures one of the
most important aspects of duty as this is normally understood, which is that it
is expected of us as a matter of course. It is precisely because we can keep
promises, and tell the truth, or care for our children, or refrain from stealing, or
avoid reckless driving that these are our duties. In this sense ought implies
can. How then can we include in the category of duty those supererogatory
acts which are praiseworthy but which are not required of us? There is clearly
an important analytical difference between moral standards, which are the basis
of our duties, and moral ideals, which go beyond duty. Kant is obliged to dis-
tinguish between a perfect or narrow duty, whose non-performance is wrong,
and an imperfect or wide duty whose performance is meritorious, but whose
omission is not an offence (Ladd 1965: xiv). Or as Dr Johnson put it:
Sir, you must consider that we have perfect and imperfect obligations. Per-
fect obligations, which are generally not to do something, are clear and posi-

tive; as, Thou shalt not kill. But charity, for instance, is not definable by lim-
its. It is a duty to give to the poor; but no man can say how much another
should give to the poor, or when a man has given too little to save his soul.
(7 May 1773)
It seems very likely that this extension of duty to cover supererogatory acts
has not only been influenced by the rationalistic predilection for single princi-
ples, but by the legalistic Judaeo-Christian tradition. Here God stands in a
quasi-social relation to Man as superior to inferior, and issues commands to
him which he has a duty to obey. So Article XIV of the XXXIX Articles of the
Church of England denounces the very idea of supererogatory acts as arrogant
and impious because it suggests the possibility of doing more for God than His
commandments require. In both Old and New Testaments we are commanded
to love our neighbours as ourselves, and even though love in this sense does
not mean to like, but to have good will towards,
1
it is still impossible for ordi-
nary people to perform this religious duty entirely satisfactorily. Religious du-
ties of this type may therefore include the supererogatory and so not be per-
fectly fulfillable, but they must be carefully distinguished from the ethical no-
tion of duty as such, which cannot take the existence of God as a proven fact.
The distinction between standards and ideals, between the performance of
ones duty and supererogatory acts has long been recognized as one between
the right and the good, and the good is typically expressed in acts of benevo-
lence and generosity, and in forgiveness, mercy, and forbearance, not bearing a
grudge, not pushing ones legal rights to the limit. But as Dr Johnson says, it is
obviously impossible to lay down hard and fast rules about being good in this
sense, and to incorporate it in some general category of duty which is not of a
religious type.
Just as it confuses the notion of duty when we try to extend it to supere-
rogatory acts, the idea of a duty to oneself also produces unnecessary puzzles
and ambiguities. In what sense can we really be said to have a duty to be edu-
cated or a duty to be healthy? Duty essentially concerns the well-being of oth-
ers, as distinct from that of the agent, because we have an inherent tendency to
favour our own interests, which is why duty is essentially concerned with the
interests of others, and we can therefore only have duties to ourself as part of
our duties to others. A virtuous man, who has improved his character by culti-
vating wisdom, and self-control, and courage, will be better able to discover
what his duty is, and to perform it, than someone who has a morally underde-
veloped character, but we needlessly obscure the notion of duty by trying to
include in it the qualities of the agent as well as his acts.
The real function of words like duty, obligation, and ought in moral dis-
course is not therefore to refer to some uniquely right action which we are

1
It is important to remember that the New Testament word for to love, agapao, has
neither the warmth of phileo nor the intensity of erao, and refers to the will rather than
to emotion (Cranfield 1951), and C.H. Dodd says of agape that it is not primarily an
emotion of affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That it is why it
can be commanded, as feelings cannot (Dodd 1951: 42 cited in Fletcher 1966: 1045)
76 Moral Knowledge
bound to perform, but to be used by an agent who is choosing between a num-
ber of possible actions, some of which will seem obviously better than others in
accordance with such principles as justice, utility, benevolence, and so on. The
broadening of the connotations of duty and obligation from the very specific
implications of their original forms, which involved particular contractual and
role relationships with others, to their very general connotations in modern
thought, reflects the growing importance of general principles in taking moral
decisions. A broad concept of duty or moral obligation is therefore necessary
for advanced ethical reflection, but its existence should not lead us to believe
that there must always be some uniquely right action which it is our duty to
perform:
What can never be done is to reduce what has to be learned in order to excel
at such a type of activity to the application of rules. There will of course at
any particular stage in the historical development of such a form of activity
be a stock of maxims which are used to characterize what is taken at that
stage to be the best practice so far. But knowing how to apply these maxims
is itself a capacity which cannot be specified by further rules, and the great-
est achievements in each area at each stage always exhibit a freedom to vio-
late the previous established maxims, so that achievement proceeds both by
rule-keeping and by rule-breaking. (MacIntyre 1988: 31)
Finnis (1983) points out that to decide what we should do in specific cir-
cumstances it is not enough to invoke a basic list of human goods; what is also
necessary is some set of intermediate principles or moral maxims, and these
can only be reached by the application of practical reasonableness to the reali-
ties of life. Thus the qualities of being an intelligent moral agent are an essential
component in discovering what we ought to do, which is another way of say-
ing that knowing ones duty is a consequence of being a virtuous moral agent,
of having the necessary excellences of character.
(iii) Justice
The second aspect of order is justice. While it clearly overlaps with duty, so
that to be fair and impartial is not only to act justly, but is also our duty, there
is what we may call a transactional quality about justice which is not neces-
sarily present when we consider the performance of our duties. So a father who
was cruel to all his children would be thought to fail in his duty towards them,
but not to be unjust. Justice is peculiarly concerned with the way in which roles
are performed, or rules are obeyed and with conflict in general, so that we do
not unreasonably favour ourselves at the expense of others and bend the rules
to our own advantage. Reciprocity, agreements, promises, and the settlement
of disputes are the special province of justice, and images of the equal and the
even, the balanced and the law-abiding are closely linked with it. It is therefore
an essential part of order, but analytically can be distinguished from duty as
role-performance, which is a rather different aspect of order.
Once it is granted that mutual assistance is basic to social life and that no
individual can be self-sufficient (and even the liberal theory of the social con-
tract concedes this) then the assertion of selfishness or injustice as a right can
easily be refuted. The individual who asserts the right to do as he pleases must

either deny such a right to others, who may reasonably inquire why this indi-
vidual thinks he is justified in claiming immunity from the rules of society for
himself alone; or, he must also grant such a right to everyone else. But if I have
the right to snatch my neighbours food, and he has the right either to pre-
vent me or to snatch mine, the whole notion of right loses its meaning, which
is that its exercise should not be opposed by others, and in some cases that they
should actively assist in its performance. A distinction may be made between
acts and omissions, so that while I must not snatch my neighbours food I may
leave him to starve to death, and generally fail to assist him. But this would
imply that I would have had no moral grounds for complaint if, for example,
my parents had decided for selfish reasons to allow me to starve to death and
that this could be made a general moral rule. This in turn would contradict the
necessity of mutual assistance for human life and a society in which the claims
of unrestricted individualism were really taken seriously would cease to be a
society at all. An individual who nevertheless asserts his own interests at the
expense of others has therefore no right to do so, whereas they have every right
to prevent him.
While actual words that can be translated as justice only develop in com-
plex societies, we find universally the belief that reciprocity, of good for good,
and evil for evil, is thought to be somehow fundamentally right. Justice is
closely associated with legality, and so with the development of institutions of
mediation and punishment, and of centralized government in general. The
concept of justice, according to which every one has an equal obligation to
obey societys rules and perform whatever duties they require is therefore in-
trinsic to the very nature of rules in the context of cooperative human social life
itself.
Justice has a number of different aspects. Reciprocity, the rule that good
should be rewarded with good and, many societies have maintained, that bad
should be requited with bad so that we have a duty to harm our enemies as
well as to help our friends, is one basic type of justice, reciprocal justice, be-
cause vengeance is intended to restore a balance. But reciprocity does not cover
distributive justice, which requires that we are fair, as Aristotle says, in distrib-
uting things between ourselves and others, or between others, and distributive
justice often includes an obligation of those who have much to give to those
who have little. Again, there is retributive justice embodying the concept of
desert, which requires that the good be rewarded and the wicked punished,
that the punishment should fit the crime, and that only the guilty should be
punished.
The basis of retributive punishment is that rules are integral to order, and
without punishment of some kind there can be no rules. If breaking a rule in-
volved no penalties, however informal they might be, how could that rule be
said to exist at all? The Utilitarians were oblivious to this fundamental connec-
tion between punishment and order, and could only interpret punishment as
pain: All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil, as Bentham
puts it. But,
the idea of punishment rests on more than merely utilitarian considera-
tions. The primary motivation is furnished by profound moral needs. Hu-
78 Moral Knowledge
man action is feasible only provided the world makes sense, and it does
make sense that injustice should reap no rewards. The good man is requited,
and the wicked is punished (if not himself, then his children who perpetuate
himself; and if not in this world, then in Hades, as Sisyphus and Tantalus
found out to their sorrow). Deeply rooted in the hearts of men, therefore,
we find the hope that good and evil are given their due reward. And if, as
it sometimes happens, this ideal is not realized in this world, men are sorely
troubled, and again and again they turn to ponder the meaning, or the lack
of meaning of a cosmos in which the good is not always, at least in the long
run profitable too. (Snell 1960: 161)
Punishment also involves understanding subjective responsibility, the pres-
ence or absence of the intention to do harm, and also some assessment of the
degree of negligence that may be involved. Thus the state of mind of the of-
fender is relevant as well as his acts when considering his responsibility be-
cause the moral significance of acts follows from the agents understanding of
the situation in which they are performed in addition to what he actually does.
In societies with formal judicial institutions there is procedural justice
which requires that a man should not be a judge in his own cause, that every-
one should have the chance of defending themselves against accusations, and
that judgements should be impartial or, in another version of the same idea,
that all should be equal before the law. There is also rectificatory or restorative
justice, as when unjust gains are removed from those who have wrongly ob-
tained them. All these aspects of justice express the ideas of equality, balance,
proportion, and impartiality in administering rules, but they are differentiated
because they relate to such specific social institutions as gifts, commercial
transactions, judicial institutions, punishment, and the settlement of disputes,
and so go beyond the basic ideas of equality and lawfulness, and will have dif-
ferent manifestations in different types of society.
But there is no more reason to regard justice as the supreme principle of
ethics than there is to base ethics on the concept of duty or utility. Rawls, for
example, makes the extreme claim that
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of
thought. A theory however elegant and convincing must be rejected or re-
vised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions must be reformed or abol-
ished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on
justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. (Rawls
1971: 3)
This view of justice is the necessary consequence of liberal individualism, in
which equality and liberty can only be reconciled by a social contract in which
justice must logically have a position of supreme importance. But as we have
seen, this is a thoroughly unsound basis for an ethical theory, and in any case
justice, like duty and utility, is too abstract to stand alone as the sole guide of
action. As de Jouvenel points out (1957: 141), we cannot actually apply the
maxim render to every man his due until we first know what his due is, and
the concept of justice by itself cannot tell us this because what is due to us de-
pends on the customs and institutions of our society, and these provide the
criteria of relevance.

This notion of relevance is fundamental to all problems of justice If, for
instance, it is a case of leaving my goods at death and I take as my standard
for their share-out the serial order of degrees of relationship with myself,
this standard of reference will be thought relevant; but if, as head of gov-
ernment, I take the serial order of degrees of relationship as my standard for
nominating to high office, my choice would be thought scandalous, because
the standard of relevance is inappropriate for the purpose. (de Jouvenel
1957: 153)
It is easy to show that there are many cases where a number of different and
contradictory standards may all be claimed to be relevant. Should people be
paid in accordance with the value of what they actually produce, or will this
cause envy and dissention? Should they be paid in accordance with their
needs, or at the rate which is necessary to attract workers to that particular job
in the current labour market? Or, should pay express differences of rank in an
organizational hierarchy?
No proposition is likelier to scandalize our contemporaries than this one: it
is impossible to establish a just social order. Yet it flows logically from the
very idea of justice To do justice is to apply, when making a share out, the
relevant serial order. But it is impossible for the human intelligence to estab-
lish a relevant serial order for all resources and in all respects. Men have
needs to satisfy, merits to reward, possibilities to actualize; even if we con-
sider these three aspects only and assume that what is not the case there
are precise indicia which we can apply to these aspects, we still cannot
weight correctly among themselves the three sets of indicia adopted. The at-
tempt comes up against a basic impossibility. (Ibid., 64)
The relation between benevolence and justice is complex. Benevolence
clearly helps us to act justly because it motivates us to put ourselves in the
place of others and to behave towards them as we would have them behave
towards us. Indeed, benevolence in some ways renders justice superfluous; as
Aristotle said, When men are friends they have no need of justice (1115a25)
and Sandel provides an illuminating example of how an increase in justice at
the expense of friendship within a group would not be a moral improvement:
Consider for example a more or less ideal family situation, where relations
are governed in large part by spontaneous affection and where, in conse-
quence, the circumstances of justice prevail to a relatively small degree. In-
dividual rights and fair decision procedures are seldom invoked, not be-
cause injustice is rampant but because their appeal is pre-empted by a spirit
of generosity in which I am rarely inclined to claim my fair share Now
imagine that one day the harmonious family comes to be wrought with dis-
sension. Interests grow divergent and the circumstances of justice grow
more acute. The affection and spontaneity of previous days give way to de-
mands for fairness and the observance of rights. And let us further imagine
that the old generosity is replaced by a judicious temper of unexceptionable
integrity and that the new moral necessities are met with a full measure of
justice, so that no injustice prevails. Parents and children reflectively equili-
brate, dutifully if sullenly abide by the two principles of justice, and even
manage to achieve the conditions of stability and congruence so that the
good of justice is realized within their household. Now what are we to make
80 Moral Knowledge
of this? Are we prepared to say that the arrival of justice, however full, re-
stores to the situation its full moral character, and that the only difference is
a psychological one? (Sandel 1982: 33)
But hostilities are inevitably generated in all societies and there is nothing in
the principle of justice by itself that forbids vengeance on those who have
wronged us, since it is possible to take revenge by legal means and not produce
social disorder. In the Republic, for example, Polemarchus gives as an obvious
example of justice: doing good to ones friends and harm to ones enemies
(332). It is clear that benevolence and justice are not the same (as Fletcher 1966:
87102 tries to maintain), as we can see not only from the evident justice of
harming ones enemies but from the very pursuit of justice for oneself. A group
of workers who go on strike to enforce a claim against their employer may be
acting justly, but they are certainly not acting benevolently. It should be noted
that the Christian emphasis on benevolence not only by forbidding vengeance
but by commending generosity to the undeserving and the unthankful actually
supplants the claims of justice and, indeed, the whole ethic of forgiveness and
mercy clearly tempers the rigorous application of justice.
(iv) Law and morality
Justice is integrally related to law, and we are now in the position to examine
one of the fundamental distinctions in ethics, which is that between morality
and law. In one way this distinction makes no sense because law itself is an
integral part of moral life, so that to say of someone that he is law-abiding is an
important moral commendation. One is therefore introducing a distinction of
levels within morality, a distinction which is closely akin to that between prima
facie rules always keep promises, always return the things you have bor-
rowed and general moral principles such as those of justice and benevolence.
Law and morality, therefore share a number of very important concepts, such
as duty, right, obligation, responsibility, and justice, a virtue especially appro-
priate to law and the most legal of the virtues (Hart 1961: 7).
Moral and legal rules of obligation and duty have therefore certain striking
similarities enough to show that their common vocabulary is no accident.
These may be summarized as follows. There are alike in that they are con-
ceived as binding independently of the consent of the individual bound and
are supported by serious social pressure for conformity; compliance with
both legal and moral obligation is regarded not as a matter for praise but as
a minimum contribution to social life to be taken as a matter of course. Fur-
ther, both law and morals include rules governing the behaviour of indi-
viduals in situations constantly recurring throughout life rather than special
activities or occasions, and though both may include much that is peculiar to
the real or fancied needs of a particular society, both make demands which
must obviously be satisfied by any group of human beings who are to suc-
ceed in living together. (Ibid., 168)
We are also accustomed, however, to thinking of law and morality as differ-
ent in certain crucial respects, notably in the relevance of intention to legal and
moral judgements when assessing responsibility for wrong-doing. The [civil]
law in general asks merely what the defendant has done, not why he did it. A

good motive is no justification for an act otherwise illegal, and a bad motive
does not make wrongful an act otherwise legal (Houston 1965: 26). The object
of a civil inquiry into cause and consequence is to fix liability on some respon-
sible person and to give reparation for damage done, not to inflict punishment
for duty disregarded (ibid., 32).
While intention is highly relevant in our criminal law, whose aim is to pun-
ish rather than to award compensation for injury, even here the act retains a
significance independently of intention or motive which it does not possess in
ethics. So attempted murder in most jurisdictions is punished less severely
than murder, though these types of act are indistinguishable from the moral
point of view. Or, a person who drives his car under the influence of alcohol
will be fined for a first offence if caught by the police, but if he causes death by
impaired reflexes while intoxicated he will probably receive a substantial
prison sentence although there is no more culpable intention in the second case
than in the first.
Nevertheless, Hart points out the absurdity of supposing that morals do
not require any specific actions but only a good will or proper intention or mo-
tive (Hart 1961: 169). A breach of moral rules can be excused if this is done
unintentionally and without negligence, or from good intentions, but this is
only an excuse and not a justification:
If good intentions were a justification for doing what moral rules forbid,
there would be nothing to deplore in the action of a man who had acciden-
tally and in spite of every care killed another. We should look upon it as we
now look upon a mans killing another, when this is required as a necessary
measure of self-defence. The latter is justified because killing in such circum-
stances is a kind of conduct which the system is not concerned to prevent
and may even encourage, though it is of course an exception to a general
prohibition of killing. When someone is excused because he offended unin-
tentionally, the underlying moral conception is not that this is action of a
kind which it is the policy of the law to permit or even welcome; it is that
when we investigate the mental condition of the particular offender, we find
that he lacked the moral capacity to conform to the laws requirement.
Hence this aspect of the internality of morals does not mean that morals is
not a form of control of outward conduct; but only that it is a necessary con-
dition for moral responsibility that the individual must have a certain type
of control over his conduct. Even in morals there is the difference between
He did not do the wrong thing and He could not help doing what he did.
(Ibid., 745)
Hart provides a number of other criteria for distinguishing morality from
law. A law may continue to be in force long after it has been generally agreed
that it should be repealed, yet this could never be the case with a moral princi-
ple. Even unwritten laws, or customs, can survive as customs when generally
laughed at, but this could not be so with moral principles. Nor, unlike laws,
can moral rules be deliberately changed, because they are thought of as bind-
ing in themselves, unlike laws which are deliberately enacted. But since the
same is true of traditions which also are immune from deliberate change, this
distinction would have little force for those societies which have no enacted
code of law.
82 Moral Knowledge
Again, laws can be enforced only by the sanction of punishment and other
unpleasant consequences, whereas in the case of morals,
the typical form of pressure consists in appeals to respect for the rules, as
things important in themselves, which is presumed to be shared by those
addressed. So moral pressure is characteristically, though not exclusively,
exerted not by threats or appeals to fear or interest, but by reminders of the
moral character of the action contemplated and of the demands of morality,
That would be a lie, that would be to break your promise. (Ibid., 1756)
The true sanctions of morality are therefore those of conscience and of knowl-
edge of right and wrong, rather than of public opinion or the power of society
to punish.
Again law is concerned with the minimum and not with the maximum;
there is much in the Sermon on the Mount that would be out of place in the
Ten Commandments. We all recognise the gap between the moral law and the
law of the land The criminal law is not a statement of how people ought to
behave; it is a statement of what will happen to them if they do not behave
(Devlin 1959: 2021). As Hart says, we can therefore have moral ideals and
failure to reach them is not a matter for censure, but there is no place for legal
ideals; one simply conforms or fails to conform, but there is no place for the
supererogatory in performing ones legal duty. Furthermore, unlike the law
which is in itself a social institution, the existence of general moral criteria al-
lows us to assess and to criticize the laws of our own society as cruel, unjust,
irrational, outdated, or lacking in humanity. Finally, morality provides the field
for the pursuit of private virtues, ideals which he need not either share with
others or regard as a source of criticism in others, still less of society as a whole
(Hart 1961: 179).
The differences between law and morality can therefore be summed up as:
1) In allocating responsibility, morality is concerned as much with intentions
and motives as with acts in themselves, whereas law is concerned with the in-
ner states of the agent only in so far as they illuminate the nature of the act, and
will only consider these in so far as they are actually expressed in action; 2)
Morality therefore is concerned with virtue, with the inner life of the agent, not
with acts alone; 3) Moral principles are self-subsistent guides to conduct which
do not require institutional enactment to be valid, nor can they be changed or
abolished in the manner of laws; 4) Moral principles can be the basis for the
criticism of social laws, because they are more fundamental principles of con-
duct than the law. 5) The moral is concerned not only with the requirements of
duty and justice, but with supererogatory acts going beyond the requirements
of the law, with ideals as well as with norms.
c. Virtue and the moral agent
If one believes that ethics can be based on some single principle, then deciding
what one ought to do, right conduct, becomes almost necessarily about the
formulation of rules derived from this principle, and virtue is then defined in
terms of a disposition to behave in accordance with these rules. So for the Utili-
tarian Sidgwick the virtues are qualities exhibited in right conduct (Sidgwick

1893: 219). The subordination of virtues to the rules that our reason gives us
about our duty is also very clear in Kant:
Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can
be called good without qualification, except a Good Will. Intelligence, wit,
judgement, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named,
or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament are un-
doubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature
may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to
make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character,
is not good. (Kant 1946: 10)
It will be noted that Kant treats everything in the way of what he calls tal-
ents or temperament as gifts of nature, that is, under the domain of causal-
ity, and only the rational will as free.
He thought that the moral agent was, in a sense, a rational agent and no
more, and he presented as essential to his account of morality a particular
metaphysical conception of the agent, according to which the self of moral
agency is what he called a noumenal self, outside time and causality, and
thus distinct from the concrete, empirically defined person that one usually
takes oneself to be Only in acting from moral principles could we escape
from being causally determined by the drive for pleasure, like animals. (Wil-
liams 1985: 64)
Kant therefore said When applied to man [moral philosophy] does not bor-
row the least thing from the knowledge of man himself (anthropology) but
gives law a priori to him as a rational being (Kant 1946: 45), and so the Kant-
ian individual becomes a strangely diminished human being, because the vir-
tues have ceased to be the defining qualities of the agent.
This very impoverished notion of the self also appears in Rawls, and is im-
plicit in any theory based on equality, rights, and justice. We remember that in
Rawls those who are to devise the rules of a just society are supposed not only
to be ignorant of their contingent social attributes of class, wealth, and so on,
but also of their natural attributes of intelligence and other personal qualities.
The original theory of natural rights regarded the unequal social advantages of
the feudal order as privileges that were contrary to equality and natural justice
but, as Rawls indicates, there is no reason in principle why the unequal distri-
bution of personal abilities should not also be regarded as privileges too, and
therefore just as contingent to the true self as purely social advantages are.
(This is a very familiar attitude among modern educationalists.) So Simmonds
points out the consequence that
a liberal theory, operating in terms of rights, equality, and autonomy, ap-
pears to dissolve the person into nothingness. The concrete individual is bro-
ken up into a range of attributes that are possessed by, but are not identical
with, the persona Thus the notion of the person becomes a structural re-
quirement of the concept of justice, but at the same time diminishes to a
mathematical point without substantial existence. (Simmonds 1985: 14748)
All that would be left, therefore, would be the notion of the self as will, but
If all the self consisted in were a concatenation of various contingent desires,
wants, and ends, there would be no non-arbitrary way, either for the self or for
84 Moral Knowledge
some outside observer, to identify these desires, interests, and ends, as the de-
sires of any particular subject (Sandel 1982: 20), which is to say, it would be no
subject at all, at least no subject we could recognize or pick out as resembling a
human person (ibid., 20).
Paradoxically, therefore, the liberal theory of individualism not only im-
poverishes our conception of society but ultimately that of the individual as
well, by reducing the person to pure will, even though exercised rationally in
accordance with the precepts of justice, in which personal excellence becomes
as contingent as the social class one is born into. While socialism is in some re-
spects the antithesis of liberalism it, too, gives a central place to justice and
equality, with similar consequences for its view of personal excellence:
Modern socialism is Kantian in this respect [only the Good Will is morally
significant]. Excellence is naturally, socially, and culturally determined, it is
not something deserved, not a merit, not a result of will, of intention, of
moral conversion; its distribution among men is unfair. After 40odd years
of Bolshevism, there is a set of words you cannot use in Eastern Europe:
words like charming, witty, elegant, stylish, beautiful, fair, just, or silly, bor-
ing, incomprehensible, shocking, common, vulgar, boorish. Speaking of ex-
cellence is speaking of differences, which is indelicate (another forbidden
word). The only criterion is the Good Will. Choosing according to merit is
choosing something attainable by everyone: it is a choice between principles,
not men. Recognizing the talents of the mind, intelligence, wit, judgement,
ability that is, excellence, the Homeric, Aristotelian and Renaissance mean-
ing of virtue is choosing among people. (Tamas 1989: 17)
Thus, in both the liberal and socialist traditions,
Rules become the primary concept of the moral life. Qualities of character
then generally come to be prized only because they will lead us to follow the
right set of rules. The virtues are sentiments, that is, related families of dis-
positions and propensities regulated by a higher order desire, in this case a
desire to act from the corresponding moral principles, asserts John Rawls,
one of the latest moral philosophers of modernity (1971: 192) and elsewhere
he defines the fundamental moral virtues as strong and normally effective
desires to act on the basic principles of right. (MacIntyre 1984: 119)
The result is that peculiarly modern figure, the person of advanced social con-
science dedicated to the reconstruction of society and the advocacy of human
rights, who may be a humourless (and sometimes cruel) fanatic strikingly de-
ficient in the traditional virtues.
In contrast with the belief that there must be some single moral principle
whose correct application will give us the correct solution to all moral dilem-
mas, it has been argued that in reality we have to balance the principles of util-
ity, justice, duty, and benevolence and use our own judgement in deciding
which of these principles are the most relevant in each situation. This means
that the personal qualities of the person who is doing the deciding, his virtue,
must be of great importance, and this will involve a shift in the balance of an
ethical system away from the emphasis upon the Good Will and rules about
duty, and, correlatively, from the emphasis upon rights: Right-based theories
(like utilitarian theories) cannot allow personal characteristics which are virtu-

ous or morally praiseworthy to be judged intrinsically desirable and cultivated
for their own sake (Raz 1986: 197).
We gain a clearer understanding of the term virtue if we remember that its
basic meaning in Greek, arete, was excellence, so that the virtues are the char-
acteristic and essential excellences that allow us to function well as human be-
ings. So Aristotle says Every excellence both brings into good condition the
thing of which it is an excellence and makes the work of that thing be done
well (1106a: 15). At a superficial level it is of course possible to treat virtues
mainly as socially desirable forms of behaviour: generosity, honesty, cleanli-
ness, punctuality, being a good neighbour, or hard working, and in this sense
the list of virtues is almost endless, and the virtues to be cultivated will seem to
depend on the local values of each particular group or society.
But if we consider the structure of the human personality as an organic
whole, comprising will, cognition, feelings, bodily appetites, etc., it is clear that
some virtues will be of central importance, notably the so-called cardinal vir-
tues of justice, prudence, temperance, and courage, and it is not hard to see that
without these we will not understand what the good is or be able to pursue it
even if we do:
We need prudence or practical wisdom for any large-scale planning. We
need justice to secure co-operation and mutual trust among men, without
which our lives would be nasty, brutish and short. We need temperance in
order not to be deflected from our long-term and large-scale goals by seek-
ing short-term satisfaction. And we need courage in order to persevere in
spite of set backs, weariness, difficulties, and dangers. (Geach 1977: 16)
This conception of virtue considers the human personality as an organic
whole, so that it can be well-ordered or disordered, just as a society may be,
and for human beings the most essential quality is the ability to know what we
are doing, or practical reason.
When we talk in ethics about practical reasonableness or right reason we
must not be taken to suppose that practical reasonableness is the supreme
good. Ethics is not just, or even particularly, for intellectuals or rationalists,
for people who want to distinguish themselves from other animals, or peo-
ple who want to cultivate a special (the highest) part of their make-up. The
point of being practically reasonable is not: being practically reasonable, full
stop. Rather it is: participating in all the human goods well. Well, here, ex-
presses the implications not of some further, external (e.g. moral) standard,
but simply of all those human goods to be participated in, integrally, in each
and all of ones self-constitutive choices. (Finnis 1983: 72)
Again, we noted in the previous discussion of justice that this is nowadays
regarded as a characteristic of a disposition of social affairs. But in the ancient
world justice was not restricted to its social manifestations, to its distributive,
procedural, restorative, or retributive forms, but was also a virtue. Aristotle
said that Justice is that quality in virtue of which a man is said to be disposed
to do by deliberate choice that which is just, when distributing things between
himself and another or between two others (1134a), so that the unjust man is
grasping. The Institutes of Justinian follow Plato in saying that Justice is a firm
and unceasing determination to render to every man his due (Lib.I, Tit.1) a
86 Moral Knowledge
definition repeated by Aquinas (S.T. Qu. LVIII). A just man, in this conception,
is not merely someone who understands certain rules from the conceptual
point of view, but has the necessary qualities of character to put them into
practical effect from the right motives. One of these qualities is practical rea-
sonableness, and another is self-control or temperance, the ability to subordi-
nate our desires and impulses to that understanding, and these themes are
immediately relevant to the central dilemma of man, that we not only have an
animal nature and an inherent inclination to put our own interests above those
of others, but that we are also rational and social, so that we cannot live the
good life for man by simply giving way at every opportunity to our own de-
sires despite the immediate pleasure which these bring. Desires must be
brought into harmony with the right, and this in turn requires a long process of
training, involving both intellect and character. In the moral life the enemy is
the fat relentless ego. Moral philosophy is properly, and in the past has some-
times been the discussion of this ego and of the techniques (if any) for its de-
feat (Murdoch 1970: 52). Some have believed that to struggle against tempta-
tion, even to fail, but to repent and persevere in goodness has greater merit
than an easy performance of our duties. Kants theory that the good will is un-
related to our inclinations is of this type. Hardie, in his discussion of Aristotles
ethics, refers to:
the distinction between two different kinds of moral goodness, the good-
ness of the man who does what is right in spite of desires which incline him
strongly not to do it, and the goodness of the man who does right without
any resistance from unruly or discordant desires, the man whose inclina-
tions are in harmony with the life he ought to lead. The man who does right
in spite of opposing desires is given by Aristotle the name conventionally
translated continent (enkorates). He is distinguished from the man who is
temperate (sophron) whose desires are in harmony with the right rule, being
neither excessive nor defective. Aristotle thinks that the second is better
(1151b34 1152a3). (Hardie 1980: 128)
While for most of us it is on occasion a strain to do what is right, the strain
here is not the essence of taking truly moral decisions, but shows that we are
still imperfect agents.
The fact that a man is tempted to steal is something about him that shows a
certain lack of honesty: of the thoroughly honest man we say that it never
entered his head, meaning that it was never a real possibility for him. But
the fact that he is poor is something that makes the occasion more tempting,
and difficulties of this kind make honest action all the more virtuous. (Foot
1978: 11)
The virtues are therefore the necessary mutually correcting qualities of
character, and here it is appropriate to emphasize a very important aspect of
virtue in the teachings of all the great moral traditions, which is that it is the
source of true happiness for the individual. Those who succeed in obtaining
this inner harmony by cultivating the virtues are the most likely to obtain a
peace of mind and inner tranquillity which far transcends mere pleasure, and it
is this fundamental consideration which is the true resolution of Sidgwicks
dilemma which we discussed earlier.

d. Human status
So far we have been discussing the necessary character of a moral order in any
society of human beings, and the nature of the moral agent, but all the re-
quirements of utility, justice, duty and virtue could be satisfied within the con-
fines of our own society. What reason could we have for being concerned with
the welfare of foreigners, or for keeping faith with them? Why should we not
be free to exploit or kill them for our own benefit? Himmler, for example, in a
speech to the SS, expresses precisely this attitude:
One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent,
loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else
Whether the other peoples live in conflict or perish of hunger interests me
only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it
does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from
exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank
ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where
it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the
world who have a decent attitude to animals
1
will also adopt a decent atti-
tude to these human animals (quoted in Fest 1970: 115)
Most of us will be shocked by what we would consider the barbarous sen-
timents expressed in this quotation, but being shocked is not a moral argu-
ment. The counter-argument is implicit in Himmlers own description of the
Slavs as human animals, because the Slavs are clearly not animals. If they
were knuckle-dragging ape-men who could only grunt and gibber his attitude
would not be unrealistic or obviously immoral, but we know quite well that
the Slavs are in fact human beings just like us, separated only by differences of
language and custom, and by their membership of different societies. We can
form social relationships with members of other societies in just the same way
as with members of our own society, despite linguistic and cultural differences
and for this reason we have good reason to believe, on the basis of experience,
that the resemblances between the members of the human race are more obvi-
ous and morally relevant than the differences between them. Societies are not
rigidly bounded entities like biological organisms, and the answer to the ques-
tion Why should we extend moral consideration to people outside our soci-
ety? is that the boundaries between one society and another are to a consider-
able degree artificial distinctions between members of the human race. It may
be necessary from time to time to defend our society (considered as a political
unit) in warfare, and normally to give our first loyalty to our own country in
preference to others (unless we have good reasons for thinking it to be abnor-

1
On January 14th, 1936, a regulation was issued that
Crabs, lobsters, and other crustaceans are to be killed by throwing them in rap-
idly boiling water. Where feasible, this should be done individually. As jurists
noted in the official introductory comments on the Law for the Protection of
Animals, the purpose of the law, as approved by Adolf Hitler, was to awaken
and strengthen compassion [Mitgefhl] as one of the highest moral values of the
German people. R. G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God. Adolf Hitler, 1977, p.47.
88 Moral Knowledge
mally wicked), but this is not a justification for refusing any moral considera-
tion to them, or to foreigners, simply because we are all human beings. This
takes us back to Shylocks speech, stressing those essential similarities between
human beings, in body, needs, feelings, and reason that outweigh the relatively
superficial differences of nationality and culture. But if human beings share
these essential qualities, the distinction between humans and animals becomes
of particular moral importance, precisely because biologically we are animals,
yet at the same time a human life is only possible because we can tame the
animal side of our nature by reason and the other virtues within a social order.
It is, therefore, from the distinction between humans and animals that we
derive the idea of some sorts of acts that should simply not be done by one
human being to another. An example would be the escaped convict in nine-
teenth century Australia, who was in the habit of shooting Aborigines to pro-
vide meat for his dogs. The condemnation of these forms of behaviour, whose
ethical significance derives from their violation of human status (cannibalism
and necrophilia being obvious examples) is very difficult to explain with refer-
ence to utility, justice, virtue, or other ethical criteria such as human rights.
Murder, for example, is obviously wrong, but if the killer subsequently eats his
victim, or has sexual relations with the corpse we feel that something mon-
strous has been done. Yet according to the principles of utility or justice, for
example, it is far from clear wherein the enormity of such crimes could lie.
While it is unjust to murder people, once they are dead it is hard to see that
cannibalism or necrophilia could add to the injustice, just as the utilitarian can-
not argue that they increase the sum of human suffering.
All societies impose restrictions on sexual relations, notably between mem-
bers of the nuclear family, and this is universally regarded as one of the distin-
guishing features between human beings and animals, comparable to cooking
ones food instead of eating it raw. Incest is not only repulsive to normal hu-
man beings, which is partly why, like cannibalism, it produces such powerful
emotional reactions, but also violates the distinction between the social and
animal realms. For the same reason members of all societies disapprove of sex-
ual relations in public only dogs or pigs do that.
Many societies regard infanticide and abortion as permissible because they
do not consider either the foetus or the new born baby as human but as a form
of animal life, which, in particular, requires a name before it can be regarded as
a real member of a society, a human being. The present controversy over abor-
tion is a good example of the fundamental significance of human status in eth-
ics, while the whole field of sexuality and reproduction is also basic to morality
because of this distinction between the animal and the human. Animality is,
therefore, the paradigm of the anti-social, physical, instinctual side of human
nature, which is in opposition to the rational, social side of our nature. The
animal/human distinction is a cultural universal partly for this reason, but also
because in our search for order we need to locate our own society or, in the
modern world, human society as a whole, in a larger context of order, and the
realm of animals forms an essential boundary within this wider order.
But we shall see that while all societies distinguish between human and
animal, this does not mean that they must therefore have a well defined notion
Natural law and religion 89

of human being. In fact, by person/people members of primitive societies
usually mean only themselves, and members of other groups, cultures, or races
may not be regarded as real people at all. It seems that only with the rise of
literate civilizations do we find serious reflection on human nature that be-
comes one of the foundations for a sense of moral obligation to ones fellow
men in general, and is also bound up with an integrated account of the essen-
tial human virtues.
6. Natural law and religion
The final problem with which I shall deal in this chapter is the claim that mo-
rality must be based on divine command. The substance of my answer will rest
on the distinction between moral principles as based on an understanding of
the human condition, and the value and importance of human beings in the
scheme of things. I have tried to show that it is quite possible to base a system
of ethics on the empirical facts of human nature, and especially on the social
and rational nature of man. This does not require us to ask what mans ulti-
mate purpose is, or whether the universe has a purpose, or whether God exists,
and as such it is a limited reaffirmation of the very old theory of Natural Law.
The theory of natural law has had a tangled history (see dEntrves, 1951)
not least because of the ambiguity of the word nature, which can mean both
the nature of the animal world and human nature, so that thinkers as diverse
as Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke and the founding fathers of the American Constitu-
tion, the Marquis de Sade, and Social Darwinists have all appealed to its au-
thority. In its traditional form which I advocate (and which should be accept-
able to anthropologists in particular) it has been defended by such modern le-
gal theorists as Hart 1961 and Finnis 1980.
Man has learned about duty and justice by living in society, and it is there-
fore essential to avoid the extremely confused notion that these ideas as such
must depend on Divine authority if they are to be morally binding. In Western
society there has of course been great confusion about the religious basis of
ethics, because the Protestant churches in particular have represented morality
in the authoritarian tradition of the Decalogue, and the sort of confusion this
can produce is well illustrated by the autobiographical reflections of the distin-
guished American Egyptologist J.H. Breasted:
Like most lads among my boyhood associates I learned the Ten Command-
ments. I was taught to reverence them because I was assured that they came
down from the skies into the hands of Moses, and that obedience to them
was therefore sacredly incumbent upon me. I remember that when I fibbed I
found consolation in the fact that there was no commandment, thou shalt
not lie, and that the Decalogue forbade lying only as a false witness giving
testimony before the courts where it might damage ones neighbor. In later
years when I was much older, I began to be troubled by the fact that a code
of morals which did not forbid lying seemed imperfect; but it was a long
time before I raised the interesting question: How had my own realization of
this imperfection arisen? Where did I myself get the moral yard-stick by
which I discerned this shortcoming in the Decalogue? When that experience
90 Moral Knowledge
began, it was a dark day for my inherited respect for the theological dogma
of revelation The fact that the moral ideas of early men were the product
of their own social experience is one of the profoundest meaning for think-
ing people of today. (Breasted 1935: 11, 15)
As Breasted implied, we can only describe God as just and merciful if we al-
ready know what justice and mercy are, and where could these ideas have
come from except our social experience? To derive moral principles from the
authority of God alone deprives them of any independent status and so re-
moves any meaning from statements calling God good, since whatever God
might be or command would ipso facto be good. There is of course nothing new
in any of this since, as I have said, it is only a restatement of the very old theory
of Natural Law. Grotius, one of its later exponents, said (in The Law of War and
Peace):
This maintenance of the social order, which we have roughly sketched, and
which is consonant with human intelligence, is the source of law properly so
called. To this sphere of law belong the abstaining from that which is an-
others, the restoration to another of anything of his which we may have, to-
gether with any gain which we may have received from it; the obligation to
fulfil promises, the making good of a loss incurred through our own fault
and the inflicting of penalties upon men according to their deserts (Prole-
gomena 8). [So, therefore] The law of nature, again, is unchangeable even
in the sense that it cannot be changed by God. Measureless as is the power of
God, nevertheless it can be said that there are certain things over which that
power does not extend; for things of which this is said are spoken only, hav-
ing no sense corresponding with reality and being mutually contradictory.
Just as even God, then, cannot cause that two times two should not make
four, so He cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be not evil. (Ibid., Bk.
I.I.X.5)
But one may imagine a reader who has followed the argument of this chap-
ter so far, and agrees that in terms of the objective requirements of human life
everything that has been said about virtue, justice, utility, benevolence, and
duty is valid, and who can still ask, But what does it all matter? What value
does human life have in any case? Was not Hitler close to the mark when he
described us as planet bacteria?. If we believe, on the contrary, that human
beings do matter in the scheme of things, this will have an extremely important
motivating influence on our attitude towards them, and on our own tranquillity
of mind. To this extent, then, religious belief will have a profound effect on our
attitude to the importance of morality and the value of human life, even
though the basic moral ideas are derived from our experience of living in soci-
ety.
Aquinas, too, drew a very clear distinction between those aspects of moral-
ity which could be derived from reason and those which required revelation;
Now if man were ordained to no other end than that which is proportionate
to his rational ability, there would be no need to have any further direction,
on the part of his reason, in addition to the natural law and humanly de-
vised law which is derived from it. But since man is ordained to an end of
eternal happiness which exceeds mans natural ability therefore it was
Conclusions 91

necessary that, in addition to the natural and human law, man should be di-
rected to his end by a law given from God. (S.T.II.91.4)
Aquinas gives a number of reasons why (on religious assumptions, of
course) there is a need for divine law to supplement natural and human law. 1)
Revelation removes our doubt in debatable areas of ethics. 2) Natural and hu-
man law can only be concerned with acts, whereas for the perfection of virtue
we must also act from the right motives and intentions: Consequently human
law could not sufficiently curb and direct interior acts, and it was necessary for
this purpose that a divine law should supervene. 3) Morality in its fullest sense
cannot be efficiently enforced by systems of human law; Human law cannot
punish or forbid all evil deeds, since, while aiming at doing away with all evils,
it would do away with many good things and would hinder the advance of the
common good, which is necessary for human living. In order, therefore, that no
evil might remain unforbidden and unpunished it was necessary for the divine
law to supervene, whereby all sins are forbidden (Aquinas S.T.II.91.4). It is
also important to note that while the notion of God as law-giver has been the
basis of a primitive self-interested legalism in which the individual is moti-
vated only by hope of reward and fear of punishment, it is possible to use the
relation of God to man as the basis for a different motivation for moral con-
duct: the imitation of an admired example out of love. So Aquinas contrasts the
Old Law (of Israel) with the New Law (of Christ): it belongs to law to induce
men to observe its commandments. This the Old Law did by the fear of pun-
ishment, but the New Law, by love, which is poured into our hearts by the
grace of Christ, bestowed in the New Law, but foreshadowed in the Old
(S.T.II.91.6).
Loving [God necessarily] includes wanting to do His will. This is a purely
non-self-interested motivation and is therefore a moral one. According to
this view Gods will sets moral standards; it does not merely reflect inde-
pendently valid standards. They are valid because they express His will.
There is, however, no difficulty concerning the motivation to obey. The love
that He inevitably inspires in all who believe in Him is that motivation
The unselfish, non-self-interested character of the motivation assures both it
and the command toward which it is directed of a moral character. (Raz
1986: 32)
While in practice belief in supernatural rewards and punishments has no
doubt been a very important sanction in the support of good conduct and the
social order, for the intelligent religious believer the main function of revela-
tion is not to tell him things which he can work out for himself that it is
wrong to lie, steal and murder, for example but to provide a world-view in
which human beings matter, and in which there is an underlying order in
terms of which everything has a function and makes sense, and moral exem-
plars who can motivate us out of love.
7. Conclusions
The cultural relativists position derives its plausibility from the model of cul-
ture as a collection of conventional classifications, but it can hardly be claimed
92 Moral Knowledge
that it is merely conventional to prefer happiness, health, long life, prosperity,
and social esteem to misery, sickness, death, poverty and disgrace, and that
there might be some society which preferred the second set of alternatives.
The relativists position is further undermined as soon as we consider that
man can only develop his distinctive human characteristics by living in society,
and that all societies have certain fundamental characteristics and constraints.
There must, for example, be certain roles father, mother, and other categories
of kin; co-operation and reciprocity; norms, and sanctions for the violation of
norms; the allocation of responsibility when this occurs; a set of institutions
and values which together with roles define the social order; traits of character
which are appropriate or inappropriate for socially acceptable behaviour; rela-
tions with members of other groups or societies; and some sort of justification
for the observation of norms, e.g. it is our custom, if you do not do x, no one
will like you, it is the command of God, or it is a basic moral obligation.
These basic constraints of social life allow us to see that what I have referred
to as the structure of moral thought the notions of justice, duty, and virtue,
benefit and harm, norms, the range of those to whom consideration is due,
punishment and responsibility, intention, guilt and shame, the justification of
norms, and so on are necessary aspects of any form of social life whatever,
even if they are not expressed in explicit linguistic form.
We are not, however, primarily concerned with these notions as philosophi-
cal concepts but rather as the constituent elements of the human condition, re-
garded from a sociological point of view. For only when we treat morality from
the social rather than the philosophical perspective can we really understand
its prescriptive and evaluative character, and also see why it should have cer-
tain universal features both cross-culturally and also in its historical develop-
ment.
But these basic features of moral understanding are no more than basic; and
this general account of ethics is actually quite compatible with the claim that
there is a wide range of cultural values which may all be quite valid and un-
derstandable within the specific circumstances of each society or social class in
which they occur. The values appropriate in the military, commercial, aes-
thetic, and academic ways of life, for example, the masculine as distinct from
the feminine approaches to life, the traditional and the progressive, the hu-
morous and the serious-minded, are all examples of different cultural values
which it is impossible and indeed absurd to try to rank in some order of merit
that has absolute validity. To this extent an objective theory of ethics must also
recognise an essential element of relativity in cultural and moral values. Put-
ting this in another way, it is impossible to specify the attributes of a perfect
society (or the perfect personality) because some of these attributes are neces-
sarily incompatible with others; and not all human excellences are achievable
simultaneously either by an individual or a society. Nor, as we have seen, does
an objective theory of ethics imply that there must be a single correct answer to
all moral dilemmas.
I said earlier that the irrelevance of modern moral philosophy to ethno-
graphic and historical evidence about moral thought indicated that it was false,
Conclusions 93

and it is now possible to see more clearly why this should be so. There is abso-
lutely no reason why the theories of Kant, Bentham, Moore, Hare, or Rawls
should explain what people have actually thought about moral issues, or how
they have come to think it, and this is not because these theories are so difficult
to grasp that only one in a million human beings will ever act upon them, but
simply because they are not based on an adequate analysis of the real world.
One of the central arguments of Chapter I was that human nature and social
life impose certain constraints on the possibilities of thought and action, and
that many of the common features of culture and social organization, and their
evolution, represent accommodations to these constraints. We may therefore
expect that a socially based moral theory which is fundamentally correct will
shed some light on the way in which people will actually think about moral is-
sues, and the ways in which thinking will develop both in the case of the indi-
vidual and in human history. (It will not, of course shed anything like a total
light because people make mistakes about difficult issues, and are influenced
by a variety of cultural and psychological factors.)
The point of this exegesis of ethics therefore is that if it is true it establishes a
basic set of constraints on human relations and conduct which will be relevant
to all groups and, as they increase in social complexity they will encounter a
common range of fundamental problems in moral thought, such as the signifi-
cance of intention in establishing responsibility for actions; the differences be-
tween morality and law; the recognition that custom is an inadequate justifica-
tion for morality; the difference between social success and virtue; the growth
of self-awareness and psychological insight into the human personality; an
idea of moral obligation that is more generalisable than the performance of
specific social roles; the formulation of general moral principles such the
Golden Rule, and so on.
Just as more complex societies have to resolve problems which do not occur
in simpler societies, so the individual has to acquire an understanding of moral
issues through a process of learning, in which the easier and more elementary
aspects of morality will be grasped before the more difficult. But in simpler
societies, where individuals are not confronted with the more challenging di-
lemmas produced in complex societies, it seems likely that individuals will
have no opportunity to develop an understanding of the more subtle aspects of
ethics. This lack of development at the individual level will therefore affect the
collective representations of moral ideas that are developed in the society as a
whole. Before we consider the general features of the evolution of moral un-
derstanding at the social level we must therefore consider how this develops in
the individual.

III. The Psychology Of Moral Development

1. Introduction
It is obvious that in moral thought, as in other areas of knowledge, some ideas
are much easier to understand than others, which also could not develop
unless the simpler ideas had been grasped first. The understanding of what
constitutes harm to others will appear long before it is possible to take the per-
spective of others. Obedience to authority and to rules can be grasped long be-
fore the requirements of a social order as such can be articulated, while the
ability to distinguish between a moral principle and a legal rule, or to grasp the
abstract nature of justice will be among the last of all to appear. And in terms
of the development of character, affection for others, for example, will be dis-
played long before the ability to persevere in doing what one believes to be
right against social pressure to conform in wrong-doing. Children do not ini-
tially distinguish the parental rule requiring honesty from a number of other
rules such as those requiring them to clean their teeth before going to bed, to
take unpleasant medicine, and not to watch television without permission. Just
as they will try to evade parental rules in these respects because they are irk-
some, and will see nothing wrong in doing so if they are not caught, so they
will try to evade rules about honesty if they believe they can do so successfully.
It takes time before they realise that honesty is a rule in a different category
from rules about cleaning teeth and watching television, and this understand-
ing requires not only social experience but the ability to reason in more ad-
vanced ways than smaller children.
The work of moral philosophers discussed in Chapter II displays these ad-
vanced modes of reasoning in such areas as:
1. The minute analysis of moral language.
2. Discussion of the nuances of inner states and mental processes.
3. The use of formal, deductive reasoning.
4. A highly articulate expression of ideas rather than reliance on im-
plicit, intuitive understanding.
5. Generalizations about man as such, irrespective of any particular so-
ciety, in which the individual is separated from all social roles.
6. The ability to conceptualize society as a whole, as in social contract
theory.
7. The construction of a conceptual hierarchy of rules, from the relative
specificity of prima facie rules to general moral principles.
96 The Psychology Of Moral Development
8. The attempt to construct highly stable systems of thought. For exam-
ple, if utilitarianism were true, it would provide us with a general
principle for solving all moral dilemmas that could not be over-
thrown by any new experience.
It should be obvious that this level of thought is not comprehensible to chil-
dren in our own society (or to many adults), and is certainly not a cross-
cultural universal either. This incomprehensibility is not because philosophers
use very difficult technical words that take many years to learn; on the whole
they do not, and the problem of understanding moral philosophy is basically
cognitive, not verbal, and is a good illustration of the fact that acquiring culture
is not simply a matter of learning conventions, but of thinking in certain ways
as well.
Our analysis of the origins of some of the distinctive features of Western
moral philosophy, brief as it was, also showed that people do not reflect in a
social vacuum but in relation to problems and to the dilemmas which they ex-
perience in their daily lives. Hobbes and Locke were drawn to analyze the na-
ture of human society at a fundamental level because of the political events in
seventeenth century England, and in ordinary life we are faced with problems
such as Platos dilemma, where we must resort to higher level principles to
resolve contradictions at lower levels in our conceptual scheme of things.
But we must be careful not to equate higher cognitive level with greater
correctness. For example, we noted a number of serious errors in the Western
tradition of moral philosophy:
1. Philosophical prejudice, e.g. the belief that all teleological thought is
inherently false, which blinded philosophers to the functional and
organic nature of evaluative language.
2. Ethnocentrism, e.g. the political assumptions of liberalism.
3. Excessive rationalism, e.g. the attempt to discover some single prin-
ciple that would resolve all moral dilemmas.
4. Methodological error, e.g. excessive reliance on linguistic analysis
and ignoring the social and historical context of thought.
The use of advanced cognitive processes is therefore no guarantee in itself that
one will find the right answers to problems how many people in search of
moral guidance would ask a philosopher? But what we can say is that some
types of problems can only be grasped at all by those whose thinking is at an
advanced cognitive level.
In the discussion of relativism I referred briefly to the essential distinction
between mental content and mental process, and we have now reached the
appropriate place to examine this distinction in more detail. When anthropolo-
gists talk of culture as learned they are correctly emphasizing the difference
between animal behaviour, which is instinctive, and our own, which is based
on convention. But the very obvious facts that conventions must be taught and
that conventions involve classification have led to the belief that the learning
process is nothing more than the passive acquisition of conventional knowl-
edge by a process of imitation, the gradual filling of an empty bucket with bits
Piagets theory of cognitive development 97

and pieces of information until the childs knowledge comes to resemble that of
its adult instructors.
This model of the learning process is very easy to understand, which no
doubt explains its popularity, but it happens to be untrue. There is now a great
deal of psychological evidence on the way in which children learn, and it does
not support the belief that this is a passive, imitative, bit-by-bit accumulation of
knowledge. The popular view of learning is false because it thinks of knowl-
edge as content, as a set of conventional classifications, and ignores the essen-
tial fact that the very understanding of conventions can only occur as the result
of certain mental processes. We can, for example, teach children of three or four
the Golden Rule, Do to others as you would like them to do to you, but while
they will be able to repeat the formula, they will not really understand it until
they are much older because it requires them, in the first place, to be able to put
themselves mentally in someone elses position; and secondly, to be able to
consider their own behaviour from that persons perspective rather than from
their own. As we shall see, these are cognitive accomplishments which take
time to develop, and until they are attained there can be no real comprehension
of what the Golden Rule entails, but only the mechanical repetition of a for-
mula. Indeed, children often translate the Golden Rule as Do to others as they
do to you. In other words, we can provide our children with words like fair-
ness or justice, but the comprehension of these ideas only develops when
they are put to use by solving problems in real life, and the same is true of all
the other concepts of a culture.
While conventions, language, and institutions are an essential basis for
thought, we must recognize that thought also involves cognitive processes
which are different from the cultural content of the mind, because learning is
an active, problem-solving activity in which some ways of understanding the
world develop before others, and form the basis on which more advanced
forms of thinking can develop.
2. Piagets theory of cognitive development
In The Foundations of Primitive Thought I showed that the tradition of develop-
mental psychology inspired by Piaget was extremely illuminating about the
way in which our knowledge of the physical world developed, and that it had
an impressive cross-cultural validity. I have therefore returned to developmen-
tal psychology in this book to see what it has to say about the growth of social
and moral understanding. While Piaget has been a seminal influence here, too,
developmental psychology is now a vast field with considerable diversities of
approach and interpretation we shall consider an example of this later in the
Chapter when we examine Kohlbergs theory of moral development but a
brief account of Piagets theory is still a good introduction to the basic ideas of
developmental psychology.
1

1
A brief introduction to Piagetian theory is given in Hallpike 1979: 5532. Good intro-
ductory textbooks are Flavell 1963, and Ginsburg and Opper 1969.
Piagets theory of cognitive development grew out of his early interest in
biology and epistemology, and while he and his associates at Geneva con-
ducted an immense amount of research on the cognitive development of chil-
dren, he always regarded himself as a genetic epistemologist, fundamentally
concerned with how organized knowledge as a whole develops. His work
treats cognitive growth as a particular aspect of general organic adaptation to
the environment, in which process neither the hereditary characteristics of the
organism nor the structure of the environment are in themselves sufficient to
explain the pattern of growth in the organism. It is often wrongly supposed
that in Piagets theory cognitive development is simply an expression of bio-
logical maturation, and is therefore a predetermined process. This is quite mis-
taken, since in that case the nature of the interaction with the environment
would be irrelevant, whereas Piaget himself recognized the importance of cul-
ture in promoting or retarding cognitive development (Piaget 1974: 309, and
see also Inhelder 1969: 193194). Rather, he regarded thought as a self-
regulating system, which strives to attain equilibrium with its environment by
constructing stable representations transcending the variability and fluctua-
tions of experience. His theory is therefore holistic and dialectical, such that
mental functioning is subject to an overall organization which is developed by
a process of accommodation to reality and assimilation of experience to exist-
ing cognitive structures.
Thought is thus an active and selective process, dominated by a constant in-
teraction between accommodation and assimilation, and development is
marked by the successive choices of different strategies of problem-solving, the
earliest being those that are simplest and require least effort. Each strategy
generates contradictions with experience, which are then partially resolved by
the use of a new strategy, so that periods of incomplete understanding are fol-
lowed by periods of a greater understanding. In his development the child
therefore moves from a state of lesser to a state of greater equilibrium, mani-
festing a greater coherence and stability of representations.
To help the reader who is unfamiliar with developmental psychology to
grasp the essentials of Piagets theory, I shall briefly summarize the stages of
cognitive development with primary reference to knowledge of the physical
world. Initially, the child interacts with the environment by means of actions
alone infancy or the sensorimotor stage. During this period of development
the child constructs an understanding of its physical environment as contain-
ing permanent objects, which continue to exist when they are not visible; that
they remain of the same size and shape when seen from different perspectives
and distances; that the child himself is an object among other physical objects;
and visual, tactile, and auditory spaces are coordinated.
With the appearance of mental imagery and language late in the second
year the child becomes capable of symbolic representations, involving objects
which are not actually present. The childs sensorimotor intelligence was in-
herently confined to the actions of the subject on physical reality, and as such
had no genuinely representational content; it could therefore only operate
sequentially with actual objects and could not coordinate the relations between
them as simultaneously perceived wholes, whereas the representational capaci-

ties of imagery using words, concrete symbolism and gestures allow the
child to construct coordinated representations of relations that are not confined
to here-and-now manipulations. The childs thought can thus escape into the
imagination of future states and reflection on past states, which capability
characterises the pre-operational stage.
But now the child faces radically new difficulties of reality construction: just
as he conserved the permanency of objects and the constancy of size and shape
in terms of perception and action, he now has to grasp these constancies at the
level of imagery and verbal expression, which involves the understanding of
quantity, length, weight, and volume, and this brings us to one of the central
concepts in Piagetian theory, the operation. An operation in Piagetian theory
is not simply an action but an interiorized or mental action which is part of a
complete system of potential action. This involves the understanding of re-
versibility and compensation, which in turn involve the ability to maintain two
ideas in the mind simultaneously the present state of a configuration and a
past or future state, for example between which those relations of reversibil-
ity and compensation can be applied, and in which centration is overcome.
What is meant by centration, reversibility and compensation? Centration is
essentially one-dimensional thinking: In the conservation of continuous
quantity, he judges two amounts equal when the heights of the column of liq-
uid are equal, and ignores the width, or he may focus on width alone and ig-
nore the height (Ginsburg and Opper 1969: 167). That is, the child does not
realise that the increased height of water in a tall thin glass is compensated by
the increased width of the water if it is poured into a short fat glass. Centration
therefore has a static quality: In the conservation of continuous quantity he
focuses on the height of the column of liquid and not on the act of pouring
(ibid., 167). There is therefore no ability to analyze the process, and conse-
quently there is a lack of reversibility: He may be able to predict an empirical
reversibility, as, for instance, in the case of the liquids where he would agree
that if the water were poured back into B, there would be the same quantity as
before. But this empirical reversibility does not change the fact that he now be-
lieves that there is more (or less) water in the new glass C. It is as if pouring
from B to C, and from C to B were totally unrelated actions. The older child, on
the other hand, realizes that pouring form C to B reverses or negates the action
of pouring from B to C (ibid., 167). To summarize,
the pre-operational childs thought is irreversible and attentive to limited
amounts of information, which are particularly the static states of reality.
The concrete operational child focuses on several aspects of a situation si-
multaneously, is sensitive to transformations, and can reverse the direction
of his thinking. Piaget conceives of these three aspects of thought centra-
tion/decentration, static/dynamic, irreversibility/reversibility as inter-
dependent. If the child centres on the static aspect of a situation, he is
unlikely to appreciate transformation. If he does not represent transforma-
tions, he is unlikely to reverse his thought. By decentering he comes to be
aware of the transformations, which thus lead to reversibility in his thought.
In conclusion, we can see that one aspect of thought is not isolated from the
rest. Even though the nature of the system may vary from the development
of the child, thought processes form an integrated system. (Ibid., 168)
The transition from the pre-operational level to that of concrete operations
is therefore marked by the ability to construct stable systems of relations based
on mobile systems of reversibility and compensation; the notion of relative prop-
erties as opposed to absolute properties which inhere in things; the avoidance of
centration or one-dimensional thought; and the avoidance of the contradictions
inherent in image-based modes of representation. We find the progressive objec-
tification of causality involving the analysis of process because operational
causality no longer represents processes as sequences of static states, but as
integrated systems of transformation. And in the case of classification, the child
can now grasp the logic of class inclusion: that, for example, if A = B+C, then B
= A - C, or if A < B < C, then A < C, and B is simultaneously < C and > A. In
very general terms, concrete operational thought involves the ability to com-
prehend the operation of systems of things, and to explain in an articulate way
how they work and how their different elements are interrelated. It is this en-
hanced ability to analyse systems that is of crucial significance, as we shall see
when we consider the social aspects of cognition.
With adolescence, children who have the requisite exposure to the appro-
priate cultural opportunities such as literacy and schooling, and the possibili-
ties of experimentation, typically advance to the stage of formal operations.
The most important general property of formal operational thought, the one
from which Piaget derives all others concerns the real versus the possible.
Unlike the concrete-operational child, the adolescent begins his considera-
tion of the problem at hand by trying to envisage all the possible relations
which could hold true in the data and then attempts, through a combination
of experimentation and logical analysis, to find out which of these possible
relations in fact do hold true. Reality is thus conceived as a special subset
within the totality of things which the data would admit as hypotheses: it is
seen as the is portion of a might be totality, the portion it is the subjects
job to discover. (Flavell 1963: 2045)
This general characteristic of formal operational thought is closely related to
three other specific characteristics: 1) a cognitive strategy which is hy-
pothetico-deductive; 2) propositional thinking; 3) combinatorial thinking,
which systematically isolates all the individual variables plus all the possible
combinations of these variables (ibid., 206).
First, the process that most adequately characterizes reasoning from the pos-
sible to the actual is hypothetico-deductive reasoning, when predetermined
hypotheses may be disconfirmed by reference to relevant data. The second
characteristic is propositional thinking. Whereas the concrete operational
thinker is only able to organize (e.g., classify or seriate) objects or events, the
formal operational thinker can also construct propositions about these data
and explore ways in which they are logically related (e.g., by disjunction).
The third major characteristic of this period is the ability to systematically
generate a listing of all relevant variables, both individually and in all possi-
ble combinations. This strategy ensures that a complete listing of the possi-
ble is available, a list from which the real may be identified. These charac-
teristics gain cohesiveness when seen as an approach to problem solving.
(King 1986: 2)

This new form of thinking is therefore based on concrete operations but
transcends them. Because concrete operations are based on necessary relation-
ships of class, relation and number, they provide the basis by which the child
can begin to consider all possible relations before he discovers what is actually
the case. Moreover the childs increased mastery of language allows him to
take the results of concrete operations, cast them into verbal form, and then
perform further logical operations on these resulting propositions. The ability
to perform operations on operations, or operations to the second power, as
Piaget puts it, together with propositional reasoning, are the most important
aspects of formal thought, and they allow the child to apply far more powerful
logical tools to the problems that confront him.
The adolescents thinking is also flexible so that from preliminary state-
ments he can manipulate them to derive definitive conclusions, and he is also
unlikely to be confused by unusual results because he has already visualised
all the possibilities. More generally,
In the intellectual sphere, the adolescent has a tendency to become involved
in abstract and theoretical matters. He constructs elaborate political theories
or invents complex philosophical doctrines. He may develop plans for the
complete reorganization of society or indulge in metaphysical speculation.
Having just discovered capabilities for abstract thought, he then proceeds to
exercise them without restraint. Indeed, in the process of exploring his new
abilities the adolescent sometimes loses touch with reality, and feels that he
can accomplish everything by thought alone. In the emotional sphere the
adolescent now becomes capable of directing his emotions at abstract ideals
and not just towards people. Whereas earlier he could love his mother or
hate a peer, now he can love freedom or hate exploitation. (Ginsburg and
Opper 1969: 2045)
Children who become capable of formal operations also develop an aware-
ness of the thinking process itself which they employ in solving problems, so
that we can describe the stage as one of thinking about thinking. While we
take this awareness for granted, it is not obvious to younger children, who are,
in Piagets terms conceptual realists. The child does not clearly distinguish for
some years between the subjective and the objective, and it is not in fact at all
surprising that the disentangling of mental from bodily functioning, of thought
from speech, and the subjective, sensory impressions of things from their objec-
tive properties, should present great difficulties, both developmentally in the
individual and in the history of human culture. So the pre-operatory child is
unaware of the existence of thought as a phenomenon distinct from the things
thought about, and although he discovers by the age of about three that reality
is often not in accord with his desires and assertions, and so uses words like
appear and believe, or brain and mind, it does not follow that he really
grasps the adult implication of these words, namely that there is a reality
which is perceived, and also a thinking process which mediates these percep-
tions, and a language process in which thought itself is encoded. He is thus
cognitively incapable of distinguishing clearly between what we refer to as the
subjective and the objective, of recognizing the constant operation of his own
mental processes not only in interpreting the world but also in creating decep-
tions of sensory judgement, language, and point of view.
Piaget terms this implicit confusion of subjective and objective conceptual
realism. So while the child may use a word like think he does not grasp its
cognitive implications, and for him it means concentrating, making a mental
effort, as when trying to remember something. He may therefore be unable to
distinguish names and words from their referents, and believes initially that
they are inherent in the objects they denote. For the child at this stage, thinking
is a physical process, identified with the mouth or with speech or breath, and
while he is aware of his own thoughts and feelings, he sees nothing incongru-
ous in crediting the physical world with will and purpose and emotions, so
that he makes no distinction between natural and social laws. In view of the
enormous difficulty of grasping the cognitive functions of mind, it is not sur-
prising that realism persists to a late stage in childrens cognitive development,
and only seems finally to disappear with the beginning of formal operations.
But it should be emphasized that the awareness of inner states such as feel-
ings, dispositions, knowledge, memory, intention, deceit and so on, occurs at
an early age in children and certainly appears to be universal in human society.
When one says that children are unaware of the cognitive aspects of the mind
one means something much more specific and restricted than inner states.
Awareness of the cognitive aspects of the mind involves an awareness of the
process of reasoning; of the distinction between appearance and reality, be-
tween image and object, between the subjective and the objective, and between
statement and meaning; of the possibility that our representations of things are
mistaken because of distorting processes inherent in our own understanding of
those things and that we may impose a conceptual order on things which is not
inherent in them.
Even in modern industrial society, however, the attainment of formal opera-
tions by adults is by no means normal and automatic. A sizable proportion of
the normal adult population does not reason at formal levels when tested on
formal operational tasks (King 1986: 15). From a survey of 25 studies of adult
reasoning King concluded that The rates of successful performance (i.e., scor-
ing at the fully formal level) average 4070 per cent for the college students and
adults tested in these samples (ibid., 15). The percentage of the adult popula-
tion without higher education capable of reasoning at the formal level would
no doubt be lower. We must also remember that not all subjects reason at the
formal level on all tasks, and that the studies cited by King show considerable
variability in this respect, which is closely related to specific areas of knowl-
edge in which subjects are expert, so that physical scientists do not necessarily
reason at the formal level in problems of political theory, and moral philoso-
phy graduate students do not necessarily use formal reasoning in physics prob-
lems.
We observed in Chapter II that it is a mistake to regard ethics as a puzzle-
solving area of thought of the same type as most of the physical sciences.
While problems such as proving which variable affects the period of oscillation
of a pendulum weight of pendulum, length of string, height at which string is
released, and force with which string is pushed can be solved by a rigorous
application of logic, we saw that it was unrealistic to treat moral dilemmas as if
they were of such a type. Piaget himself said that There is more to thinking

than logic (Inhelder and Piaget 1958: 335), and when we are considering moral
reasoning and social understanding in general we should recognize those other
features of formal operational thinking besides formal logic, such as proposi-
tional thinking, the ability to go beyond concrete data, to grasp the totality of a
set of relationships and so on. (In this connection the reflective judgement
model [K.S. Kitchener 1986], which is concerned with thinking about ill-
structured problems typical of moral dilemmas is a valuable addition to our
understanding of formal thought, although there is no space to discuss it here.)
With regard to the general question of stages of development, we must be
particularly careful to distinguish between the logical structure of concrete
operational thought and pre-operational thought and the actual manifestations
of thought in individual children, who do not make sudden leaps from one
stage to the next. On the contrary, children first learn to apply concrete
operational thinking, for example, in one type of problem, such as the
conservation of continuous quantity (eg. liquids), and then slowly generalize
this new ability to other problem areas over several years the so-called
dcalage. Stages are not therefore in reality obtained in a single leap, but
constructed gradually:
the child masters the conservation of discontinuous quantity and sub-
stance at about 6 or 7: does not achieve stage 3 of the conservation of weight
until 9 or 10; does not understand the conservation of volume until ap-
proximately 11 or 12. In each case the arguments used are the same, some-
times even involving the same words. But having mastered conservation in
one substantive area, like substance, he is not able to generalize immediately
to another area like that of weight. First he acquires conservation of discon-
tinuous quantity and substance, and then of weight, and then of volume.
This dcalage, or lack of immediate transfer, illustrates how concrete is the
thought of the child during the ages of about 7 to 11 years. His reasoning is
tied to particular situations and objects; his mental operations in one area
may not be applied to another, no matter how useful this might be. (Gins-
burg and Opper 1969: 165)
In The Foundations of Primitive Thought I pointed out that the stages of cogni-
tive development are not in any way like rigid compartments, in which all the
thinking of the individual is confined, and from each of which he leaps in one
bound to the next:
they are not clearly divided from one another, although children may
seem to make very rapid progress at intervals: a child may perform, for ex-
ample, at the level of concrete operations with respect to some cognitive
tasks and still be at the pre-operatory level in the case of others (the vertical
dcalage). Thus they are not clear, totally coherent divisions appearing at
fixed intervals; the only essential feature is their order of appearance, which
may be delayed or totally inhibited by adverse environmental circum-
stances, but the stages of development cannot be inverted or omitted.
(Hallpike 1979: 27)
it is an essential postulate of developmental psychology that we can all
operate on a number of different mental levels, even if we are capable of
formal thought There is nothing contradictory in saying that, both cogni-
tively and affectively we, in our society, whatever our educational level, are
always liable to regress to more elementary levels of thought in grappling
with difficult problems, in creative thought, or when we are emotionally in-
volved in their solution. (Ibid., 33)
1

It is therefore important to note that the use of the concept of stages does
not imply that the boundaries between them are sharply defined indeed, how
could this be the case in any sort of growth or development? While a childs
modal responses to problems will be characteristic of a particular stage, we
may also expect to find some responses that are characteristic of the preceding
and succeeding stages. So exactly how clearly defined or hard the various
stages are is often a matter of some dispute among psychologists. We shall see,
for example, that with regard to moral development Kohlberg and his associ-
ates consider that the stages are harder than other psychologists are willing to
accept. But even those who dispute the hardness of the Kohlbergian stages
concede that [We] can unequivocally state our position that conceptual growth
implies progressive reorganization; and such reorganization can only be cap-
tured through a sequence of qualitatively distinct structures that is, some sort
of stage model (Damon and Hart 1988: 103).
Again, the mind is not some general-purpose entity with a unitary struc-
ture, but a complex system of inter-related structures. While, therefore, we
shall find that such broad stage concepts as the pre-operatory, concrete
operational, and formal operational are of considerable use, to expect a rigid
correlation between the stages of cognitive development in physical and social
cognition would be simplistic. Piaget himself said I must emphasize that [cog-
nitive] systems are merely partial systems with respect to the whole organiza-
tion of mind. The concept of structure does not imply just any kind of totality
and does not mean that everything is attached to everything else (Piaget 1967:
143).
Harris and Heelas (1979) make the useful distinction between the contextu-
alist and the constructivist approaches to differences in cognitive ability.
Contextualists argue that when a subject is unable to solve a particular prob-

1
Professor Jahoda, in his Psychology and Anthropology (1982), says at the beginning of a
critique of The Foundations of Primitive Thought that I have misunderstood Piagetian the-
ory in two crucial and most damaging respects, both of which are related to the no-
tion of stages. First, [Hallpike] assumed that stages are fixed and rigid, uniformly char-
acterizing the thinking of a particular individual; the second error, which follows from
the first, is the belief that the performance of an individual or set of individuals on a
specific task is sufficient for confident assignment to a given stage (Jahoda 1982: 225).
With regard to my first error, it will be obvious to anyone who compares our two
statements on this page that Jahoda attributes to me an opinion which is the exact oppo-
site of the one stated in my book. Since, therefore, I said that the thinking of any indi-
vidual could not be confined within any one stage of cognitive development, it also
follows, of logical necessity, that I could not have thought that anyones performance on
a single task could be the basis for confidently assigning him to a particular stage,
which disposes of my second error. These samples of Professor Jahodas scholarship
are, unfortunately, typical of his whole critique which does not deserve further notice
here. Other critics of The Foundations of Primitive Thought have been replied to in
Hallpike 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986(c), 1987.
The development of social cognition 105

lem, such as the conservation of quantity, this is not because the general ability
to grasp conservation is lacking, but because the subject is at present unable to
generalize that ability to the new context, through unfamiliarity with its par-
ticular form. Constructivists, on the other hand, would argue that conservation
is a qualitatively new ability that has to be developed. From another point of
view it could be said that a crucial issue is the extent to which cognitive ability
can be generalized to new situations, what we may call the permeability of
contexts. The contextualists and the constructivists therefore
differ from one another in their answer to two fundamental issues. First, are
basic psychological operations invariant throughout the course of intellec-
tual development in the individual, or are they gradually constructed? Sec-
ond, are psychological operations applied across a wide set of permeable
contexts, or are they applied within restricted and hence impermeable con-
texts? most exponents of the contextualist position stress the invariance
rather than the construction of cognitive operations, and stress the imper-
meability rather than the permeability of context. The constructivists, on the
other hand, stress exactly the opposite point of view construction together
with permeability. Our own position stresses the importance of construction
but recognises the difficulty of transferring constructed principles across
impermeable contexts. We call it local constructivism. (Harris and Heelas
1979: 211212)
While it seems clear that in cognitive development there is considerable
impermeability of context as the horizontal and vertical dcalages attest the
contextualist position can be taken to extremes: Logically, the contextualist can
plead that all the basic intellectual operations are present at birth, any failure to
demonstrate such principles being due to the difficulty of finding a suitable
context for their elicitation. This claim is however unfalsifiable, and as such,
unfruitful for experimental investigation (ibid., 214).
By local constructivism Harris and Heelas mean that we should distin-
guish between different domains of thought, such as physical, social, moral,
and so on, and not assume that the construction of concrete operations, say, in
some aspect of physical cognition will necessarily be accompanied by the
equivalent of concrete operational thought in social cognition. Their approach
(with which I generally agree) would thus be opposed to a general stage the-
ory predicting that all of a persons thinking will conform to a single stage of
development. Exactly how permeable contexts are is likely to remain a matter
of dispute for some time, but there seems no reason why social cognition in
primitive society might not on the whole be somewhat more developed than
physical cognition.
3. The development of social cognition
So far we have been examining Piagets theory of cognitive development
largely in relation to the properties of the physical world, and we must now
consider how far his theory is relevant to the understanding of social and
moral issues. When we interact with things, Their movement is predictable
from a knowledge (or perception) of the physical forces exerted upon them.
There is then a direct tie between the action exerted on an object and the
movement of the object (Glick 1978: 2). But in the case of people how they
react is not a simple function of how one acted towards them but is mediated
by inner states which are unobservable such as how they interpreted ones act
and what they hope to accomplish by their response. Secondly, the people one
encounters behave differently and the meaning of their actions differs depend-
ing on the nature of ones relationship to them (e.g. relations based on kinship,
friendship, power, contract, chance encounters) (Hoffman 1983: 42).
On the other hand, our common humanity and typically membership of
the same culture provides us with a very important basis for obtaining predict-
ability and stability of representations:
the observer and the model are both humans with the same nervous
system and a shared background of similar experience, especially during the
long period of socialization. Given their similarity in organizational struc-
tures, and the development and cultural similarities discussed earlier in the
paper, the observer and the model are apt to respond to stimuli in similar
ways. Thus, if the observer relies only on social scripts and shared belief
systems, and attributes his own interpretation of events to the model, he will
generally be correct. (Hoffman 1983: 49)
Indeed, once we think of social behaviour and institutions, rather than of
individual behaviour alone, there are a number of important resemblances be-
tween physical and social systems. Social institutions and practices tend to be
orderly, stable, and predictable, so that in the Western cultural tradition we use
the word law to describe these aspects of both the social and natural realms.
Both social and natural systems have differing orders of complexity, and hier-
archical structures occur in both, and can be analyzed in terms of part-whole
relationships and seriations, while the components of machines and organisms
can also be said to have functions, and this concept, too, is also appropriate to
many social institutions.
Again, our understanding of things and the institutions of our society have
a similar series of cognitive levels; those of action, governed by implicit knowl-
edge which is the level of the concrete, the immediate, and the particular; the
level of explicit verbal knowledge, which is related to an effective part-whole
analysis; and the level of an increasingly comprehensive and abstract grasp of
underlying principles, whether of nature and society, the level of formal opera-
tions. In this development the understanding of society as well as nature also
becomes more differentiated and integrated, from the global and prototypical
concepts of the pre-operatory stage to the analytical and taxonomic concepts of
concrete and formal operations, and simultaneously loses its static quality and
becomes more flexible and mobile. Conceptual realism, too, is as relevant to the
understanding of society as it is to that of nature, and we shall see that the im-
putation of purpose to nature is one of its most important manifestations. (It
should be noted, however, that while conservation is a central concept of Pia-

gets theory of cognitive development as applied to things, there is no clear
counterpart to this in the understanding of social systems.)
1

In the growth of understanding, therefore, we would expect to find that the
basic operations of reversibility, decentration, and correlation or compensation
are relevant to both the natural and social realms, and that such general attrib-
utes of cognitive development as part-whole analysis, mobility and flexibility,
differentiation and integration, and the ability to articulate reasons verbally,
will be relevant to social as well as to physical cognition. The aim of the subject
in relation to both physical and social reality has a basic similarity: to attain
stable representations which are not overthrown by fresh experience, as the
necessary basis for purposeful actions. Rules, customs, and institutions of soci-
ety clearly provide a stable body of phenomena for comprehension and in
principle Piagets stages of cognitive development by which an increasingly
general series of equilibrations is constructed, ending in appropriate circum-
stances with the stage of formal operations, are therefore relevant to the
comprehension of any type of stable system, physical or social. But it should
also be remembered that our social interactions involve relations of emotion,
authority, dependency, and formal instruction from adults on what is proper
which are different from our interactions with things, and for this reason in
particular Piagets scheme of development cannot be applied to social
cognition in any simple and unmodified fashion.
The problems of social cognition include the understanding of the institu-
tions of government, the nature of social conventions, mutual perspective tak-
ing, and self-understanding, and we may now consider these in detail, begin-
ning with Connells (1971) study of the growth of political understanding,
2
be-
cause the development of the institutions of government is fundamental in so-
cial evolution. Connells study of Australian children focuses in particular on
developing concepts of role structures and their differentiation, authority, hier-
archy, party conflict, ideology, and the gradual integration of these ideas into a
systemic whole.
The social understanding of children below about 7 has many features in
common with pre-operatory thought generally. Connell notes that the children
therefore find great difficulty in grasping the structure of political roles (their

1
Conservation is obviously relevant to an essential feature of matter its lack of change
in certain essential respects despite changes in appearance but in the case of social
systems there is no underlying and unchanging reality apart from the relations them-
selves, and hence there is nothing to be conserved. Kohlberg (1984: 889) equates the
stability of a cognitive act (such as a reversible justice operation) under apparent trans-
formations or as the basis of a widened system of transformations, with conservation,
but it is significant that in his actual analyses of justice operations he does not use the
concept of conservation. It is surely more fruitful to regard conservation as a special
case of stability which is peculiarly appropriate to the physical world, rather than trying
to incorporate the notion of stability in that of conservation.
2
It is disappointing that Connells work is not mentioned in Haste and Torney-Purta
(eds.) The Development of Political Understanding (1992).
hierarchical relation and their specialized functions), the distinction between
reigning and ruling, and the functions of government:
political consciousness at these ages is a collection of scraps of informa-
tion, unrelated to each other and with no special status to distinguish them
from other bits and pieces of the world The character of this political con-
sciousness clearly reflects more general features of the thought of children at
the stage of intuitive [preoperational] thought. We may note the arguments
that leap so suddenly from topic to topic the seizing on apparently irrele-
vant details, and the apparently random juxtaposition of details, the re-
peated bending of the reality to the demands of a momentary stream of
thought. More generally, the punctuate character of the understanding of
politics reflect the lack of synthesizing power in intuitive thought. We may
agree that these children lack a conception of political structure, not because
they lack sources of information about it, but because they lack the cognitive
equipment to represent it. (Connell 1971: 19)
With the development of concrete operations at about seven children in the
initial period develop stable concepts of social roles, but this does not mean
that they can articulate the structure of the state or even a concrete notion of
the government. Their idea of government seems to derive from the aware-
ness that children of five and six have of an external world with special and
important people in it, though with no distinction between political and
other activity. So, first, the idea of a governmental or political role such as
Prime Minister becomes stabilized, and such a person is thought of as holding
a position, to which is allocated a set of tasks (ibid., 235). But the conception of
government held by children of about 8 still remains undifferentiated:
The figures in it are rather vague; and because the children have little con-
ception of political structure, they cannot readily see the boundaries of po-
litical spheres of authority ruling the country, making people happy,
making good laws, etc., are all statements potentially embracing things that
the Prime Minister does, but also hundreds of things that he does not do or
that other people do (ibid., 28). We may propose that the idea of the gov-
ernment at this stage arises from the combination of the idea of the special
with the rudimentary idea of power (ibid., 28).
Governmental figures are therefore both special and powerful, and it will be
evident from this material that the idea of personal authority, such as a father,
chief or king, who is born to rule and give orders, is far easier to understand
than the idea of a legally constituted authority. The idea of a role then devel-
ops, followed by the differentiation of roles and the understanding of hierar-
chical relations.
The Queen is the first political figure to be sorted out from the others. Chil-
dren are taught in infant school of symbols and ceremonies of a unique kind
the reigning as opposed to ruling. But up to the end of primary school,
the typical idea of the Queen is that of a particularly powerful ruler living in
an ambience of romance and ceremony. By the age of 12 the picture of the
Queen changes. The elements from the common task pool [making laws,
punishing criminals, providing public services, etc.] are gradually dropped,
leaving only the ceremonial ones behind. (Ibid., 3032)

This process of differentiation between types of roles and political activities
continues as the basis of a more integrated idea of government and state as to-
tal social systems, and finally
By adolescence most have a firm idea that different political positions have
different tasks associated with them, even if they cannot describe them accu-
rately The understanding of the Leader of the Oppositions tasks requires
an understanding of instituted conflict in the parliament; the sorting out of
the Prime Minster from other Ministers involves a conception of hierarchy
and an awareness of the multiplicity of governmental activities. (Ibid., 367)
The understanding of hierarchy is an essential aspect of this process of ar-
ticulation, and seems to begin with those primitive conceptions of power al-
ready alluded to: the young children apply to political figures the same simple
ideas of command they apply to bosses of all kinds, the idea of one person
giving instruction to others (ibid., 38). The first step in the elaboration of this
idea comes when the children place the major political figures themselves in
vertical relationships. The commonest version of this is the idea of the Queen
as a big Prime Minster, a person who can tell the Prime Minister what to
do (ibid., 39). At about 10 to 11 understanding about promotion from lower to
higher status gets into the idea of a series of positions through which the can-
didates moves and at this age, too, some vague intuitions about power and
prominence crystallize into a conception of hierarchical role structure (ibid.,
42). The children are not, of course, formally instructed in such a concept. We
must regard their grasp of this principle, which appears at much the same age
in their comments on several different subject matters, as an achievement of
pure thought. The details are filled in at later ages and even then rather erratic-
ally (ibid., 42). Hierarchy includes the idea of asymmetric transitive relations
and children are able to grasp this in the ordering of sticks or numbers in order
of length and magnitude well before they can understand the hierarchy of so-
cial relationships (ibid., 51). This is an example of physical concepts developing
before their social counterparts. Emler (1992) draws attention to the important
effects of schooling in developing childrens understanding of the implications
of formal authority, and the distinction between official obligations and per-
sonal wishes.
The idea of party conflict, again, shows a clear development from a more
primitive prototype, in this case that of enmity. The earliest conception of con-
flict in the political world is the idea of war, involving a relationship of enmity
(ibid., 43), though preoperatory children can grasp that this is between groups,
since they are accustomed in primary school to team games which provide
them with the experience of group conflict. They can also make sense about
their information about war while assimilating it to the schema of conflict be-
tween goodies and baddies that they get in other contexts such as TV cartoons,
stories of cops and robbers, and westerns (ibid., 44). But the younger children
do not understand political conflict as concerned with issues of policy, because
they do not yet think of politics as a matter of choice between different goals:
When they realize the instrumental character of political action and the fact
that different courses of action are supported in order to realize different
goals, they have grasped the nature of debate over policy. Issue conflict in
this sense is commonly mastered about the age of 12 [beginning of formal
operations], and about this age there is a great expansion in the childs
awareness of issues and propensity to take sides over them. (Ibid., 4950)
A process of decentering, typical of concrete operations, is also involved
here: at 6 only one side is the enemy but at 9 both are enemies of each other,
and A similar though more complex decentering is involved in the idea of is-
sue-conflict: the child cannot conceive of the relationship of conflict over issues
until he can see that there is an argument involving two sides and can repre-
sent each side as disagreeing with the other (ibid., 51).
A true grasp of issue-conflict only appears with the stage of formal opera-
tions.
As we have seen, issue-conflict involves an idea of a means-end relationship,
an implication between what is done and what is intended to be achieved.
The children commonly represent the relationship between the opposing
parties to an issue-conflict, or the relationship between their views, as one of
logical incompatibility, and the relationship between means and ends by re-
ciprocal implications. These are operations in the logic of propositions, not
of classes or relations, and if Piagets analysis of the development of intelli-
gence is correct, the ability to wield the propositional operations comes after
the others, and first appears with the onset of formal thought at about age
11. We may therefore argue that the idea of issue-conflict, but not the idea of
hierarchy, is one of the early products of formal thought. (Ibid., 51, and see
also Greenstein 1965: 7071.)
Thus to understand party conflict in relation to government and the choice of a
ruling party, the child must synthesize the idea of parliamentary conflict and
the exercise of governmental power from the age of 12 on, a conception of
the parties competing for the right to exercise power, and only one of these do-
ing so at a time, is dominant (ibid., 62). Formal operations thus provide the
cognitive basis for the use of ideological concepts and arguments, and at this
stage we also find the development of the ability to think in general terms
about society as such. Adolescents use words like communism and democ-
racy to describe general characteristics of society. And they begin to think
about societies as wholes It is at this age that comprehensive images of the
class structure appear; as Adelson and ONeil (1966) have shown, in adoles-
cence there is a marked increase in the ability to reason about the organization
of a hypothetical society. Thus two of the bases of ideology, the capacity to
wield abstract social concepts, and the recognition of whole societies as a sub-
ject of argument, appear and become common in adolescence. (Ibid., 91)
The actual development of a formal political ideology is much rarer, and
largely confined to those who have a special interest in politics.
As Connell says with regard to this general development of political under-
standing:
The distance between the child and politics, and the intermediary role of
adults, makes this learning situation substantially different from the childs
basic learning about his physical environment It is clear that we are a long
way indeed from the paradigm situation in Piagets research, the direct con-
struction by the child of interpretations of his environment independent of

adults and their thought Clearly, the stages in the development of chil-
drens thinking identified by Piaget and others will be inapplicable in detail,
because of the constant intrusion of adult thought forms into the childs
thinking, because in fact adult thought is here the stuff of the childrens con-
struction.
But the most casual study of the interviews, the slightest acquaintance with
the children themselves, is enough to show that they are not simply repro-
ducing adult ideas nor being processed by agencies of socialization. Each
childs constructions are to a degree idiosyncratic, and taking the group as a
whole we can see their political thinking passing through a sequence of
phases which are much more than movements in the accumulation of a
stock of adult ideas. (Ibid., 230)
Table 1: Stages in the development of political belief
Interpretations Stances
Stage Characteristic Stage Characteristics
1. Intuitive
thinking
Confusion of political and
non-political material; wild
leaps in narrative and ar-
gument; fantasy.
2. Primitive
realism
Disappearance of fantasy;
identification of a distinct
political world at a remove
from the self; appearance of
task pool.
1. Politics not problem-
atic.
Most judge-
ments ad hoc,
unqualified, not
consistent.
A few stable
attitudes
formed under
adult instruc-
tion.
3. Construc-
tion of po-
litical order
Division of task pool; ex-
pansion of concrete detail
about politics; perception of
the multiple relationships
among political actors.
i. Isolated
stances.
(a) Positions
taken on issues:
preferences
expressed.
2. Politics
problem-
atic.
ii. Inter-
connected
stances.
4. Ideologi-
cal thinking
Use of abstract terms in po-
litical argument; concep-
tions of societies and poli-
ties as wholes.
Ideologies
(b) Alternative
actions consid-
ered and some-
times under-
taken.

Connells Stage 1 corresponds in many respects to pre-operational thought:
Stage 2 to earlier concrete operations; Stage 3 to more advanced concrete opera-
tions; and Stage 4 to formal operations. Summarizing briefly, we can say that
the early concrete operational stage is marked by stable concepts of social roles,
with some differentiation, and that in the later concrete operational stage there
develops a notion of hierarchy in an explicit form, and the decentering of party
conflict the concrete political order while the grasp of the whole political
system which includes an understanding of policy disputes is not attained un-
til the stage of formal operations, at which stage subjects are also able to think
about society in general and to formulate ideas about hypothetical forms of
social organization. It is clear that very much more advanced cognitive devel-
opment is required to function adequately in a modern constitutional democracy
such as Australia than in a feudal monarchy or an uncentralized tribal society.
(What proportion of voters actually function adequately in a particular democ-
racy will be a matter of local circumstances, of course.)
Turiel (1980: 8395) has developed a series of stages in childrens under-
standing of social convention which are a valuable complement to Connells
research on the development of political understanding. In the first stage (up to
6 or 7) the social perspective is rigid yet atomistic: conventions are descriptions
of what must be, yet form an uncoordinated set of prescriptions. This view
breaks down and is replaced by the emergence of an authoritarian model of the
social system as the basis of rules. This again breaks down and yields to a more
systematic concept of social structure as a system of fixed roles and hierarchies.
This again dissolves and is replaced by a more flexible concept of the social
order as one which acquires a shared body of mutual expectations in order that
society can function in a smooth and integrated fashion. In this final stage, only
reached by subjects of approximate ages 18 25, conventions are regarded as
uniformities that are functional in coordinating social interaction. Shared
knowledge, in the form of conventions among members of social groups facili-
tates interaction and the operation of the social system. Alternative forms of
action may be equally valid, but uniform or specified courses of actions on the
part of members of the social system are necessary. The need for uniformity is
based on mutual expectations held by members of social system that each indi-
vidual will act in specified ways to achieve coordination. Individuals therefore
observe conventions in the expectations that others will, but conventions are
arbitrary. We shall see that this, like Connells model, ties in closely with Kohl-
bergs stages of moral development.
Finally, we must consider the various ways in which our understanding of
ourselves develops. From a survey of the literature on the development of self-
understanding Damon and Hart conclude that there is general agreement on
the following features of the process:
1. An early awareness of self based on ones own activity and contin-
gencies arising from such activity.
2. An early awareness of physical categories of self like gender and size.
3. An age-related shift from defining oneself through external character-
istics (physical, material, and active categories) to defining oneself
through internal qualities (psychological and spiritual categories).
4. An age-related tendency to integrate the diverse aspects of self into a
seemingly coherent system. (Damon and Hart 1988: 54)
Some of the characteristics of self-understanding which are widely reported
as only developing with adolescence are:
1. The self is characterized by the ideological beliefs held.
2. The mental world is believed to have its own system of internal
regulation.

3. The past and future of the self become increasingly important (the
self as a stable, continuing system).
4. Distinctiveness from others is increasingly mentioned in self-
definition.
5. The primacy and immediacy of self-knowledge, as opposed to the
difficulty of knowing others, distinguishes the self from others.
6. The mind as the active processor of conscious experience can affect
behaviour.
7. The self becomes the judge of selfs actions.
8. Development of a feeling of self-direction connected with a sense of
pride.
9. The emergence of both an awareness of self-awareness and a belief in
unconscious experience so a distinction between real and bogus
selves.
10. Self-statements are organized into a self-system.
11. An awareness of potential conflicts among aspects of the self-system.
(ibid., 3339, from Table 2.1)
Damon and Hart have developed an elaborate stage model of the develop-
ment of self-understanding which is too complex to discuss here, but in general
their analysis of the 4th (highest) stage supports the findings of other research-
ers that it is characterized by the ability to reflect on ones own thought proc-
esses, a definition of self in terms of ones own inner awareness rather than on
ones social relations with others alone (which is far more characteristic of
Stage 3), and that subjects at this stage can differentiate between various as-
pects of themselves and integrate them into a coherent system, parallel to their
ability to think of society as a total system. It is also important to note that only
a small minority of their subjects reached this level, which is not attained as a
matter of course by all adolescents, or adults for that matter. Nevertheless,
these advanced conceptions of the self are of the first importance in the devel-
opment of the highest levels of moral understanding.
It will have become clear in this survey of the stages of cognitive develop-
ment in the understanding of social relations and the self that there is a signifi-
cant resemblance between Piagets stages and those of social and self-
cognition, so, in the preoperatory period
It is important to note the existence of a strong relationship between the ego-
centric character of the thought processes during this period and the intui-
tive character of these inter-dependent exchanges pre-operational reason-
ing centers on static configurations and implies a primacy of the immediate,
subjective, personal point of view. (Voyat 1978: 15)
The attainment of concrete operations, however,
implies that [the child] will no longer think only from his own point of
view but that he will be able to coordinate points of view, will be able to dis-
cuss, reflect, organize the exposition of ideas; in other words, common rules
will underlie collective activities. Above all, he is truly understandable to
peers, parents, teachers and society in general. (Ibid., 15)
It is also generally agreed that formal operations lead to a further major change
in social thinking: the ability to conceptualize society as a system of interac-
tions between the holders of social roles, and to use abstract concepts in the
evaluation of conduct.
a number of studies [established] the greater logical adequacy of higher
moral stages in comparison to lower moral stages. Some of these studies
such as that of Lee 1971 show that the development of higher forms of
moral judgement correlate with the development of higher levels of logical
thinking as the child grows older. Other studies demonstrate even stronger
and more specific bonds between advanced logical reasoning and advanced
social and moral judgement. Kuhn, Langer, Kohlberg, and Haan (1977) and
Tomlinson-Keasy and Keasy (1974) have reported results indicating that cer-
tain levels of logical thinking may actually be necessary for the emergence of
higher moral stages. Specifically, both studies suggest that Piagets stages of
formal operations may provide a necessary condition for Kohlbergs stages 5
and 6. (Damon 1980: 61)
As in Piagets theory, states of cognitive equilibrium are broken up by fresh
experience and equilibrium is then regained at a higher level. This was very
obvious in Turiels account of successive levels in the understanding of con-
ventions: transitional states are characterized by dis-equilibrium, as mani-
fested in conflicts, contradictions, and inconsistencies (Turiel 1975: 25). And, of
course, social interaction itself is the prime mover in this whole process of cog-
nitive development:
It seems that children in social interaction must restructure their cognitive
performances in order to coordinate them with others The mechanism of
change and coordination, i.e. social conflict is more effective than learning or
imitation. Doise found that more progress takes place when children
with different cognitive strategies work together than when children with
the same strategies do so (Mugny and Doise 1978: 181). (Damon 1981: 165).
Or, as another psychologist puts it: socialized thought progressively fa-
vours the resolution of contradictions: it is much easier not to correct oneself
when one thinks for oneself in a private way. It is much harder to contradict
ourselves when our peers are there to remind us of what has been said before
and what has been agreed upon (Voyat 1978: 16).
Having surveyed the general development of social cognition and self-
understanding we are now in a position to consider the work of Piaget and
Kohlberg on moral development. In sections 4 and 5 I shall summarize their
theories, and postpone a critical comment on them until section 6.
4. Piagets theory of moral development
Piagets main work on the development of moral understanding, The Moral
Judgment of the Child, was published seventy years ago, and while it has had a
seminal influence it is nevertheless distinctly antiquated. But I have thought it
worthwhile to summarize its conclusions in some detail, partly because they
form the basis for the later work of Kohlberg, which is essentially Piagetian,
but also because Piagets scheme of moral development still remains very illu-
Piagets theory of moral development 115

minating and captures a number of its essential aspects. He begins by defining
morality in Kantian fashion: All morality consists in a system of rules, and the
essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual
acquires for these rules (Piaget 1932: 1). In later parts of his book he also gives
some attention to the question of love, and so modifies his position, since love
and benevolence in some ways conflict with a rule-based morality, as we have
seen, but for our purposes we may concentrate on Piagets investigation of mo-
rality as a system of rules.
The notions of authority, duty, the right, obligation, justice, punishment,
and responsibility are of course inherent in all morality considered as a system
of rules, and Piaget begins by studying childrens games, particularly those of
marbles as played in Switzerland, to elucidate the ways in which rules are un-
derstood by children of ages from three to fifteen. He asked children about the
rules of the game, whether these could be changed, why the rules must be
obeyed and so on, and also observed childrens actual play to see to what ex-
tent this accorded with their verbal or theoretical statements about rules. He
then told the children various stories about children and parents, involving
such things as deliberate and accidental faults, punishment and blame, and
asked the children why they considered some acts more serious offences than
others, why some acts should be punished more severely than others and so
on.
As the result of these investigations he concluded that childrens moral
ideas begin with a state of moral realism or heteronomy whose chief charac-
teristics are as follows:
1. Unilateral respect for authority.
2. Rules are external to the mind and have their own existence.
3. Conformity to the rules is good in itself.
4. Conformity is to the letter of the rules rather than to their spirit.
5. Attention is focused on acts, not on motives and intentions.
6. Responsibility is objective and moral guilt consists in being found
out.
7. There is a belief in immanent justice.
8. Punishment must be expiatory and retributive.
But it is important to note that for Piaget moral development does not pro-
ceed by the clearly defined stages which characterize other aspects of cognitive
development related to space, time, causality, number, and so on. One of his
reasons for believing this is the obvious importance of cultural influences on
the childs moral development, and the other will be discussed in the next sec-
tion. Let us now examine these characteristics of moral realism in more detail,
beginning with childrens understanding of authority. This is clearly derived
from their experience of their parents, and as Piaget says
in ordinary life it is impossible to avoid certain injunctions of which the
purport does not immediately seem to have any sense from the childs point
of view. Such are going to bed and having meals at given hours, not spoiling
things, not touching the things on Daddys table, and so forth. Now, these
commandments, received and applied before being really understood, natu-
rally give rise to a whole ethic of heteronomy with a feeling of pure obliga-
tion, with remorse in the case of violation of the law, and so forth. (Piaget
1952: 420)
By ethic of heteronomy, he means an ethic whose authority is applied ex-
ternally, unilaterally, and depends on a qualitative difference between the law
giver (the parent) and the recipient (the child). Moral realism is thus a product
of constraint, in particular, rather than of mutual agreement or co-operation
between equal parties.
Flavell describes the consequences of constraint in Piagetian theory as fol-
lows:
The child adapts to the prohibitions and sanctions handed down from on
high by reifying them (a moral realism akin to the intellectual realism studied
earlier) into moral absolutes or simple givens which are unquestioned and
sacred, in theory if not in practice. Hence, the child views wrong doing in
objective rather than subjective terms, is confined to the letter rather than the
spirit of the law, and is incapable of seeing morality-relevant acts either in
terms of the inner motives of the actor or in terms of the social-interpersonal
meaning of the act itself (i.e., as a breach of solidarity and mutual trust be-
tween group members). For a morality of constraint, it must be the overt
consequences alone which count in assessing the wrongfulness of acts (un-
truths, clumsiness, and the like), not the inner intentions and motives in-
volved. Similarly, justice reduces simply to whatever the authority com-
mands, rather than being seen as an equitable distribution of sanctions and
rewards, these sanctions and rewards meaningfully related to the acts which
engendered them. (Flavell 1963: 296)
But the constraint of parental and similar unilateral authority is not the only
factor at work here. Another is that while children even at 3 to 4 can differenti-
ate between intentional faults and involuntary breaches of the moral code, they
do not extend this new awareness very readily to others:
Generally speaking, it is not going too far to say that the child like our-
selves is more severe with others than with himself. The reason for this is
quite simple. The conduct of other people appears in its outward shape long
before we can understand the intentions behind it; so that we are apt imme-
diately to compare this outward shape with the established rule and to judge
the action by this essentially objective criterion. It is only by a continuous ef-
fort of generosity and sympathy [my italics] that we can resist such a tendency
and try to understand other peoples reactions in terms of their intentions. It
is obvious that the child is capable very early of such intropathy. But it is
also obvious that during this phase when respect for rules still outweighs co-
operation to judge psychologically will require a greater effort in the case
of other peoples actions than in that of our own. (Piaget 1952: 4245)
Thirdly, and here we come to a cognitive rather than a social factor of pri-
mary importance, the childs moral realism is only a facet of his intellectual
realism:
Being therefore a realist in every domain, it is not surprising that the child
should from the first realize and even reify the moral laws which he
Piagets theory of moral development 117

obeys. It is forbidden to lie, to steal, to spoil things, and so forth all, so
many laws which will be conceived as existing in themselves, independently
of the mind [my italics] and in consequence independently of individual cir-
cumstances and of intentions. For this is the place to recall the fundamental
fact that, just because of the general realism of his spontaneous thought, the
child, up to the age of about 7 8, always regards the notion of law as simul-
taneously moral and physical. Indeed, we have tried to show that until the
age of 7 8 there does not exist for the child a single purely mechanical law
of nature. If clouds move swiftly when the wind is blowing, this is not only
because of a necessary connection between the movement of the wind and
that of the clouds; it is also and primarily because the clouds must hurry
along to bring us rain, or night, and so on If boats remain afloat on the
water while stones sink to the bottom, this does not happen merely for rea-
sons relating to their weight; it is because things have to be so in virtue of
the World-Order. In short, the universe is permeated with moral rules;
physical regularity is not dissociated from moral obligation and social rule
What, then, do intentions matter? The problem of responsibility is simply
to know whether a law has been respected or violated. Just as if we trip, in-
dependently of any carelessness, we fall to the ground by virtue of the law
of gravity, so tampering with the truth, even unwittingly, will be called a lie
and incur punishment. If the fault remains unnoticed, things themselves will
take charge of punishing us. (Piaget 1952: 429430)
Hence the belief in immanent justice, which is the belief in automatic pun-
ishments which emanate from things themselves (Piaget 1932: 250). For exam-
ple, suppose that a boy, who has been stealing apples, on his way home falls
into a river because a bridge breaks: according to the assumptions of immanent
justice the bridge breaks because he has been stealing apples.
It will be clear that the various facets of moral realism are closely interde-
pendent, and highly legalistic, and so punishment is expiatory and bound up
with the rule of authority and constraint. It has an arbitrary quality (anything
that is painful) so that e.g. for telling a lie there can be an infinite variety of pun-
ishments; the only thing that matters being a due proportion between the suf-
fering inflicted and the gravity of the offence (Piaget 1932: 203). Disobedience
the principle of all sin is a breach of the normal relations between parent
and child: some reparation is therefore necessary The pain inflicted thus
seems to re-establish the relations that had momentarily been interrupted, and
in this way the idea of expiation becomes incorporated in the values of the mo-
rality of authority (ibid., 32122).
But Piaget notes that no children of any age in his study accepted that col-
lective or group responsibility and punishment were fair. In some cases, how-
ever, when the story given to the children is about an offence where the group
itself does not know who the culprit is, the youngest children thought that all
should be punished because there should be punishment at all costs, not be-
cause the group was morally responsible.
The opposite of moral realism or heteronomy is moral autonomy, reached
by children at about 12 to 15, and its characteristics are as follows:
1. The rationality of authority.
2. Authority is based on mutual respect and co-operation.
3. Rules are conventions produced by thought and agreement.
4. Conformity to rules must consider what the rules are for.
5. There is conformity to the spirit rather than to the letter of the rules.
6. Attention is given to motives and intentions as well as to acts.
7. There is subjective responsibility, conscience, which involves more
than not being caught.
8. The laws of nature and those of morality are distinguished.
9. Punishment is reciprocal rather than expiatory and retributive.
How does this transformation occur? According to Piaget co-operation with
the childs peers, as opposed to obedience to parental authority, is the most
important factor and this new morality is
formed out of the reciprocal relationships among status peers and based
on mutual, rather than unilateral respect. With a growing understanding of
the role of motives in the actions of self and others and of the social implica-
tions of anti-social behavior, the child comes to the basic raison detre of mo-
rality and begins to conceive (if not always to follow in practice) moral ac-
tion as an autonomous good essential to the intact functioning of any social
unit. With this orientation, rules become rational conventions which serve
orderly group action rather than arbitrary and untouchable dicta; malfea-
sance is judged by motivational as well as objective criteria; and justice, now
placed in a social context, is seen in terms of equality and equity. (Flavell
1963: 296)
The child gradually becomes capable of grasping a system of rules as a stable
entity, within which he can locate himself in a set of reciprocal duties and
rights towards others, and he also develops an increasing awareness of the sig-
nificance of the intentions and motives of others. Before assessing Piagets the-
ory we should consider the work of Kohlberg, which is an extension and modi-
fication of that of Piaget.
5. Kohlbergs theory of moral development
The late Lawrence Kohlberg was the most important scholar to take up Piagets
theory of moral development, and while remaining essentially Piagetian, both
empirically and theoretically he made many revisions to Piagets scheme of
moral development, and Kohlbergs theory itself has been considerably revised
in the last thirty years.
1
He follows Piaget in regarding the experience of cogni-
tive conflict as an essential factor in development:

1
My account of Kohlbergs work is based on The Philosophy of Moral Development (1981)
and The Psychology of Moral Development (1984). These are volumes of collected papers
written at different dates totalling about eleven hundred pages, in the course of which
Kohlbergs views sometimes change. It is therefore difficult to summarize his theory
concisely.
Kohlbergs theory of moral development 119

Structural theory stresses that movement to the next stage occurs through re-
flective reorganization arising from sensed contradictions in ones current
stage structure. Experiences of cognitive conflict can occur either through
exposure to decision situations that arouse internal contradictions in ones
moral reasoning structure, or through exposure to the moral reasoning of
significant others which is discrepant in content or structure from ones own
reasoning. (Kohlberg 1984: 2023)
Like Piaget, Kohlberg regards morality as essentially concerned with rules
and conduct, but gives justice a central importance which it does not possess in
Piagets theory. A moral obligation is an obligation to respect the right or
claim of another person. A moral principle is a principle for resolving compet-
ing claims: you versus me, you versus a third person. There is only one princi-
pled basis for resolving claims: justice or equality. Treat every persons claim
impartially regardless of the person (Kohlberg 1981: 39). Justice, therefore,
rather than the rules of Piagets theory, occupies the central position in Kohl-
bergs theory, not only because Kohlberg is committed to an explicitly Rawl-
sian theory of morality, but because the understanding of justice has strong
cognitive implications:
The two principal justice operations are the operations of equality and recip-
rocity, both of which have logical parallels. Justice is a matter of distribution,
involving operations of equality and reciprocity. Distribution is by equality
(equity, distributive equality proportionate to circumstances and need) or it
is by reciprocity (merit or desert, reward in return for effort, virtue or talent).
Each stage defines and uses these operations differently, and each higher
stage uses them in a more reversible and equilibrated way. (Kohlberg 1981:
201)
It is in justice operations especially that reversibility plays such a central role in
moral thinking:
Reversibility is a property of a system in equilibrium, it is the idea that a
moral judgement must be reversible, that we must be willing to live with
our judgments or decisions when we trade places with others in a situation
being judged. This, of course, is the formal criterion implied in the Golden
Rule: Its right if its still right when you put yourself in the others place
(ibid., 197)
Kohlberg therefore disagrees with Piaget in several important respects. As
we have seen, he regards justice rather than rules as the core of morality, and
this in turn leads him to a view of the stages of moral development which dif-
fers from Piagets. It will be recalled that Piaget distinguishes between the het-
eronomous and autonomous types of morality not as hard stages, but as ideal
types. While Piaget agreed that the transition from the heteronomous to the
autonomous had a age-developmental aspect, even though many adolescents
or even adults could remain in the heteronomous stage, he rejected the idea
that these were true stages, on the grounds, first, of the great influence of edu-
cation and social background on morality (Piaget 1932: 284). In Kohlbergs the-
ory, however, moral development can be analyzed into a series of hard stages
because he gives greater emphasis to the purely cognitive aspects of moral rea-
soning than does Piaget. For both Kohlberg and Piaget stages can be defined as
1) implying invariant order or sequence and the varying environmental
conditions. 2) Implying a structured whole, a deep structure or organiza-
tion uniting a variety of superficial different types of response. 3) Involving
hierarchical integrations. This implies that higher stages include lower
stages as components reintegrated at a higher level. Lower stages, then are
in a sense available to, or comprehended by, people at a higher stage [but
the converse is not true]. There is, however, an hierarchical order of prefer-
ence for higher over lower stages (Kohlberg 1981: 136) A cognitive-
developmental theory of moralization holds that there is a sequence of moral
stages for the same basic reasons that there are cognitive or logico-
mathematical stages; that is, because cognitive-structural reorganization to-
wards the more equilibrated occur in the course of interaction between the
organism and the environment. In the area of logic, Piaget holds that a psy-
chological theory of development is closely linked to a theory of normative
logic. Following Piaget, I claim the same is true in the area of moral judg-
ments. (ibid., 133)
Piagets second reason for rejecting a hard stage model was that the two
moralities of heteronomy and autonomy originate in different types of experi-
ence and social relationship, those with parents and with peers (Piaget 1932:
324); and that the two moralities are in opposition to each other, rather than the
autonomous developing as a transformation of the heteronomous (ibid., 324).
For these two reasons he was unwilling to maintain that moral development
occurred in a sequence of hard stages. Kohlbergs research, however, showed
that the heteronomous/autonomous distinction was not apparently related to
any specific type of social relationship:
These two types did not appear to define two different types of social re-
lationship or two different types of respect. Type/Stage 1 did not appear to
be tied to a sense of heteronomous respect toward adults and rules
grounded on a sense of reverence and awe for them but instead appeared to
be tied more to a calculated deference to a superior power and to obedience
and punishment which cut across relations towards adults and towards
peers. Similarly, Type/Stage 2 did not appear to be orientated to an intrinsic
feeling of mutual respect and solidarity, but instead reflected an instrumen-
tal understanding of relationships that cut across those with both adults and
peers These considerations led me (Kohlberg 1958) to conclude that while
Piagets typology suggested some aspects or dimensions of moral judgment
related to age and cognitive development, they did not define stages or even
developmental types as structured wholes or interlocked patterns of consis-
tency of moral judgment response. (Kohlberg 1984: 656)
We shall see that Piagets heteronomy/autonomy are incorporated into
Kohlbergs stages as types A and B morality, and we shall therefore postpone
consideration of them until Kohlbergs stages have been reviewed. It will be
clear from the following table that these stages go far beyond justice to provide
a general model of the development of social cognition.

Table 2: Kohlbergs stages of moral development
Content of stage
Level/ Stage What Is Right Reasons for Doing Right Social Perspective
Level I: Pre-
Conventional
Stage I Heterono-
mous Morality
To avoid breaking rules
backed by punishment,
obedience for its own
sake, and avoiding physi-
cal damage to persons
and property.
Avoidance of punishment,
and the superior power of
authorities.
Egocentric point of view.
Doesnt consider the interests
of others or recognize that
they differ from the actors:
doesnt relate two points of
view. Actions are considered
physically rather than in
terms of psychological inter-
ests of others. Confusion of
authoritys perspective with
ones own.
Stage 2 Individual-
ism, Instrumental
Purpose, and Ex-
change
Following rules only
when it is to someones
immediate interest; acting
to meet ones own inter-
ests and needs and letting
others do the same. Right
is also whats fair, whats
an equal exchange, a deal,
an agreement.
To serve ones own needs or
interests in a world where
you have to recognize that
other people have their
interests, too.
Concrete individualistic perspec-
tive. Aware that everybody
has his own interest to pursue
and these conflict, so that
right is relative (in the con-
crete individualistic sense).
Level II: Conventional
Stage 3
Mutual Interper-
sonal Expectations,
Relationships, and
Interpersonal Con-
formity
Living up to what is ex-
pected by people close to
you or what people gen-
erally expect of people in
your role as son, brother,
friend, etc. Being good is
important and means
having good motives,
showing concern about
others. It also means
keeping mutual relation-
ships, such as trust, loy-
alty, respect, and grati-
tude.
The need to be a good per-
son in your own eyes and
those of others. Your caring
for others. Belief in the
Golden Rule. Desire to
maintain rules and author-
ity which support stereo-
typical good behaviour.
Perspective of the individual in
relationships with other indi-
viduals. Aware of shared feel-
ings, agreements, and expec-
tations which take primacy
over individual interests. Re-
lates points of view through
the concrete Golden Rule
putting yourself in the other
persons shoes. Does not yet
consider generalized system
perspective.
Stage 4 Social
System and Con-
science
Fulfilling the actual duties
to which you have
agreed. Laws are to be
upheld except in extreme
cases where they conflict
with other fixed social
duties. Right is also con-
tributing to society, the
group, or institution.
To keep the institution go-
ing as a whole, to avoid the
breakdown in the system
if everyone did it or the
imperative of conscience to
meet ones defined obliga-
tions. (Easily confused with
Stage 3 belief in rules and
authority; see text).
Differentiates societal point of
view from interpersonal agree-
ment or motives. Takes the
point of view of the system
that defines roles and rules.
Considers individual relations
in terms of place in the sys-
tem.
Content of stage
Level/ Stage What Is Right Reasons for Doing Right Social Perspective
Level III: Post-
Conventional or Prin-
cipled
Stage 5 Social
Contract or Utility
and Individual
Rights
Being aware that people
hold a variety of values
and opinions, that most
values and rules are rela-
tive to your group. These
relative rules should usu-
ally be upheld, however,
in the interest of imparti-
ality and because they are
the social contract. Some
nonrelative values and
rights like life and liberty,
however, must be upheld
in any society and regard-
less of majority opinion.
A sense of obligation to law
because of ones social con-
tract to make and abide by
laws for the welfare of all
and for the protection of all
peoples rights. A feeling of
contractual commitment,
freely entered upon, to fam-
ily, friendship, trust, and
work obligations. Concern
that laws and duties be
based on rational calcula-
tion of over all utility, the
greatest good for the great-
est number.
Prior-to-society perspective.
Perspective of a rational indi-
vidual aware of values and
rights prior to social attach-
ments and contracts. Inte-
grates perspectives by formal
mechanisms of agreement,
contract, objective impartial-
ity, and due process. Consid-
ers moral and legal points of
view; recognizes that they
sometimes conflict and finds
it difficult to integrate them
From Kohlberg (1984: 174175)
Kohlberg has now abandoned the 6th stage of moral development, Univer-
sal ethical principles:
Stage 6 has disappeared as a commonly identifiable form of moral reasoning
as our stage-scoring concepts and criteria have developed from the continu-
ing analysis of our longitudinal data. None of our longitudinal subjects in
the United States, Israel, or Turkey have attained it The case materials
from which we constructed our theoretical definition of a sixth stage
came from the writings of a small elite sample, elite in the sense of its formal
philosophic training and in the sense of its ability for and commitment to
moral leadership. (Kohlberg 1984: 270)
Stage 6 is now only a theoretical construct to define the nature and end-
point of the kind of development we are studying (ibid., 271), and we can
therefore regard Kohlbergs model for practical purposes as comprising 5
stages of moral development. A central theme of this development is the
equilibration between the self and society, expressed in a growing ability to
reflect on ones own inner states and those of others; to form an increasingly
coherent grasp of social systems; and to think of others independently of their
specific social status, as moral beings in their own right.
Kohlbergs assessments of the level of moral development of his subjects are
reached by the same clinical method used by Piaget, in which subjects re-
sponses are probed by a series of questions designed to show the reasoning
behind those responses. The same problem can therefore be presented to a
wide range of subjects, since the investigator is not looking for a single right
answer, but at the general organization of thought. The best known of Kohl-
bergs problems is Heinzs Dilemma, which is as follows:
In Europe, a woman was near death from a rare form of cancer. There was
one drug that the doctors thought might save her, a form of radium that a
druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The druggist was charg-
ing $3,000, ten times what the drug cost him to make. The sick womans
husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow money, but he could

only get together about half of what the drug cost. He told the druggist that
his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But
the druggist said no. So Heinz got desperate and broke into the mans store
to steal the drug for his wife. (Kohlberg 1984: 186)
These are some typical examples of responses to this sort of dilemma at the
different levels of moral development:
Pre-Conventional point of view: Why shouldnt you steal from a store? An-
swer: Its not good to steal from the store. Its against the law. Someone
could see you and call the police.
Conventional point of view: Why shouldnt you steal from a store? Answer:
Its a matter of law. Its one of our rules that we are trying to help protect
everyone, protect property not just to protect a store. It is something that is
needed in our society. If we didnt have these laws, people would steal, they
wouldnt have to work for a living and our whole society would get out of
kilter.
Post-Conventional point of view: Why shouldnt someone steal from a store?
Answer: Its violating another persons rights, in this case, to property.
Does the law enter in? Well, the law in most cases is based on what is mor-
ally right, so it is not a separate subject, its a consideration. What does
morality or morally right mean to you? Recognizing the rights of other
individuals, first to life and then to do as he pleases as long as it doesnt in-
terfere with somebody elses right. (Kohlberg 1984: 177179)
For Kohlberg, there are then not two types of morality, heteronomy and
autonomy, but three constraint, co-operation, and principle which corre-
spond to his three main stages of moral development: the Pre-Conventional,
the Conventional, and the Principled. Principled morality in Kohlbergs
scheme corresponds to the autonomy of Piaget, and Kohlberg has therefore
introduced a distinction into Piagets heteronomous morality in the form of the
Pre-Conventional and the Conventional. The major modifications of Piagets
moral stage scheme made in the stages formulated by Kohlberg are, first, at the
earliest levels (Stages 1 and 2) moral judgements are based not on respect for
authority and rules, but on the fear of punishment and the unpleasant conse-
quences of ones acts (and consequently pursuing ones own aims as long as
one is not caught). Secondly, these early stages are followed in adolescence by
levels (stages 3 and 4) in which there is an orientation toward maintaining the
rules of social groups and society. Then, at the final level (stage 5), moral
judgements are based on principles that are universal principles of justice: the
equality of human rights and the respect for the dignity of human beings as
individual persons (Kohlberg 1973: 35).
While, I repeat, it is not in any way suggested that the whole range of an ac-
tual persons thinking, from the physical to the moral, must be predominantly
at a single stage of development, stages 1 and 2 do generally correspond to the
broad features of pre-operational thought; stages 3 and 4 to concrete-
operational thought, and stage 5 to formal operations.
Moral thought, then, seems to behave like all other kinds of thought. Pro-
gress through the moral levels and stages is characterized by increasing dif-
ferentiation and increasing integration, and hence is the same kind of pro-
gress that scientific theory represents. Like acceptable scientific theory or
like any theory or structure of knowledge moral thought may be consid-
ered partially to generate its own data as it goes along, or at least to expand
so as to contain in a balanced, self-consistent way a wider and wider experi-
ential field. (Kohlberg: 1981: 26)
Differentiation and integration are of fundamental importance because they
entail a better equilibrium of the structure in question: These combined crite-
ria, differentiation and integration, are considered by developmental theory
to entail a better equilibrium of the structure in question. A more differenti-
ated and integrated moral structure handles more moral problems, conflicts,
or points of view in a more stable or self-consistent way (Kohlberg: 1981:
135136).
Kohlberg is strongly opposed to explanations of moral development which
are based on the idea of virtue, and character training in general. It is a fair
statement of the history of psychological research in the field to say that the
study of character as a set of virtues has not been a flourishing or successful
research paradigm (Kohlberg 1981: 2).
For Kohlberg the virtues are simply labels for certain kinds of behaviour,
and thus lack the internal coherence which is provided by a body of moral
principles.
The objection of the psychologist to the bag of virtues should be that virtues
and vices are labels by which people award praise or blame toward others,
but the way people award praise or blame toward others are not the ways in
which they think when making moral decisions themselves But, although
there is no such thing as moral behaviour as such, there is such a thing as
behaviour that is consistent with an individuals moral principles or that
springs from a moral decision. Before we can know anything about such be-
haviour, however, we must know what a persons moral judgements or
principles are. (Kohlberg 1981: 184)
It is therefore principles which provide the inner workings of moral behaviour,
and which are internally consistent, and subject to cognitive growth. Kohlberg
also opposes the virtue approach to moral development because he sees it as
deriving from a false view of morality as mere indoctrination in socially ap-
proved values, and hence as closely akin to relativism:
The problem with the bag of virtues approach is that it equates the teaching
of virtue with indoctrination of conventional or social consensus morality
in more elaborated form, a theory of the virtues usually rests on social rela-
tivism, the doctrine that, given the relativity of values, the only objective
framework for studying values is relative to the majority values of the
groups or society in question, an assumption I criticize. (ibid., 2)
We have noted that Kohlberg has now abandoned earlier claims that moral
judgement may progress to a stage 6 (or even a stage 7). Kohlberg has also ac-
cepted the very reasonable criticism of Gilligan and others that justice is not the
sole dimension of morality, which must also include a principle of altruism,
care, or responsible love (Gilligan 1982), which typically involve relations with
particular people.
An assessment of Piagets and Kohlbergs theories 125

In our view, special obligations of care presuppose, but go beyond, the gen-
eral duties of justice, which are necessary but not sufficient for them. Thus,
special relationship dilemmas may elicit care responses which supplement
and deepen the sense of generalized obligations of justice [but] we believe
that what Gilligan calls an ethic of care is, in and of itself, not well adapted
to resolve justice problems, problems which require principles to resolve
conflicting claims among persons, all of whom in some sense should be
cared about. (Kohlberg 1984: 229)
6. An assessment of Piagets and Kohlbergs theories
Both theories are very illuminating analyses of the way in which childrens
moral ideas develop, and are generally consistent with the findings of other
scholars on the development of social cognition and self-understanding in gen-
eral. The conclusions of developmental psychology on the ways in which the
human mind expands its cognitive grasp of social reality which I have cited
provide overwhelming evidence against the passive, bit-by-bit theory of learn-
ing that permeates anthropology.
Our criticisms may begin with the general comment that neither Piaget or
Kohlberg reflects adequately on the philosophical foundations of why Moral
Autonomy is higher than Heteronomy, or Stage 5 is higher than Stage 1. They
simply take it as obvious that Kant or Rawls is correct and then proceed on that
assumption. But without establishing the basic principles of ethics (as Piaget
does in his analyses of time and space, for example) they are not then in the
position to claim that the perspectives attained at the more advanced moral
levels are truer than those of the less advanced levels. This produces some
problems in, for example, their assessment of notions of punishment, social
convention, and human rights, and the whole question of the practical re-
quirements of the social order which they do not sufficiently recognize because
their general conception of morality is too heavily biased towards a view that
principle is inherently opposed to convention.
We noted that Piaget regarded morality as essentially a system of rules, so
that moral development is a matter of replacing a non-reasoning conformity to
prescribed rules by a reasoned resolution of moral problems, which is cogni-
tively superior to custom:
In a word, as soon as we have co-operation, the rational notions of the just
and the unjust become regulators of custom, because they are implied in the
actual functioning of social life among equals During the preceding
stages, on the contrary, custom overbore the issue of right, precisely in so far
as it was deified and remained external to the minds of the individuals (Pia-
get 1932: 66).
But Turiel, in particular, has criticized both Piaget and Kohlberg for assum-
ing that moral development is a process of differentiating convention from
morality, and he maintains (as we saw earlier) that the understanding of con-
vention has its own development which can in some respects be distinguished
from morality.
The force of the criticism that respect for conventions cannot be treated
simply as a more primitive form of moral thinking than principles of justice is
borne out by Kohlbergs more recent findings that subjects can retain an orien-
tation towards the requirements of social order throughout their moral develop-
ment. This orientation is referred to as a type A substage and has some resem-
blances to Piagets heteronomous morality, whereas the Type B substage re-
sembles Piagets autonomous morality. Types A and B however are not true
sub-stages because there is no necessary progression of the form 3A 3B
4A 4B.
Type A seems to correspond in many ways to what might be called a con-
servative or holistic view of society and human relations, whereas Type B
corresponds to a liberal or individualistic view; indeed, Kohlberg states that
the type B person is more likely to develop in a more egalitarian or democratic
socio-cultural environment (Kohlberg 1984: 682).
1
It seems clear however that
it is possible to be a principled person with either of these ideologies, and
Kohlberg concedes that both types A and B are in the domain of the deontic
right or justice. As we saw from Turiels scheme of the stages of reasoning
about conventions, therefore, it is clear that obedience to conventional rules can
be justified at different levels of cognitive development.
For Piaget, not only the wider social order but the very idea of punishment
is morally problematic, being rooted psychologically in heteronomous relations
with parents,
2
and culturally in a moral realism which does not distinguish
between the psychical and the physical. Grudgingly, he concedes that
From a purely legal point of view, punishment is perhaps necessary for the
defence of society, though modern writers on the subject also tend to place
the idea of social re-education and re-adaptation above that of expiation. But
from the moral point of view, there is always something ambiguous about
the idea of punishment, and the least we can say of it is that it renders
autonomy of the conscience impossible. (Piaget 1932: 339)
One might reply that to accept an appropriate punishment for ones offence
is a very clear affirmation of an autonomous sense of moral responsibility. But
Piaget was so pre-occupied with what were, especially in the 1920s, the exces-
sively authoritarian relationships between many parents and children (which
he compared to an unintelligent government endlessly issuing futile laws) that
he did not see the real nature of the wider social order, which became in his
eyes nothing more than heteronomy unless it was the subject of free agreement

1
We group the normative order and utilitarian orientations as inter-penetrating to form
type A at each stage. Type B focuses on the inter-penetrating of the justice orientation
with an ideal-self orientation. Type A makes judgments more descriptively and predic-
tively, in terms of the given out there. Type B makes judgments more prescriptively,
in terms of what ought to be, of what is internally accepted by the self. A Type B orien-
tation presupposes both awareness of rules and a judgement of their fairness. (Kohl-
berg 1984: 184185)
2
Kohlberg however rightly pointed out that heteronomous attitudes can be engendered
by relations with peers as well as with adults.

among individuals. Social constraint and by this we mean any social rela-
tions into which there enters an element of authority and which is not, like co-
operation, the result of an interchange between equal individuals has on the
individual results that are analogous to those exercised by adult constraint on
the mind of the child (ibid., 340). It is obviously quite unreasonable, however,
to imagine that the whole body of societys laws and customs can or should be
the subject of free agreement among every individual in the same manner as a
game of marbles. We have, broadly speaking, to accept the culture into which
we were born (or immigrated), and while retributive punishment may be un-
derstood in a primitive expiatory sense, it can also be seen as a necessary as-
pect of having any rules at all (as we noted in Chapter II). It is not just a crude
utilitarian device for keeping blood and broken glass off the streets but a basic
feature of the social and moral order. Like Kohlberg, Piaget was therefore too
ready to regard obedience to convention as in itself a manifestation of a primi-
tive level of moral thinking, and Piagets opposition between parental author-
ity and peer group discussion is too simplistic.
Kohlbergs developmental sequence of Pre-Conventional, Conventional,
and Post-Conventional, or the perspective of the Concrete Individual, Social
Order, and Principle, goes beyond his focus on justice as such and is a valuable
conceptual tool because it relates well to what we know about social cognition
in general. Kohlbergs theory also emphasizes the purely cognitive aspect of
justice as reversibility which it did not possess in Piagets theory. The Piagetian
causal factors of obedience/discussion lose their overwhelming importance,
and we are enabled to take account of a wider range of social experience. Kohl-
bergs scheme of development has been tested cross-culturally and, having
been more precisely formulated than Piagets, provides some evidence for the
generality of a developmental model outside Western culture, and also for the
relative predominance of individuals of different levels of development in dif-
ferent cultures, showing that in some of these there are conspicuous lags in
development. (These results will be considered in the next chapter.)
But some important reservations about Kohlbergs theory are that it is based
upon Rawlss theory of society and ethics, whose radical deficiencies we exam-
ined in the previous chapter; that it attempts to base too much on the concept
of justice; and that it seriously underestimates the significance of the virtues.
With regard to the first point, if rights cannot be meaningfully said to belong to
individuals independently of their social existence, the main justification for
regarding justice as the core of ethics is at once removed. Since the whole ide-
ology of individual rights has been shown to be a peculiarly Western social
philosophy, Kohlbergs Stage 5, in which an ability to reason in terms of rights
is fundamental, is thus vulnerable to the charge of ethnocentrism. But by re-
moving the emphasis on rights in the assessment of principled moral thinking
and replacing it by the more general ability to think of individuals independ-
ently of their social status, the idea of Principled Morality can be saved from
ethnocentrism without impairing its general validity.
Again, since Kohlberg believes that justice is the core of morality rather than
merely one aspect of it, he is obliged to make justice bear too great a conceptual
burden: His account of moral development might therefore be considered to
be one sided in that it has been erected on the features of a limited interpreta-
tion of morality (Peters 1971: 203). Damon, too, considers that Kohlbergs the-
ory tries to encompass areas of experience and cognition which are much more
disparate than he assumes:
Kohlbergs own work is certainly the most extreme manifestation of struc-
turalist assumptions in moral psychology. In his stronger statements (Kohl-
berg 1971), Kohlberg claims that individuals organize their entire social
world through one or more of the six basic justice structures that comprise
his six stage moral judgement model. He argues that justice is the essential
factor in human social life, and consequently, that human knowledge about
social relations and social institutions is organized primarily around concep-
tions of justice Even persons sympathetic to structural-development the-
ory have also felt that Kohlbergs approach is too ambitious and too global.
Turiel (1975), for example, has written that structuralism does not necessar-
ily imply that one unitary structure governs all thinking. [See Piagets re-
marks that not everything is attached to everything else, quoted above.] For
example, Turiel has suggested that sexual and romantic relations between
individuals are better understood with reference to notions like attraction
and intimacy than to notions like justice and morality. (Damon 1980: 37)
Kohlbergs analysis of the place of the virtues in moral development also
needs considerable qualification. While one can understand methodologically
why they should not receive, by comparison with justice reasoning, much at-
tention in terms of the strictly cognitive theory that Kohlberg wishes to con-
struct, and that the virtues do lend themselves to the sort of cultural relativism
of values which Kohlberg rightly condemns, his attitude to them is also quite
consistent with his generally Rawlsian view of morality, in which virtues are
little more than a disposition to act in accordance with principles. Since Kohl-
berg emphasizes the definitive nature of the Hartshorne and May findings in
refuting the idea of virtue as traditionally understood, it is appropriate to ask
whether these findings were based on a proper research methodology. First of
all, Damon observes that Hartshorne and May naively assumed that children
who could recite moral standards like the Ten Commandments and the Boy
Scout code will tend to demonstrate such standards in their behaviour more
than children who could not recite such standards(Damon 1988: 7). Because
the childrens behaviour had no significant relation to their knowledge of such
codes, it was therefore concluded that childrens morality was contextually
determined, with no significant personality or developmental factors.
It may seem odd to us today that anyone could take a childs ability to recite
by heart the Ten Commandments and the Boy Scout Code as a good indica-
tor of a childs moral knowledge, yet in Hartshorne and Mays day this
seemed reasonable and appropriate. By now we have learned enough about
whether a childs shaky memory of such rules bears any indication of the
childs tendency to be kind, honest, loyal, obedient, and fair. (Ibid.., 8)
Secondly,
Children have their own social lives and may take seriously different in-
terpersonal events than we do. They may for example, share our respect for
trustworthiness, but they also may consider it more important to be trust-
worthy with a friend than with a strange adult making strange requests

particularly when these two events come in conflict, as in the Hartshorne
and May experiments. The message is clear: adults who would understand
childrens morality must understand the significance of childrens acts
within the context of the childs world. The reason this so difficult is that de-
velopmental changes long ago transformed the typical adults interpretation
of virtually all moral issues. (Ibid., 89)
So, Hartshorne and May found with regard to honesty a great discrepancy
in the childrens disposition to cheat in tests and to steal money in experimen-
tal situations: in some tests over 75% cheated, with only about 15% were pre-
pared to steal, and therefore used this as evidence against the existence of such
a virtue as honesty. But This large discrepancy between deception on tests or
games, and deception in stealing someone elses money suggests that children
distinguish between the two types of events cheating in academic types of
test is not just a matter of honesty/dishonesty or high/low resistance to temp-
tation but of how tests are conceptualized (Turiel 1978: 55).
Kohlbergs treatment of the virtues as an open-ended list or bag of desir-
able forms of behaviour derives its plausibility from ignoring the fact that what
we call virtues comprise a wide variety of types of behaviour and dispositions
of character (as Peters 1971 points out). There are highly specific forms of be-
haviour, such as punctuality, tidiness, and cleanliness; there are general fea-
tures of character, such as compassion or persistence, which motivate us; and
there are what may be called artificial virtues, such as justice or tolerance,
which are learned and so closely linked with cognitive development. As Peters
says, while cognitive development is an essential feature of moral development
as a whole, this must also involve learning moral rules without at first under-
standing why they are rules, and also developing a disposition to act morally,
which is not at all the same as a cognitive grasp of moral principles.
With regard to childrens development of self-control, for example, this will
initially occur as obedience to external controls and sanctions whose full moral
significance will not be understood for some years.
Like Aristotles child, who learns to be temperate by behaving temperately
under instruction, they are preparing themselves by going through the mo-
tions of self-control, for the stage when they will have a more inward under-
standing of the reasons for the patterns of behaviour that they are exhibiting
habituations may thus help to lay down a pattern of response that may be
used in the service of more appropriate motives at a later stage.
Kohlberg nowhere deals with the development of this class of virtues which
necessarily involve self-control In this sphere the individual not only has
to learn to accommodate himself to dangers that threaten him in a palpable
physical way, but to social threats and pressures such as ridicule, disap-
proval, ostracism, and so on Does Kohlberg think that an individual can
in fact adhere to his favoured principle of justice when the screws are put on
him, without some kind of training in sticking up for principles connected
with fair play in the face of group pressure? (Ibid., 259260)
Kohlberg therefore pays too little attention to the connection between knowing
the difference between right and wrong, and caring about it, and having the
courage and perseverance to act on that knowledge.
7. Conclusions
In assessing the development of moral understanding it has become clear that
this cannot be understood in isolation from the way in which social under-
standing as a whole develops, because obviously moral action takes place in a
social context.
Initially, social relations are conceived as a set of relations between concrete
individuals, rather than as a structure of roles, and indeed there is great diffi-
culty in constructing representations of stable roles. Conventions are rigid but
uncoordinated, and are to be obeyed without consideration of why they exist.
Interpersonal behaviour is strongly dependent on the fear of consequences,
and the predominant notion of what is right is that of reciprocity or fair ex-
change. In assessing responsibility attention focuses on acts rather than on mo-
tives or intentions, while the idea of the self is based on ones own actions and
physical categories of identity, such as gender and age.
Following this, social relations come to be represented not just as relations
between concrete individuals, but also in terms of a number of roles, and ones
obligations lie in the proper performance of these roles. Political authority is
seen as vested in certain archetypal figures of importance and power, pat-
terned on fathers or elders, and society is represented as a collection of these
roles, so that what is customary is what is good. People are anxious to have
good reputations for living up to what is expected of them in these roles and
doing what is customary. This develops into a more systemically coordinated
representation of society as an ordered system, with authority as a hierarchy of
roles that are also differentiated in function. People have the duty of maintain-
ing the system as a whole and contributing to the common good. Law is neces-
sary for this common good, as is political authority, and law and justice are the
basis of morality.
Finally, people are able to transcend the limitations of their particular soci-
ety and think of it as only one among a number of possible types, which can be
considered from an ideological point of view. Moral principles become distin-
guished from the customary and the legal as valid in their own right. The indi-
vidual can be thought of as such, distinct from his or her actual social position.
Customs are now seen as conventions that are justified by their contribution to
the smooth working of society, rather than as simply good or mandatory in
themselves, and the social and the natural are clearly distinguished. The self is
primarily defined in psychological and spiritual terms, with physical attributes
of relatively less importance, and there is a clear awareness of the mind as me-
diating between ones experiences of the world and ones inner representations
of it. Correspondingly, in assessing the moral and legal responsibility of others,
their motives and intentions, as well as their actions, are taken into account.
We shall see in the next chapter that these features of the development of
moral understanding in the individual are highly relevant to the way in which
moral thought has evolved at the level of collective representations in society.

IV. Social Evolution And Moral Thought

1. Psychology and sociology
a. Collective representations and individual thought
One of the main themes of this book is that thought develops in relation to
problems of adaptation and, to repeat what was said in Chapter I, just as our
understanding of nature has increased by the need to solve new and more dif-
ficult problems, so our understanding of ourselves has developed in the con-
text of increasingly complex social institutions, so that our interaction with one
another in society has called for a steadily greater understanding of the moral
dimension of human life. But when anthropologists have considered the rela-
tionship between forms of society and modes of thought their explanation has
typically been that changes in the first have determined changes in the second,
so that thought is simply a reflection of social organization and modes of pro-
duction. This Durkheimian (and Marxist and cultural materialist) point of view
is faithfully presented by Professor Mary Douglas, for example, in Purity and
Danger (1966), Chapter V (and reiterated in Douglas 1986).
She gives what is in many ways an excellent description of many of the ma-
jor differences between primitive and modern modes of thought, and she also
accepts the parallels between these and the findings of developmental psy-
chology (1966: 88). But these changes in modes of thought are said to be simply
the direct reflections of social processes: In the course of social evolution, insti-
tutions proliferate and specialize one inevitable by-product of social differ-
entiation is social awareness, self-consciousness about the processes of social
life (ibid., 91). Lack of social differentiation is also said to be responsible for a
lack of differentiation between subjective and objective, speech and action,
natural law and social law, personal and physical causation, and so on. But
how differentiation in social institutions by itself could result in these profound
changes in modes of thought, and why there should be any parallels between
the findings of anthropologists and those of developmental psychologists re-
main entirely mysterious in such a theory.
The solution which I am proposing in this book is that thought develops in
relation not as a direct reaction to institutions and social organization but to the
cognitive problems that are generated by new and more complex institutions in
the course of history. Once we start talking about problems, however, we then
have to think about mental processes and cognitive skills, not just about the mind
as a container for cultural content. But problems can only be encountered by
individuals, and culture itself is transmitted by individuals, so it follows that in
132 Social Evolution And Moral Thought
history there must have been an interaction between collective representa-
tions or cultural forms of thought, and individual mental processes, between
social and psychological factors.
The suggestion that such a connection could exist is, however, repugnant to
conventional anthropological opinion not only because it is evolutionary, but
because it is well established that collective representations can have nothing
to do with the psychology of individuals.
1

Perceptions, emotions, evaluations of right and wrong, ideas of the causes of
events in short, whole systems of thought and feeling exist
transcendentally, independently of the individuals in whom they appear.
They are what the French sociologists call collective representations, which
pass from generation to generation, learnt in behaviour, contained in
proverb and precept, in technology and convention and ritual, and, with the
development of writing, in books. A mans psyche is social, not organic.
(Gluckman 194950: 75)
Now no one would deny that the grammars of natural languages, kinship
systems, political institutions, and so one can have objective properties that in
many cases may not be grasped by those who transmit them, and it is perhaps
inevitable that anthropologists, when describing the beliefs and institutions of
small, non-literate societies, should create the impression that these cultural
forms have a rigid structure, almost as though they were like buildings and
bridges. Diagrams of segmentary lineages and age-grading systems, patterns of
political alliances, grammars of natural languages, and schemes of symbolic
opposition, for example, contribute in particular to this impression of the con-
crete, objective quality of collective representations.
It is, no doubt, essential to be able to talk in a general way about the collec-
tive representations of particular cultures if anthropologists are to be able to
communicate anything at all about them to their readers. But if we simply state
that a particular society is polytheistic or monotheistic, has a segmentary line-
age system or an age-grading system, a council of elders or a king, or believes
in human rights and democracy, this in itself can certainly tell us nothing about
individual modes of thought in these societies. We must therefore remember
that in collective representation we are employing what is no more than a
useful fiction. In reality there can be no clear distinction between collective rep-
resentations and individual thought processes because collective representa-
tions can only be transmitted through individual minds and the anthropologist
can only learn what they are by talking to individual people.
As ethnographers we encounter most collective representations as informa-
tion given to us by individuals. So the diagram of one of the Konso age-
grading systems (Chapter VI, 2) represents a complex social institution, but it
was put together as the result of many personal discussions between my in-

1
This issue has previously been discussed at length in Hallpike (1979: 41165). It is
interesting that despite this challenge to a central dogma of modern anthropology, the
attempts to defend it have been very few, and too slight in content to be worth noting
here.
Psychology and sociology 133

formants and myself. It is a collective representation in the sense that they, as
individuals, did not invent the age-grading system themselves but were born
into it, but the system as such could only be perpetuated through the minds of
these individuals. To say, then, that as ethnographer I only had access to the
collective representation and not to the minds of those who were involved in
the system is absurd. In the very act of telling me about it they showed me how
they understood it not, in this case, as a total system at all whose properties
they could analyze, but in a piecemeal and concrete fashion that showed very
clearly that they had not attained Connells Stage 3. No doubt, there may have
been some Konso who could have given me a more advanced exposition but
such men, if they existed, were rare and in any case it was entirely possible for
ordinary people to operate their age system without such cognitive skills. Nor,
again, were there any Konso who could provide explicit, articulate analysis of
their religious beliefs, which, like their social organization, had to be pieced
together from the various statements of informants and from observing cere-
monies.
So once we understand how such collective representations are understood
by individuals, any rigorous distinction between collective representations and
individual thought processes becomes implausible, since it assumes that collec-
tive representations enter the minds of the individuals who transmitted them
without any kind of mental processing by those individuals. This is the empty
bucket theory of the mind which was refuted in the previous chapter where it
was shown that mental content cannot be clearly distinguished from mental
processes in this way. The conventions of the game of marbles or of the system
of parliamentary democracy are certainly collective representations, the cul-
tural content of the individual minds which transmit them from generation to
generation, but we have seen that this content is not simply imprinted on the
minds of children by some direct process of imitation. Children have to assimi-
late information about these institutions to their existing cognitive structures,
and this involves for example the development of reversibility, dynamic as op-
posed to static representations, decentration, the grasp of invariant relations
across transformations, the ability to think about language and the formal im-
plications of propositions, and about the self. If the mind had only content,
which was processed, if at all, in an identical manner by all human beings,
these differences between the way in which children understand the world and
that of adults would be incomprehensible. Adults do not teach children that
there is more liquid in the tall thin glass than in the short fat one why, then,
should pre-operatory children typically think that there is? Nor do adults cor-
rect children in such matters, since they are usually oblivious to the special
characteristics of childrens thought.
The traditional assumption that mans psyche is social, not organic is
therefore conclusively refuted by this evidence, and also by the discovery that
childrens thinking goes through the same developmental stages in all cultures,
the only differences being in the speed of the process, which also may not lead
to the development of formal or even concrete operations in some cases. Such
universality would be quite inexplicable if the thought of individuals were
solely determined by the conventions of each culture. If the sociological theory
were true, there would also be absolutely no reason to expect any parallels be-
tween the historical development of thought and its development in the indi-
vidual. In view of this evidence we should be prepared to accept the possibility
of an interaction between the social and the psychological, rather than asserting
dogmatically that thought is to be explained solely in terms of cultural factors.
As Harris and Heelas say,
We agree entirely that forms of cognition owe much to socio-cultural condi-
tions, but this by no means entails the conclusion that psychological factors
are irrelevant to the explanation of collective representations. It does no
good to argue, as Evans-Pritchard did so often, that psychology is irrelevant
because we are born into systems of collective representations for ulti-
mately they must be grounded in the human mind. (Harris and Heelas 1979:
237)
If, then, there must be a close connection between collective representations
in their public, communicable aspects, and as individual thought, we must also
recognize that some collective representations or some aspects of them are
harder to grasp than others. This was made extremely clear in the previous
chapter where we found, for example, that the idea of Her Majestys Opposi-
tion is harder to understand than that of the Government, and ideas of political
power as the exercise of personal authority are much easier to understand than
ideas of constitutional authority. The ability to conceptualise ones society as a
total system, or to understand the nature of ideological conflict only develop in
adolescence, if at all, as does the ability to understand ones own mental proc-
esses. It is therefore obviously much more difficult to grasp the working of the
British or Australian Constitutions than it is to understand the working of an
age-grading system or a segmentary lineage system, because to understand
modern democratic constitutions involves the conceptual synthesis of such sys-
tems as hierarchies of differentiated functions, different types of authority such
as ruling and reigning or the legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and
party conflict, as well as the system of political representation, to name only
some.
It might be objected that the Konso, for example, have a complex age-
grading system which is difficult even for us to understand. But the point is
that not only is any age-grade system far simpler than a modern democratic
constitution, but the Konso do not understand theirs in formal operational
terms. It is possible actually to participate in an age-grading system or a seg-
mentary lineage system with far fewer cognitive difficulties than to participate
in a parliamentary democracy, even at the level of the average voter, let alone
someone more actively involved in politics. So too it is easier to understand the
ordinary processes of gift exchange than the problems of usury involving cal-
culations of interest rates, the planning of simple raids than the strategy of
large military formations, and the process of vengeance than legal distinctions
between various categories of homicide. (We may accept, however, that in any
society some people will have a better understanding of their collective repre-
sentations than others, especially if they are centrally involved with them, and

that some collective representations, such as the idea of God, can be under-
stood at very different cognitive levels.
1
The extent to which individuals par-
ticipate in the collective representations of their culture will, in more complex
cultures, also vary greatly in relation to their educational level.)
Up to a point it can be said that all societies, whatever their complexity, will
have to deal with a similar range of problems and that what will differ is the
types of solution that are considered intellectually adequate. For example:
1. Why must I obey my father? (This involves the nature of parental and
other social authority. Should a father be obeyed simply because he is
the father and begot his offspring, or is the obedience of his children
justified to some extent by his greater knowledge and moral leader-
ship?)
2. Why is stealing wrong? (Why should we obey social rules? Because
the ancestors established them or because they are our customs, or
because all societies must have rules in order to function properly?)
3. Do the people distinguish between types of rule, e.g. customs versus
moral principles, or not?
4. Is any moral consideration due to strangers?
5. Is human life more important than property or custom?
6. What counts as being a good person? Being a useful citizen or having
certain essential moral qualities?
7. How do people assess personal responsibility for actions? Do they
weigh intentions and motives, or is a knowledge of the act alone suf-
ficient?
The various issues here are in one sense the same for all societies, which is
why Kohlbergs dilemmas (suitably adapted in cultural content) have been
shown to be comprehensible cross-culturally (e.g. Edwards 1981, 1985; Snarey
1985). In the simpler societies the lower stages of moral reasoning will appear
to be adequate, although this does not mean that Kohlbergs Stage 5 of moral
reasoning would actually be unworkable among hunter-gatherers or simple
agriculturalists. Moral reasoning in some small agricultural groups, such as
Hutterite colonies, or Israeli kibbutzim, may be at Stage 4 or 5 (Snarey 1985, Ta-
ble 2).
But as societies become more complex they create qualitatively new dilem-
mas.For example:
1. Where written law codes exist, there is a potential conflict between
the letter of the law and equity. But in societies where legal disputes

1
So, for example, a peasant and a Jesuit theologian will both believe in God, but their
cognitive organization of this belief will be on very different levels. (For an application
of developmental psychology to childrens religious beliefs, see Goldman 1964, Fowler
1981, Fowler and Vergote 1980.) Again, it is easy both for children and for primitive
peoples to form the idea of sorcery, but this can also be defended at the level of formal
operations (see Hurley 1985, reviewed by Hallpike 1986d).
are settled by elders, for example, there is no overt conflict of this
type, or with the requirements of political expediency, since law at
this stage is undifferentiated in these respects.
2. A conflict is potentially created by the order of a superior that vio-
lates a moral rule. For example, Mariner relates (Martin 1827) that the
Tongans acknowledged that their attack on his ship had been a viola-
tion of the rule of hospitality to friendly strangers, but that they were
also obliged to obey any order of a chief.
3. There is a need for reconciliation of different cultural codes of law
and ethics within a single political and jural system. Gluckman (1965,
1967) discusses this in the case of the Lozi, and it is a standard prob-
lem for all empires and multicultural societies.
4. What are the moral implications of conquest? This is a relevant prob-
lem for empires that have to establish stable relations with their sub-
ject peoples.
5. In what respects should the morality of international relations coin-
cide with the moral norms of private relationships? How far are the
claims of justice valid, for example?
6. What are the duties of a king towards his subjects? What may the
subjects do if the king violates the proper functions of his office?
7. How far should parental authority be binding on children over a
choice of career in societies that have a high division of labour?
8. How far can a commercial morality be distinguished from the rest of
our moral obligations? Do vendors, for example, have the moral duty
of declaring the defects of what they are selling to prospective pur-
chasers?
9. How far can social success be distinguished from being a morally
good person?
These and similar problems can only arise with political and judicial centraliza-
tion, conquest warfare, and a well developed commercial economy, but the
answers to them, at least by the leaders and decision-makers of such societies,
will not be perceived as intellectually adequate if they simply rely upon the
notions of custom and ascriptive authority that sufficed in societies of simpler
organization. Collective representations and individual cognition must there-
fore be closely interconnected, whatever contemporary anthropologists may
like to think.
In addition, the collective representations of complex societies will also be
cognitively more powerful in certain respects than those of simple societies but
this question, too, has been thoroughly confused by the debate about rational-
ity. The following is a typical example of orthodox modern anthropological
thought on the subject:
I for one consider it unthinkable to claim that a Piaroa of the Venezuelan
rain forest is irrational when he says that rain is the urine of the deity Ofo
Daa. The Westerner asserting that rain is H2O and the Piaroa saying that it
is the urine of a deity are doing so on similar grounds; both are relying on

the knowledge of the supreme authority of their society, respectively the sci-
entist and the shaman, on the nature of water. (Overing 1985b: 45)
Rationality, in the first place, is a word we should avoid since it is vague and
ambiguous, and confuses logic with common sense, or even with sanity
(Hallpike 1979: 1, 49095). But Overings example evades two essential issues.
One is that it is cognitively much easier to understand the Piaroa notion of rain
than the Western version, just as it would be cognitively much easier to under-
stand Piaroan moral ideas than those of Kant or Rawls. It is no doubt true that
in meteorological matters most of us are in the same state of dependency on
our scientists as the Piaroa are on their shamans; to think of rain as a purely
physical phenomenon analogous to spraying ones garden with a hose, as some
of us do, is indeed no more cognitively demanding than thinking of it as the
urine of a deity. But those of us whose grasp of the nature of rainfall is re-
stricted to this level are not really participating in Western scientific culture at
all in so far as it deals with meteorology.
To think of rainfall scientifically, as an example of condensation, we have to
understand the idea of a given volume of air and of the total mass of the water
evaporated in that volume of air. This in turn gives us the density of the water
vapour and we then have to understand that for a given volume of air there is
a maximum density of water vapour, at which point it is saturated, that is, its
relative humidity is 100%, but saturation also depends upon the pressure of the
air and its temperature. Condensation, including rain, is therefore associated
with changes in the linked parameters of air volume, temperature, pressure,
and humidity. This very brief sketch of only a small part of the scientific theory
of rainfall shows quite clearly that understanding science is not simply a matter
of accepting authority but also of grasping a set of conceptual relations be-
tween variables, of percentages and ratios (both direct and inverse), of distin-
guishing between volume and mass, and of understanding the reciprocal rela-
tions between a number of related variables in a total system. The ideas of
mass, volume, density, and so on are indeed cultural conventions, but they are
nevertheless conventions that are inherently more difficult to understand than
the convention that rainfall is the urine of a deity. The Piaroa belief that this is
the origin of rain, and the Konso belief that rain comes from the Sky God, and
falls on the just but not on the unjust, are complete in themselves. They rest on
no further elaborate theory of how exactly the Sky Gods moral judgements are
transformed into water droplets, or of how Ofo Daa urinates, and they are as
beliefs extremely simple and can be understood by small children.
Secondly, Overing evades the problem that some cultures beliefs are more
adequate accounts of the world than others the fact that rainfall is not, in re-
ality, the urine of a deity at all but the condensation of water vapour. How,
then, did our scientists reach a more adequate understanding of this phenome-
non than the Piaroa and other primitive peoples? To say that those concepts on
which the scientific theory of rainfall such as mass, volume, density, saturation,
and so on are cultural conventions accepted on authority and so might easily
have been different is clearly inadequate. They were developed out of the ex-
perience and thinking of individuals in the solution of real problems, without
whose intellectual efforts our more adequate forms of knowledge could not
have developed. To be sure, these individuals could not have thought as they
did without an existing body of collective representations which they could use
for thinking about nature and society, but they in turn enriched and developed
the collective representations of their culture so that they provided the founda-
tions for new developments. Unless we recognize that collective representa-
tions are also the expression of individual thought we therefore have no means
of explaining how organized systems of knowledge develop.
A number of symposia (e.g. Wilson 1970, Horton and Finnegan 1973, Hollis
and Lukes 1982, Overing 1985a) have grappled with the problem of rationality
and primitive thought, but while the various rival schools, such as the relativ-
ists, the Durkheimians, and the rationalists, have all agreed that of course psy-
chology is irrelevant, they have been unable to agree about much else. Despite
all this effort very little has actually been achieved, and the prevailing impres-
sion given by this literature is not of the steady progress of a vigorous and suc-
cessful research programme, but of general confusion and impotence.
1

It is actually quite false to suppose that sociological and psychological ex-
planations are mutually conflicting approaches to the study of collective repre-
sentations. The whole thrust of the argument from developmental psychology
is that thinking develops as an interaction between the knower and the known
and that it is therefore impossible to explain knowledge as a collective phe-
nomenon without taking account of the social as well as the psychological fac-
tors. Piaget rejected both the Durkheimian model and psychological reduction-
ism: For Piaget, society is to be explained in terms of the relations between
individuals, relations of constraint, co-operation, social roles, and so on, and
not merely in terms of the non-relational properties of individuals (e.g. schema
or habits) (R.F. Kitchener 1986: 14). Piaget himself said From this perspective,
there is no longer any need to choose between the primacy of the social or that
of the intellect; the collective intellect is the social equilibrium resulting from
the interplay of the operations that enter into all co-operation (Piaget 1971:
114).
2

1
As a further example, Professor G. E. R. Lloyd (1990), in a book rather optimistically
entitled Demystifying Mentalities, attacks the idea of primitive mentality, but with re-
markable insouciance he has not thought it necessary to read anything about develop-
mental psychology. He does not realise therefore that when he describes how Greek
philosophers developed formal logic and the idea of proof, or distinguished between
the literal and the metaphorical, and opposed magic and myth to logos, he is providing a
text-book example of the development of formal operational thought in that society.
Lloyd also imagines that Lvy-Bruhls theory of primitive mentality was a psychologi-
cal theory and that by giving the world yet another refutation of Lvy-Bruhl (who died
in 1939) he has disposed of all theories of primitive thought. In fact, of course, Lvy-
Bruhl rejected psychology entirely and claimed that collective representations were
purely social in origin (e.g. 1926: 13), and Lloyds attack on his theory is therefore en-
tirely irrelevant to my own theory of primitive thought.
2
Piaget, who was well aware of the resemblance between the thinking of children and
ethnographic data on moral thought in primitive society, argued that the main factor in
producing moral heteronomy is parental authority, which also manifests itself in social


It should therefore be obvious that developmental psychology alone cannot
explain the process by which moral understanding has evolved in the course of
human history, since this involves a number of factors, such as changes in
modes of subsistence, demography, economic organization, warfare, and po-
litical structure which cannot be attributed to cognitive change. For example, a
shift to agriculture is not itself the product of any new cognitive process, but by
producing much larger social groups and new forms of property relations it
also leads to a new range of problems and dilemmas which do involve cogni-
tive change. In the same way the emergence of the state, or money and the
predominance of commercial transactions, or law courts, or industrialization
do not require, as such, some new cognitive ability, but they are likely to bring
about new social conditions which provide a more cognitively demanding so-
cial environment. As I remarked at the beginning of the book, the use of devel-
opmental psychology allows us to go beyond the static correlations between
social organization and modes of thought because it focuses on the problems
that individuals have to deal with as a consequence of their social organization.
The evidence and arguments that I shall use come from a number of differ-
ent sources: developmental psychology; cross-cultural tests of developmental
theory; ethnographic data including the experience of ethnographers with their
informants; the nature of the social conditions in which different types of moral
thinking manifest themselves; and finally, historical evidence from a number of
different areas, such as Greece, India, and China, in which we find clear evi-
dence of changes in moral thinking which conform to the predictions of devel-
opmental psychology.
The evidence from the literate civilizations of antiquity is of central rele-
vance to understanding the relations between psychology and collective repre-

organization:
Now when we think of the part played by gerontocracy in primitive communi-
ties, when we think of the decreasing power of the family in the course of social
evolution, and of all the social features that characterize modern civilization, we
cannot help seeing a sort of gradual emancipation of the individual; in other
words a levelling out of the different generations in relation to each other (Piaget
1932: 336).
But the anthropologist is prompted to reply at once that while the elders and tradition
are indeed respected in many primitive societies, one of the most typical features of
such societies is the egalitarian relations between adult males in discussion, and the
traditional authority of senior over junior generations does not therefore prevent dis-
putes between members of the same generation. If discussion as opposed to unilateral
respect is the origin of moral autonomy, why therefore does this not appear in primitive
society? There is actually no reason to think that until modern times there has been any
significant levelling out of the authority of the generations in the major civilizations
anyway, and even if there has, this has been more than counterbalanced by the authori-
tarian relations between, for example, priests or judges and the people in the great reli-
gious traditions. Yet, as we shall see, the course of social evolution has certainly in-
volved significant development in moral thought. Piagets theory of gerontocracy is not,
therefore, a useful contribution to our study of the connection between psychological
and social factors in the history of moral thought.
sentations, because here we can actually observe the struggles of individual
thinkers to bring about changes in the thought of their society. It is partly for
this reason that I have given them such extensive treatment in Chapter VII. We
find that the development of formal logical inference, thinking about thinking
and self-awareness in the sense of the examination of motives and intentions
and the structure of the personality; the application of mathematical concepts
to natural phenomena; the development of exhaustive and systematic modes of
classification; the analysis of language, and explicit social theory, for example,
clearly required an immense intellectual effort that is recorded in the writings
of the period. How then could it reasonably be supposed that these modes of
thought had also been present in the earlier periods of these societies? If this
were so, then the various philosophers and religious teachers in Greece, Rome,
Israel, India, and China, and later in Arabia and medieval and Renaissance
Europe were not really accomplishing anything new at all, but only recasting
existing modes of thought in different ways, and this entirely contradicts not
only the contemporary impressions of these changes but the evidence itself.
Those who wish to argue that these new modes of thought which we find in
the literate civilizations of antiquity are really present in all societies will there-
fore have to give some evidence for this, and also demonstrate that nothing of
real intellectual importance actually happened at all in the literate civilizations
in the period under consideration, and it would be interesting to see someone
set about doing this.
We are not, therefore, simply comparing collective representations in some
static manner with certain abstract stages proposed by the developmentalists,
and juxtaposing a series of social stages of increasingly complex organization
with certain stages of thought. On the contrary, by focusing on how the prob-
lems of social life involve a dynamic interaction between individual thinking
and culture, it is possible to transcend the issue of the social determinism of
thought altogether. We are drawing upon a wide range of evidence, and the
fact that all the conclusions converge so well gives strong support to the hy-
pothesis that cognitive factors must be given an important place in the explana-
tion of the evolution of moral understanding.
b. Cross-cultural studies of moral development
The children studied by the developmental psychologists have been struggling
to master the institutions of complex modern societies: problems like Heinzs
Dilemma could only occur in a complex society where commerce is regarded
as having its own code of ethics that allows a chemist not to sell medicines to
those who need them unless they can pay the price he asks, and where the state
will protect his legal right to do so, even though people may morally disap-
prove of the way he exercises that right. The conflict of loyalties which Heinz
faces between obeying the law and saving his wife would not be so clear-cut in
a simpler stateless society, because there Heinzs tribal equivalent would be
able to appeal to the elders, or to popular opinion, and the avaricious chemist
would find himself obliged to come to terms with Heinz, or, Heinzs kin would
come to his aid, and so on. In tribal society business ethics does not have a
status distinct from the rest of ones obligations, and under customary law one

does not have such a clear choice between respect for the law and respect for
what is morally right.
But if Heinz were living in a tribal society, why therefore would he need to
be able to solve these sorts of problems at Kohlbergs Stage 5, and to be able to
think about human rights, the social contract, the moral claims of individuals
as human beings, and the relative importance of life and property, and so on?
The obvious implication is that the simpler the social environment, the less
pressure there will be on individuals to develop to the more advanced stages of
social cognition or, for that matter, of self-understanding, because many indi-
viduals will be able to function quite adequately without them.
The most comprehensive survey to date of cross-cultural tests of Kohlbergs
theory is that of Snarey (1985). 44 studies have been carried out in 26 cultural
areas (excluding the United States); 27% in Western Europe, 44% in non-
European societies influenced by the West (e.g. Japan, India, Taiwan), and 33%
include tribal or village folk populations (ibid., 207). These studies generally
support Kohlbergs hypothesis of a progressive increase in moral reasoning
with age through the stages that he predicts, though the higher stages may not
be reached. Studies of industrialized societies showed in 10/11 countries (ex-
cluding Taiwan) that there are significant social class differences, but 14/17
studies showed no significant gender differences. The only national exception
here was England, but even here the study using the most reliable scoring
method showed no difference in gender responses (ibid., 218). Snarey also con-
cluded that Stage 4/5 or 5 was absent in 100% of the 8 traditional tribal or vil-
lage folk societies, both non-Western and Western. The available data thus
suggest that the significant difference lies between folk versus urban societies
rather than between Western versus non-Western societies (ibid., 218). In fact,
while a few individual adults in these societies reached 3/4 or 4, the modal
scores were 3 or even 2.
Table 3: Snareys survey of cross-cultural tests of Kohlbergs theory
Study Reliability Published/
unpublished
Group Subjects Modal
score
Saxe (1970) C unpublished Eskimo Adults 2125 2
White (1977, 1983) A unpublished Bahamas Adults 5795 2
White, Bushnell, &
Regnemer (1978)
A published Bahamas Adolescents 1516 2
Saadaatmand (1972) C unpublished Guatemala Adults 3
Gorsuch & Barnes
(1973)
C published Honduras Adolescents 1516 2
Harkness et al.
(1981)
A published Kenya Adults
(leaders/non-leaders)
3, 2
Edwards (1975) B published Kenya Adults
3, 2
Tietzen & Walker
(1984)
A unpublished New
Guinea
Adults
3, 2

References to unpublished studies are given in Snarey (1985).
Key: A: Studies using Standardized Scoring Manual (1978). Acceptable.
B: Studies using Structural Issue Scoring Manual (1972). Borderline
C: Studies using Sentence and Story Scoring Method (1958) and Global Rat-
ing Guide (1968). Cautionary.

The first obvious conclusion from these data is that the average level of moral
reasoning in primitive and small scale society also seems to be distinctly lower
than is found in modern industrial society: White, Bushnell and Regnemer in a
study of 426 rural Bahamian school children on a small island, both male and
female, 817 years, found none of the individuals in the present sample rea-
soned at any stage beyond 3 but that the overwhelming majority reasoned at
stages 1 and 2. Most of the changes longitudinally, and differences cross-
sectionally indicate that with age there is a decrease in stage 1 reasoning and an
increase in stage 2 reasoning with a small increase in stage 3 reasoning (White,
Bushnell and Regnemer 1978: 6263). Gorsuch and Barnes (1973) in a study of
the Black Caribs of British Honduras (Belize) of 84 boys from 1016 years of
age in rural or small town situations show responses at a stage 1 level drop
from 60% at ages 1011 to 20% at ages 1516, but no stage 3 reasoning devel-
ops: with the higher stage of development being found in the oldest inter-
viewees and the towns interviewees containing fewer initial stages and more
advanced stages than the village interviewees (Gorsuch and Barnes 1973: 59).
(It should be noted that this study used a less reliable questionnaire than that
of White, Bushnell and Regnemer [Snarey 1985: Table 2].)
It might be supposed that unless the predominant level of moral and social
reasoning among the adult members of a society were at Kohlbergs stages 3
and 4 it would be impossible to sustain a functioning social order at all. But
this need not be the case. Gorsuch and Barnes say:
It is apparent from our data that the highest developed frequent stage, a
pure 2, is in a form appropriate to a village or small town society and is a
distinct variant of the stage 2 found in more technologically developed soci-
ety. The respondents, for example, seem to express a real concern with help-
ing others, a concern seldom found in stage 2 in the United States. They
were concerned not because of a moral norm within the culture, but because
they could reasonably expect to have the favour returned to them [my emphasis].
Another element that makes these 2s distinctive was that the possible viola-
tion of norms were not perceived as a live option because group pressures
would be immediately applied [my emphasis]. Indeed, these expectations of
immediate group reactions are more realistic in the Carib culture than in a
city culture because of the physical proximity and interaction among the
members of the former. In a sense, therefore, personal and village interests
converge sufficiently so that one need not move above a stage 2 to be an ac-
cepted individual of that culture and to have a functional society. (Gorsuch
and Barnes 1973: 296297)

We shall see that in band societies, in particular, direct reciprocity and
group pressure referred to by Gorsuch and Barnes are basic modes of social
control, and stage 2 moral reasoning will be adequate because
Primary reference groups such as family and friends provide role-taking
opportunities suitable for the types of interpersonal thinking involved in
stages 1 and 2. However, primary reference groups are not sufficient to
promote higher moral thinking because children must be able to take a gen-
eralized social perspective in order to attain moral stages 3 and above. (Ed-
wards 1975: 520)
Edwards also states that moral judgment stages 4, 5, and 6 are not gener-
ally found in interviews with traditional adults who live in small scale societies
such as isolated tribal communities. rather, only stages 1 to 3 seems to
dominate among such groups of people (Edwards 1981: 268). Indeed, she
notes a significant difference between the social assumptions of stages 3 and 4.
The stage 3 perspective presumes that society is a sort of homogenous, har-
monious we composed of people who share moral values (Selman, 1976).
At stage 4, society is explicitly conceived as of a complex whole composed of
competing groups with conflicting values and interests. Conflicts and pref-
erences must be mediated through formal institutions such as courts and
legislatures. Stage 4 is thus more abstract than stage 3 in its assumptions
about the nature of society. Stage 4 represents what Kohlberg calls a sys-
tems perspective, because it posits the resolution of social conflicts in terms
of political and legal institutions. (Ibid., 258)
These results show, secondly, that we need not expect to find that the level
of thinking in any society will be uniform. Some individuals will be able to op-
erate on a higher cognitive level than is required to master the collective repre-
sentations of their society, while others will not be able to understand all their
collective representations. Again, the more complex the society, the greater the
differences in cognitive level, so that in complex literate societies we shall ex-
pect to find the maximum diversity in this respect. The result is that here we
can scarcely talk of collective representations at all, as far as the whole society
is concerned, since some legal, philosophical, and theological representations
may be too complex and abstract for the ordinary person to grasp.
Edwardss (1975) Kenyan sample of 52 students (35 males 17 females), me-
dian age 22.2 at the University of Nairobi, and 61 persons (47 males 14 females)
from 5 different tribal groups, 36 adults with a median age of 48, and 25 secon-
dary students with median age of 19.6 shows the following distribution of
moral judgement reasoning stages (see Table 4).
Table 4: Frequency distribution of the moral judgment scores
Sample Stage
1
Mixed
12
Stage 2 Mixed
23
Stage 3 Mixed
34
Stage
4
Mixed
45
Total
University
students
0 0 2
(4%)
21
(40%)
13
(25%)
11
(21%)
3
(6%)
2
(4%)
52
(100%)
Community
leaders
0 0 6
(17%)
14
(39%)
12
(33%)
4
(11%)
0 0 36
(100%)
Secondary
students
0 1
(4%)
9
(36%)
13
(52%)
2
(8%)
0 0 0 25
(100%)
Source: Edwards (1975)
stage 4 reasoning is much more evident among the university subjects
than the community leaders, although the leaders are on average much
older than the university students (and have therefore more time to de-
velop). Among the university students, 31 percent of subjects show major or
minor stage usage of stage 4 reasoning. In contrast, among the community
leaders, only 11 percent of subjects display in the stage 4 [for reasons that
will be explained below]. (Edwards 1975: 517)
Harkness et al. (1981) also found significant differences in the moral reason-
ing of leaders and non-leaders among the rural Kipsigis of Kenya, and their
data will be quoted in detail in Chapter VI. Edwards (1975) points out the im-
portance of experience of ethnic and racial differences, and attending school
away from home, as further factors related to moral development:
In Africa two salient dimensions of intrasociety variation in peer interaction
include the amount of cultural diversity and the extent to which schooling
removes young people from traditional family life and parental authority. I
have found that Kenyan university students attribute the greatest changes
in their personal values to encountering ethnic and racial heterogeneity at
school and to going away from home to live. Students felt that these experi-
ences helped to give them a social perspective on morality and also helped
them to see themselves as moral agents Indeed, the empirical evidence
presented in the study (based on university and secondary samples) sug-
gests that students attending culturally diverse (versus homogeneous) and
residential (versus nonresidential) secondary schools advance more rapidly
in moral judgment from the pre-conventional to the conventional level. (Ed-
wards 1975: 519, and see also Maqsud 1977 for Nigeria)
Referring to her Kenyan study (cited above) Edwards notes that all four of
the leaders who show stage 4 reasoning possessed either secondary or higher
level of education and occupations in the modern sectors of the economy
(teacher, business manager, bank officer, executive secretary). In contrast, the
leaders who were traditional village farmers or labourers were scored at stage
3, or stage 2 and 3 mixed (1981, 269).
Finally, these cross-cultural studies clearly establish that there are certain
features of social experience which retard cognitive development and others
that stimulate it. Life in isolated, rural communities, with lack of formal educa-
tion, lack of participation in a commercial economy, lack of participation in
leadership roles and in state-level institutions, and lack of experience of cul-
tural diversity, are all retarding influences; while interaction with non-kin in
Social evolution 145

urban environments, formal education, commercial relations, leadership, and
participation in state-level institutions, and experience of cultural diversity are
all stimulating factors. It will also be obvious that all the stimulating factors are
inherently associated with those features of societal complexity which have
evolved in the course of history and are not found at the simpler levels of social
organization.
2. Social evolution
In the course of social evolution there are certain types of change that are of
exceptional importance:
1. The growth of community size, which inherently produces more
elaborate corporate structures, differentiation of social function, and
hierarchical organization.
2. The development of institutions of mediation and justice. These pro-
mote the formulation of clear social norms to guide conduct, that can
eventually be enforced by punishments. The centralization of legal
systems is of special importance in relation to notions of law and jus-
tice.
3. Growing political centralization, which involves increasing functional
integration and rationalization of society. A few men are now in the
position of being able to survey the whole of their society and direct
its policies.
4. Conquest warfare, which tends to produce large scale polities with
multicultural populations, and this in turn creates problems in the
harmonization of values.
5. The growth of trade and commerce, which are specially effective in
breaking down the traditional structure of status obligations based on
kinship and birth. With the developments in technology and a mone-
tary economy, and growing division of labour, individual choice be-
comes of greater importance in social life. Long distance trade, like
conquest warfare, increases knowledge of other cultures.
6. This is also related to urbanization, in which mercantile relationships,
a high division of labour, the breakdown of traditional status obliga-
tions, and multicultural interaction is strongly implicated.
7. The rise of a professional class of thinkers, an educated, literate elite,
with formal education and debate.
These factors are all highly significant in the evolution of moral understanding
because they are all closely related to the need for more differentiated, articu-
late, and abstract ways of thinking about society and human relations, and they
tie in closely with those factors relating to cognitive development noted in the
previous section.
Boas supposed that any general theory of social evolution must (wrongly)
assume that the same cultural phenomenon was the result of similar causes:
The fact that many fundamental features of culture are universal, or at least
occur in many isolated places, interpreted by the assumption that the same
features must always have developed from the same causes, leads to the
conclusion that there is one grand system according to which mankind has
developed everywhere; that all the occurring variations are no more than
minor details in this grand uniform evolution. (Boas [1896]1988: 89)
And, as Boas very rightly observed, it is not the case that the same cultural
features actually do develop everywhere as the result of the same causes. But
while Boas and subsequent generations of anthropologists thought that this
was a conclusive argument against the idea of a general pattern of social evolu-
tion, they were mistaken.
The centralization of political authority, the development of mediatory in-
stitutions, conquest warfare, urbanization, literacy, money, and so on are cer-
tainly not the result of a uniform set of factors that operate in the same way in
all times and places. But the crucial point which Boas (and his epigones)
missed was that it does not matter by what particular historical route the state,
or urbanization, or money, or writing, developed in society X as distinct from
society Y; what matters is that in whatever society they occur, and by whatever
means they develop, these cultural forms will have certain similar properties,
and impose certain constraints on other aspects of that society. There is also a
strong tendency for technological, economic, political, and religious factors to
interact together and mutually reinforce each other, and the result is a clear
directional tendency in the course of human history for societies to become lar-
ger and more politically centralized (see Hallpike 1986a Chapter V for an ex-
tended discussion of this process). The state, for example, has developed in a
number of unrelated areas in very similar ways, so that the basic organization
of Aztec and Inca societies was, despite such practices as human sacrifice, es-
sentially familiar to the Spaniards when they first encountered them, and
would also have been familiar to the Chinese and the Indians. Increased size,
centralization, hierarchical organization, specialization of function, division of
labour, urbanization, trade, and so on are very obvious general features of so-
cial evolution (Hallpike 1986a: 13) which we may now examine in more detail.
The dominant characteristics of hunter-gatherer society, which is the initial
condition of the human race,
1
are its small size, with each band having an av-

1
It will be understood that when I refer to hunter-gatherer society as the initial condi-
tion of man, I am basing my conclusions only on the ethnographic data relating to
modern societies of this economic type. A valid theory of social evolution does not re-
quire the hypothetical reconstruction of some initial state of society that was once com-
mon to the whole human race, a kind of agnostic version of the Garden of Eden. We
certainly have no means of knowing whether the Neanderthals or even the Cro-
Magnons had polyandry or polygyny, exogamy, totemism, or bride-capture, and specu-
lation on such problems is a waste of time because there is no evidence to support it and
never will be. But we have considerable evidence from archaeology, history, and eth-
nography about the consequences of a number of innovations such as agriculture and
the domestication of animals, the use of metals, the emergence of the state, conquest
warfare, writing, money, and industrialization. Some of these have occurred before oth-


erage population of about 2550; the ability of individuals to move from one
band to another, especially to avoid those with whom they are on bad terms;
and the lack of formal political and judicial authority. Although headmen can
exist, they are non-hereditary, and their influence is essentially informal and
persuasive, operating through the force of personality and example rather than
from a generally accepted duty of obedience on the part of band members.
Correspondingly, while members of senior generations may be respected by
their juniors, neither the elders nor headmen have any judicial function, such
that they can provide authoritative judgements in the settlement of disputes.
There is relatively little to dispute about, of course, in band society, apart from
women and failure to share and exchange in a generous manner. Disputes are
typically resolved by the sanctions of public ridicule and disapproval, by mu-
tual avoidance of the parties concerned, by formal competitions such as physi-
cal or verbal duelling, or by vengeance (Leacock and Lee 1982: 78; Cohen
1985: 99100). At the band level of society, there is no real possibility of a
distinction between an injury to an individual and a crime, since the notion of a
crime assumes the existence of a corporate order which is violated by a crime
in a manner distinct from the injuries suffered by the victim. While extremely
anti-social individuals in band societies (such as habitual and indiscriminate
murderers, or those suspected of witchcraft) may be killed often by their own
kin at popular request they are killed because of the unpleasant effects of
their behaviour on the band members, not because what they do is a violation of
the social order. (About the only possible exception to this generalization which
I have encountered is the killing of women in some Australian tribes because
they have seen sacred objects which must be kept hidden.)
The need to avoid conflict between band members is very obvious to all,
especially where hunting
1
is concerned, and sharing (as of game animals killed
in the hunt) is obligatory, so that the constant exchange of gifts and the rule of
reciprocity is a striking feature of the social organization of bands. But on the
other hand many ethnographers refer to the individualistic quality of personal
interaction and the lack of corporate solidarity.
While unilineal descent groups occur in Australia, these are for ritual pur-
poses and they do not provide the basis for corporate groups, which are nota-
bly lacking in band societies. The bands themselves are, of course, corporate
groups in the sense that they consist of a number of families who hunt and for-
age together, but, as previously mentioned, it is always possible for individuals
to change band membership. Bands are therefore collections of individuals,

ers in history and, indeed, are the prerequisites of the later developments, and social
evolutionary theory is the study of how such innovations occur, why they have the ef-
fects they do, and how they are linked together.
1
We should bear in mind that the amount of hunting in hunter-gatherer societies var-
ies with the environment. For modern hunters, at any rate, it seems legitimate to pre-
dict a hunting emphasis only in the arctic, a fishing emphasis in the mid-high latitudes,
and a gathering emphasis in the rest of the world (Lee 1968: 42), so that apart from the
hunting of large prey a high level of actual co-operation in foraging societies does not
seem to be required.
rather than the corporate groups of more complex societies that are based on
such jural principles as descent, or relative, age, or residence which have clear
and complex rules of membership and mutual obligations among their mem-
bers.
The absence of clear group structures therefore makes it very difficult for
the members of these societies to think about their social order in a way that
goes beyond the actual relations between known individuals. The absence of
formal modes of adjudicating disputes also means that it is hard to articulate
social norms in a way that is known and accepted by all, so moral judgements
on individual cases must tend to be relative to the personal relations of those
involved in the disputes. Thus we have a situation with, on the one hand, con-
siderable personal autonomy for individuals that, on the other is only modified
by group pressure to conform and the requirements of reciprocal exchange.
Personal behaviour may also be regulated by rigid taboos.
The shift to agriculture, which has often taken many centuries, leads to a
number of major changes in social organization. The most obvious are those
associated with greater size of population and the increase possibilities for a
sedentary way of life, with much larger settlements than are possible for
hunter-gatherers. The size of groups is closely related to the organizational
complexity needed to coordinate the increasing number of social relations.
Sedentism is a very powerful factor in providing stable and coercive groups
which can persist over many generations.
Agriculture
1
is also the basis of new forms of property relations between
people and land. While private property exists in band society, it is confined to
personal belongings, such as weapons and tools, but the cultivation of land and
the domestication of animals which often accompanies this involve people in a
new set of relationships and problems. These centre on rights of ownership,
land use, and the inheritance of land and stock, while violations of these rights
generate a new and serious range of disputes, and there are now many more
people to become involved in such disputes. I shall argue that societies moving
towards agriculture often experience a serious collapse of social order during
the transitional phase before a more stable order can be instituted.
As we shall see in Chapter V, while population increases arithmetically, re-
lationships increase exponentially, so that social control becomes a major prob-
lem for agricultural societies. This is what Johnson (1982) has called scalar
stress, involving increased congestion, information load, loss of privacy, and
loss of control (and see also Cohen 1985, and Hallpike 1986a: 23752 for ex-
tended discussions of the principle involved here).

1
Economies that are primarily dependent on fishing are, from one point of view, classi-
fied as foraging, but are distinguished from the rest of hunter-gather societies by their
elaborate technology of boats, nets, and other tools, and by the much greater density of
the population that they can support. The North-West Coast Indians are the classic ex-
ample of ranked, tribal societies based on a fishing economy.

This new kind of order is based on status, derived from elaborated systems
of kinship, age, residence, and occupation, and has been well summarized by
Cohen:
If human beings are to live permanently in groups of more than 50 to 100
people, they apparently have to change their own rules. People who live in
large permanent groups must find ways of dealing with neighbours too nu-
merous to be known individually. One of the major steps facilitating pro-
gress to larger group size appears to have been the development of systems
to categorize, identify, and stereotype group members. Large communities
of farmers are commonly divided into sub-groups. Individuals are treated
according to the category to which they are assigned these communities
invent distinctions among otherwise relatively similar individuals, including
elaborate and formal divisions based on kinship and descent, age, sex, or ini-
tiation into special clubs. Clans and lineages are not only resource-owning
groups: they provide a major means of classifying unknown individuals.
(Cohen 1989: 2324)
(Here and in other quotations from Cohen I do not interpret him as meaning
that these classificatory changes in the organization of society occur con-
sciously, and as the result of deliberate planning.)
These groups typically become formed into structures, often of a hierarchi-
cal nature, such as segmentary descent groups, age-group systems, complex
residential divisions, or occupational distinctions, such as priests, warriors, and
farmers. Age-group systems also often incorporate oppositions between the
military functions of the warriors and religious functions of the elders. Smiths,
potters, and other craftsmen are also often distinguished from farmers, and
take on hereditary status, and these structures based on status form a complex
order which is almost invariably linked with cosmological and religious beliefs.
The domestication of animals is clearly associated with sacrifice and the de-
velopment of ritual and ceremony
1
The new relations between man and the
earth also generate a complex symbolism associated with fertility and the
respective functions of sky and earth in the growth of crops. There is a marked
development of calendrical systems associated with the intensification of agri-
culture, and the months often acquire ritual associations. Religious functions,
initially linked with the elders in band society if they exist there at all, often
become specialized hereditary roles in agricultural and pastoral societies.
Political and judicial authority develop greatly, especially on the basis of
descent, birth-order, and relative age, and in association with the religious at-

1
Ingold (1987: 243376) argues that the killing of animals by the hunter is a form of
blood sacrifice forming part of a cycle of world regeneration in which, however, it is the
spirit masters of the wild herds who are analogous to the human masters of the domes-
tic herds. His argument is too complex to summarize here, and is also based only on
data from the circumboreal hunting societies of northern latitudes. But, as he says, it is
quite possible that sacrifice does have some symbolic and cosmological continuities
with hunting. Yet there is no doubt that the domestication of animals allowed a much
greater elaboration of ritual and ceremonial organization based on sacrifice than was
possible in a hunting economy.
tributes of authority, so that disputes come to be settled by recognized authori-
ties in accordance with generally accepted legal criteria of procedure and deci-
sion-making. The possibility of punishment by duly constituted authority rein-
forces the notion of desert, whereby the virtuous are rewarded and the bad suf-
fer in accordance with their wrong-doing, and it is now possible for crime to be
distinguished from tort, which has separate remedies (in which retaliation of-
ten continues to play a part, especially for homicide).
If the society is small enough, disputes can still be handled informally within
each lineage (or segment) of the society, whereas disputes between segments
can be negotiated by the leaders (elders) of the two groups. Larger groups
need to designate permanent leaders head men or chiefs to whom people
regularly turn when decisions must be made or disputes settled. To simplify
the demands on these individuals, which might otherwise become over-
whelming, formal channels of appeal are established within the group. Indi-
viduals may communicate with leaders only through defined intermediaries
(usually the senior members of their own group). (Cohen 1989: 24)
The greater degree of sedentism, the involvement of the individual in vari-
ous groups in which the social status and access to resources depends, and the
improved modes of dispute settlement all combined to restrict avoidance and
mobility as a response to social discord, and this greater permanence of resi-
dence in turn places a heavier demand on individuals to conform, since expul-
sion or ostracism are much more severe penalties than there are in societies
where people can easily move away to escape the consequences of their anti-
social acts.
In these societies it becomes very much easier for individuals to think of
themselves in terms of their social roles and the duties related to those roles,
and hence to judge the behaviour of others in terms of their fulfilment of role
requirements. The development of formal institutions of dispute adjudication
also allows social norms to be much more clearly articulated, so that moral
judgements can be given a more objective, non-relativistic basis in terms of the
social order rather than the personal relations between the individual dispu-
tants and their supporters.
Ranking, almost invariably based on descent, is a frequent development
and produces a hierarchical order of society even in the absence of the institu-
tions of the state so that the degrees of nobles, commoners, and slaves may be
intrinsic parts of the total social order. And with ranking comes the notion of
obedience and loyalty to superiors, which is another significant change in what
may be called the moral landscape, for it introduces at least the possibility of a
conflict between duty to a social superior and the standards of customary mo-
rality.
To summarize the major features of social evolution so far, one result
is what might be called increased patriotism. Large communities must in-
vest an increasing proportion of their resources in reinforcing feelings of
membership and commitment to the group. Much of the efforts of the group
become directed towards both occasions that celebrate group membership,
such as peace and festivals, and symbolic monuments and tombs that seem
to reinforce group ties and celebrate the status of ancestral individuals. The

community directs increasing amounts of energy from individual welfare to
celebrations of group identity In short, tribes and chiefdoms trade some
of the flexibility of band society for more formal rules; they trade some of
their sense of individual reciprocity for an emphasis on group membership.
(Cohen 1989: 25)
The state, when it develops, again produces a new set of circumstances as
did agriculture, notably in relation to the administration of justice. Newman
suggests the following dimensions or differentia as the basis of a typology of
legal systems: 1) the existence of a third party or hearing body; 2) the social
requirement to use the third party; 3) the authoritativeness of third party deci-
sions; 4) the centralization of decision-making; 5) multiple levels of jurisdiction
or appeal (Newman 1983: 52).
Instead of finding all possible combinations of the five differentia, one dis-
covers that the various dimensions are interrelated, and only certain combi-
nations occur. In fact, they form a Guttman-like scale. Systems that lack third
parties also lack authoritative decision-making and multiple legal levels. At
the other extreme, societies with highly centralized forms of legal decision-
making also have authoritative decisions and require third party involve-
ment. (Ibid., 5253)
On this basis Newman (ibid., 54) proposes a sequence of legal types as fol-
lows:
Table 5: Newmans sequence of legal types
The emergence of the state and political centralization also means that a
small group of leaders have to reflect on how that leadership is to be main-
tained, which is the beginning of statecraft, since these leaders have to start
thinking about the social order as a total system. (We are given an excellent
account of this in Mariners account of Tonga at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and the means by which Finow maintained his political dominance
over the subordinate chiefs see Martin 1827). In an uncentralized tribal soci-
ety, by contrast, no one is in charge (at least above the local level of interac-
tion), and so the question of how the whole society is to be run cannot really
present itself.
Types
Differentiae
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Third Party
Available
- + + + + + + +
Third Party
Required
- - + + + + + +
Authoritative-
ness Expected
- - - + + + + +
Multiple Legal
Levels
- - - - + +
Centralizations
of Decisions
None None None Low Medium High High Highest
With the consolidation of the state, populations typically become much lar-
ger, usually as a result of conquest warfare and the incorporation of entire so-
cieties, with differing customs and laws. Since one of the characteristics of the
state is the centralization of justice, there may be a problem of incorporating
different systems of law and customs into a common system of justice, and this
may give a new relevance to the idea of a ius gentium, a general consensus
among peoples of different cultures about certain basic principles of law. Oc-
cupational specialization greatly increases, in conjunction with clearer distinc-
tions of rank, and the state may now include groups whose ways of life are
remarkably diverse, and these divisions are often enhanced by the develop-
ment of literacy and a high culture among the wealthy. The larger populations
of states are often associated with urbanization, trade, and markets, and in
these types of relationships one increasingly interacts with strangers in transac-
tions where status is of little or no guidance in how one should act, and where
notions of contract, honesty, and fairness must be employed instead. (It will be
recalled that Heinzs Dilemma in Kohlbergs theory is centred on a commercial
transaction between strangers.)
Power and wealth can be far more clearly distinguished from personal vir-
tue under states than under the regime of tribes or chiefdoms, since the unjust
judge or governor and the dishonest merchant nevertheless have far higher
social status than the virtuous poor, so that to be successful and to be good
might almost be contradictions in terms in some societies.
While a social order based on status embedded in corporate groups may
carry over into the state, or it may be disrupted by the very emergence of the
state, there is a general tendency for kinship structures at the upper levels of
society, and age-grouping systems, to diminish in importance as a result of the
emergence of the state, especially where commerce and urbanization become
significant. Conquest warfare has everywhere the tendency to disrupt the kin-
based order of society, as does the increasing use of money as the nexus of so-
cial relationships, and social injustice and oppression may become pervasive.
In such a climate the individual can no longer decide what to do simply by ap-
peal to his own status and to that of others and is inevitably more confused
about moral choices: What is virtue? and What is justice? are therefore ques-
tions which are increasingly asked in these conditions, and we shall see that the
answers to these questions are associated with three types of development
towards greater generality of moral principles, such as the Golden Rule; to-
wards a deeper probing of the inner life of the individual; and away from a
purely status-based morality towards a greater emphasis on a morality of ide-
als. Correspondingly, there is greater awareness of those characteristics which
all human beings share by virtue simply of their common humanity, regardless
of nationality, rank, or other differences of status. At this level of thought we
encounter the philosophers and religious teachers of the ancient world who are
able to transcend the limits of their own specific social order.
From one point of view we can regard the evolution of moral thought as
concerned with the increasing articulation of the relations between the indi-
vidual and society. This process begins in small scale foraging societies with a
simple confrontation of the egoistic desires of each individual with the desires
Social understanding 153

of others, and an uneasy compromise between autonomy and the accommoda-
tion by the individual to these collective restrictions by conformity and ex-
change. The development of more complex forms of corporate order provides a
more stable framework to regulate the relations between individual and soci-
ety, within which it becomes possible for customary obligations to regulate
individual thought and behaviour more comprehensively. Relations between
the individual and society still remain predominantly heteronomous, however,
while articulate self-awareness and the analysis of the mental states of others
also remain undeveloped. Only at the highest stage do we find that individuals
can simultaneously go beyond convention to basic moral principles and also
stand outside their own point of view and behaviour which, like social conven-
tion, become an object of articulate thought.
Finally, it should be stressed that the evolutionary process is not necessarily
one of greater and greater efficiency and stability of organization, since there
are likely to be intervals of confusion and instability. The growth of community
size and the new forms of property relations which accompany the shift to ag-
riculture and the domestication of animals create new problems of social con-
trol which are impossible to resolve on the basis of hunter-gatherer organiza-
tion. New forms of authority, dispute settlement, and corporate groups must
be developed, and this will take time how much time, of course, will depend
on the contingencies of local circumstances and traditions. The development of
the state may also occur in the period of weakened tribal institutions, produced
by growth in trade and warfare, and states themselves undergo periodic col-
lapses which create confusion. More recently, we know very well that the In-
dustrial Revolution has had similar effects on our own society.
3. Social understanding
In the previous section I have referred briefly to the way in which different lev-
els of social complexity are related to the way in which people can think about
society, and this question must now be taken up in more detail, as it is central
to the development of moral understanding.
a. Simplification in social evolution
The social milieu of primitive society is relatively undemanding from the or-
ganizational point of view by comparison with that of states because numbers
are few, the experience is shared by all, the division of labour is low and the
technology is simple. The same few ascriptive principles based on descent, kin-
ship, gender, and relative age and birth-order are all that are required, and
these lend themselves very well to symbolic representation, which is inherently
resistant to verbal analysis.
The prevalence of symbolic representations of social institutions which link
them so closely with cosmic order is also characteristic of that lack of discrimi-
nation between social and natural law that Piaget found especially in pre-
operatory subjects. So, in answer to my question why they had their age-grade
system, the Konso reply was that it made the crops grow, by which they meant
that when society was well ordered mans relations with nature would be well
ordered too. Piaget notes
the fundamental fact that, just because of the general realism of his spon-
taneous thought, the child, up to the age of about 78, always regards the
notion of law as simultaneously moral and physical. Indeed, we have tried
to show (The Childs Conception of the World and The Childs Conception of Cau-
sality) that until the age of 7 8 there does no exist for the child a single
purely mechanical law of nature in short, the universe is permeated with
moral rules; physical regularity is not dissociated from moral obligation and
social rule. Not that the last two are to be deemed more important than the
first. Far from it. There is simply non-differentiation between the two ideas.
The idea of physical regularity is as primitive as that of psychical or moral
regularity, but neither is conceived independently of the other. It is only
natural, therefore, that the moral should retain something physical about it.
(Piaget 1932: 18889)
Small scale societies such as the Konso, with simple technologies, can afford
to be organized on those symbolic principles which tend to confound the natu-
ral with the social because they do not need to be organized primarily in terms
of functional efficiency. Rather than being a universal feature of all societies,
functional efficiency is actually an emergent property, related in general to in-
creases in the size, centralization, and specialization of society, and in particu-
lar to the development of the state, when for the first time the whole of society
is subordinated to a clear and distinct set of goals the maintenance of the au-
thority and power of the rulers. The growth of political, judicial, bureaucratic,
military, and commercial institutions requires a great deal of explicit functional
analysis each of these institutions is for something, and its component parts
have been consciously designed to achieve these goals in an efficient way. This
is a very different situation from that of a primitive society. Here, it is very dif-
ficult to be maladaptive because almost anything will work, so that many insti-
tutions are not for any specific practical purpose of social regulation, but rather
express religious, moral, and cosmological values (an example being the age-
system of the Konso). It is immediately obvious why all business firms have an
accounts department, because their goal is to make a profit, but it is not at all
obvious why a particular society needs prescriptive alliance or an age-grading
system from the organizational point of view, since many other alternatives
would be equally viable.
What this means is that, paradoxically, more complex social structures may
be based on simpler methods of social organization than are found in smaller
scale societies. It is conventional to describe the evolutionary process as one
from the simple to the complex, and while this usage is obviously justified, it
can also be said that societies have only increased their regulatory capacities,
and the conceptual power of their collective representations, by successive and
selected simplifications. This claim appears paradoxical only if we treat com-
plex as synonymous with complicated, but while complex is defined as con-
sisting of parts connected together and/or involved in various relations of
subordination, and therefore as difficult to understand, the connotations of
complicated are significantly different: 1) folded, wrapped or twisted to-

gether, 2) combined intimately with, 3) mixed up with an involved way
(summarized from the Oxford English Dictionary).
The conventional usage of simple and complex obscures the fact while
societies with less elaborate organization than others may be less complex they
may also be more complicated, in the sense that social relations may be less
differentiated, categorized, and orderly and hence more mixed up and in-
volved. In small scale, face to face societies it is easy to develop what are actu-
ally more complicated that is less differentiated forms of association and
classification, but with the growth of size of society, and the range of technol-
ogy and culture, it is necessary to develop more generalizable forms of order
that can transcend local idiosyncrasies and embrace larger and more diverse
types of people, that is, to simplify in a classificatory sense.
The specialization of social relationships that occurs in societies of corporate
order into those of descent, residence, work groups, crafts, age groups, and so
on represent an enormous simplification by comparison with atomistic socie-
ties where all these different relationships are intermingled. The result is that
societies of corporate order can co-ordinate very much larger populations, who
will find it easier to form a clearer mental image of their own society. But even
here, because societies of corporate order such as the Konso are uncentralized
they are very complicated in terms of political organization: there are the re-
gional priests who act as mediators between the towns, but whose authority is
essentially ritual, and within the towns the councils are composed of elected
elders, who have both ritual status as deputies of God and also take political
decisions and decide court cases. Executive functions and the maintenance of
order are carried out by leaders of the warrior grade. But in the case of fighting
between the wards it is the lineage heads, rather than the elders, who act as
mediators, so that political authority in this society is spread among a number
of different types of functionary.
It is clear, then that by isolating political authority itself, like descent and
age, from other social relations, and by centralizing it, a whole new range of
organizational possibilities and problems is created, permitting an elaborate
development which is impossible when it is mixed up with other social rela-
tions, and this also makes it much easier for people, especially the leaders, to be
able to develop an articulate mental grasp of how their society operates politi-
cally.
This process can also be described as rationalization, involving the substitu-
tion of increasingly general and articulate rules and categories for those of a
more particularistic and idiosyncratic type: the diminishing importance of the
ascriptive principles of kinship and age, and their steady replacement by such
principles as individual achievement and ability, social class, and increasingly
self-conscious application of functional and purposeful criteria to social or-
ganization. The emergence of the state in particular greatly extends this process
of rationalization, since it involves the growing subordination of the whole of
society to a few clear and overriding purposes: the maintenance and extension,
where possible, of the authority and power of the ruler over his subjects, to-
gether with military success, and control over trade in the public works which
support and enhanced that power. Functional efficiency of organization (and
associated modes of thought) first becomes of major significance with political
centralization and the emergence of the state, professional military organiza-
tion, large skill trade and public works, and a high level of the division of la-
bour. Once it becomes necessary to maintain a central government, to allocate
official tasks, to prevent rebellion, to raise and distribute the necessary reve-
nues, to organize truly efficient military forces, to organize large scale public
works such as irrigation, and so on, we are in a very different world from that
of the society based on ascriptive institutions, because the institutions of primi-
tive society are not usually organized by a few directing minds in terms of ex-
plicit and overriding purposes. It is only when an organization has to satisfy
certain criteria of performance and efficiency that alternative solutions need to
be considered, and hence a comparison is generated between what is, and what
might be, and this requires conscious, articulate thought. Modes of thought
dominated by concrete imagery, allegory, affect, and moral values are quite
practical forms of social control in small scale, face-to-face societies, but such
thinking can only impede the understanding of nature and machines, and is
inappropriate in societies which approximate more and more closely to the
condition of machines, as do states. The consequence of this development from
ascriptive to functional organization is therefore the dissolution of the elemen-
tary ascriptive categories of the earlier stages, particularly those based on de-
scent and age, so thoroughly imbued with ritual and symbolic values and con-
cepts, and the growth of purposeful institutions for specific ends; pragmatic
substitutability, a growth of rational calculation, and the assessment of institu-
tions in the terms of efficiency. All of this involves conscious thinking about
statecraft and the facilitation of higher levels of social and moral cognition than
those that can develop in smaller uncentralized societies.
b. Implicit versus explicit knowledge
It follows that one of the most important characteristics of primitive moral and
social awareness is that it is, by comparison with our own, relatively inarticu-
late. The members of such societies know, in an implicit sense, how their soci-
ety works, but this knowledge cannot be expressed in an articulate and coher-
ent way. In small groups, which continue for generation after generation in the
same place, with a simple technology, it is therefore easy to develop rules (such
as those for kinship and marriage) based on principles which do not have to be
made explicit. Small changes can be made in each generation which will fit in
with the general pattern of life, but this fitting in need not require an articu-
late awareness of that pattern as a totality. Ethnographers repeatedly encounter
the phenomenon of patterned order in culture which the people themselves
cannot articulate, even though in a sense they know it, and the psychologist
Bruner (1966: 58) points out that the ability to act on implicit knowledge typi-
cally precedes the ability to express that knowledge in articulate verbal form.
For example, while Konso society is regulated by a wealth of named catego-
ries and rules, the order so produced is essentially static, nor is it conceptual-
ized as a whole, so that its day-to-day operation is achieved by concrete
knowledge of individuals and by the operation of specific rules in the appro-
priate context. I remember once having a conversation with a young man of

about 25, who had attended the mission school for several years, on the subject
of Konso age organization. This is based on generational seniority, of elders,
warriors, and boys. I tried to express to him the idea that the different grades
each had their own work to do in relation to the whole society and was sur-
prised to discover that he did not find this at all easy to grasp. With the advan-
tage of Piagetian hindsight it now seems likely that what he found difficult was
to think of the age organization as a whole, as a total system, to which the
component groups and categories made their distinctive contribution. Of
course, he was perfectly well aware of the distinctive and complementary roles
of elders and warriors, but he could not combine this into a conscious and ar-
ticulate model of the total age-grouping system. His knowledge remained im-
plicit and inarticulate. Compare this case with the reflections of a medieval
European cleric on a traditional order very similar in type of that of the Konso:
The society of God, which one thinks of as one, is divided into three orders:
some pray, others fight, and others work. These three orders live together and
cannot be separated. The services of one permit the services of the other two.
Each in turn lends its support to all (Dubuisson 1975: 37). It is therefore possi-
ble for the members of primitive society to operate complex institutions
which form a total order of considerable complexity, yet without the ability to
grasp consciously that total order, or to be able to see and articulate how the
component parts fit together for the whole. (If this were in fact a common abil-
ity the task of ethnographers would be very much easier.)
Horton (in the passage previously quoted) has stressed the importance of
the lack of alternatives in primitive society, where one particular way of doing
things and representing the world is taken for granted. The growing complex-
ity of society in the course of evolution creates situations in which people are
increasingly made aware that theirs is not the only possible way, and they of-
ten have to interact with members of different cultures, especially in the con-
text of the state, which may embrace many different ethnic groups, and it
seems likely that the demands for the more articulate expression of thought are
a response to the increasing diversity of experience. The verbal analysis of ex-
perience, of social behaviour and custom, will be given a lower priority in so-
cieties where experience is roughly the same for every one, where behaviour is
largely dominated by custom, and where institutions are part of a social struc-
ture that is not the subject of debate. Only when we have to translate our ex-
perience and way of life for the benefit of strangers or of those who do not
share our experience do we have to fall back on verbal analysis and generalisa-
tion, and in primitive society there are no strangers, or at least no intellectually
inquisitive or disputatious ones.
Generalisation is required for instruction out of context, for comparison and
analysis, for reconciling felt contradictions between different aspects of life or
different representative modes (as when we engage in music or art criticism,
for example), and for planning and deliberate experiments. As we have seen,
the circumstances of primitive life do not generally present problems requiring
generalisation. Language in these societies is not a tool of conceptual analysis,
but the basic vehicle of social interaction, of persuading, of concerting action,
and there is no awareness of propositions dissociated from the context of ut-
terance, or of language as a phenomenon distinct from speech.
Generalisation is also inhibited in primitive societies because their institu-
tions and customs are rooted in behaviour and feeling, embedded in the con-
text of action and expressed in a perceptually dominated concrete symbolism.
The conscious imposition of order is difficult to achieve, and when we do not
have to teach a system of classification to others it can easily be ad hoc, idiosyn-
cratic, and unanalytic. So, if what we are doing is familiar to us and small in
scale our desk, our books, or tools we find it easy to devise some personal
system of order, though a stranger is likely to have considerable difficulty in
following it. And when a limited number of individuals are interacting on a
long-term basis they, too, can develop forms of social and cultural order which
are easy for them to understand, on the basis of familiarity and shared experi-
ence.
I would suggest in general terms that collective representations and the
thinking of individuals change in response to the need for more effective com-
munication between members of different groups to the need for translatabil-
ity, in fact to the need for more generalised strategies for dealing with the
unfamiliar, and for the development of conscious purpose in the shaping of
social institutions. The need for articulated principles of order is proportional
to the complexity of the conceptual demands, that is, to the number, diversity,
unfamiliarity, and rate of change of the materials to be ordered; and it is therefore
possible to order small, stable, homogenous groups in complicated ways, that
is, which are undifferentiated and idiosyncratic, that are impossible in groups
of greater number, diversity, rate of change and resulting unfamiliarity. When
data increase markedly in quantity and heterogeneity, in scalar stress, compli-
cated classification is inadequate and there must be a search for a more overtly
systematic and hence generalizable basis of classification. In the evolution of
social systems of thought and representation of reality there is a progression
from the context-bound, the concrete, the non-specialized, the affective, the
culturally subjective or ethnocentric, and the absolutist, to the generalisable,
specialized, abstract, impersonal, objective, and relativist, and the progressive
unification of disparate areas of experience is also part of this process.
One of the most important factors in the development of these higher levels
of thought has been the fostering of debate among specialist thinkers, because
we may say that primitive society is a society of amateurs. While ethnogra-
phers encounter men of exceptional abilities and knowledge, such men are
scattered throughout society, and do not usually have the opportunity to meet
one another for extended periods and to match their wits against one another.
In addition, such men do not have the leisure to develop their talents because
they must be busy earning a living like everyone else, and they cannot usually
leave their knowledge to their descendants because there is no guarantee that
their sons will have the interest or ability to acquire this knowledge. The indis-
pensable requirements for speculative, abstract thought are leisure, the oppor-
tunity for able men to meet together, and for such groups or schools to be free
of the restraints of kinship. It is of course possible for priestly families to exist
and to have the responsibility for acquiring a large body of oral knowledge

ritual, myths etc. as in the case of Indo-Iranian and Hindu society, but this is
memorized knowledge of sacred texts, which by itself will not produce any
significant cognitive advance. Association between unrelated men with the
ability and interest to pursue discussion of philosophical and religious ques-
tions is of great significance in the cognitive development of society, and we
shall see that the growth of opportunities for such debate was crucial in the
development of the reflective and philosophical movements in the higher civi-
lizations of antiquity.
c. The influence of education and literacy on thought
Against this background the nature of the learning process in primitive society
assumes particular importance in relation to the sorts of cognitive skills re-
quired, by comparison to those developed by schooling and literacy.
We can summarize education in primitive society as conducted in a context
of real life, by example and observation, and without much verbal instruc-
tion or any specialist training situations. The object of education is not clev-
erness or the ability to question or experiment or to think for oneself, but
good sense, wisdom, and the ability to perform as a good citizen in work
and social relations. The child is highly motivated to conform, and his basic
learning commitment is not to things or ideas, but to people, especially those
closest to him socially. (Hallpike 1979: 109)
Gradually the child is inducted into the full life of an adult. He is almost
never told what to do in an explicit, verbal, or abstract manner. He is ex-
pected to watch, learning by imitation and repetition. Education is concrete
and nonverbal, concerned with practical activity, not abstract generalization.
There are never lectures on farming, house-building, or weaving. The child
spends all his days watching until at some point he is told to join in the ac-
tivity. If he makes a mistake, he is simply told to try again. (Gay and Cole
1967: 16; see also Smith 1934 and Fortes 1938 for detailed confirmation of
this.)
Even where specialized instruction occurs, one suspects that it resembles
the schools of learning among the Maori. The purpose of these was to pre-
serve various types of traditional lore, and to hand it down the centuries free
of any alteration, omission, or deterioration Any form of change, any depar-
ture from old teachings, was strongly disapproved of, and any questioning of
ancient teachings was held to be a grievous affront to Tane, the origin and pa-
tron of all high-class [expert, esoteric] knowledge (Best 1923: 7). The most im-
portant quality for which potential pupils were tested was their ability to
memorize oral instruction exactly and retentively (ibid., 14).
Formal schooling is part of a more complex type of social system in which
learning in the context of ordinary life is no longer sufficient to acquire an ade-
quate stock of knowledge:
Note that when a society grows more complex in its technology and division
of labour, then there are two deep changes that must necessarily occur. First,
the knowledge and skill within the culture comes increasingly to exceed the
amount that any one individual can know. Almost inevitably, then, there
develops a sharp disjunction between the worlds of the child and of the
adult. The unity of the Tale world becomes impossible in more complex so-
cieties. Increasingly, then, there develops a new and moderately effective
technique of instructing the young based heavily on telling out of context,
rather than on showing in context. The school, of course, becomes the prime
instrument of this new technique but by no means the exclusive one. For, in
fact, there is also a great increase in telling by parents, again out of the con-
text of action, for there come to be fewer spheres in which such learning in
situ can be practised. (Bruner 1966: 62)
We may begin a survey of the cognitive effects of schooling with the devel-
opment of the ability to use taxonomic classification, which is fundamental to
the higher levels of social and moral understanding. In one study of the effects
of schooling in Liberia, Cole et al. (1971) found that a prominent characteristic
of the thinking of those who had attended school was the increased ability to
use taxonomic categories. Taxonomic classification involves establishing the
defining criteria of the class, shared by all members of that class, and which
distinguish them from the members of other classes, eg. tool, container, ag-
ricultural implement, or duty, justice, and virtue etc., which Piaget would
term logical classes. Those with little or no schooling, however, classified
mainly by functional entailment, which involves grouping together things
together on the basis of their normal associations in everyday life or on func-
tional relationships between them, A pair of objects was selected so that the
first went with, or operated upon, the second. For example, a potato and a
knife were put together because you take the knife and cut the potato. Very
rarely was a large group formed and we virtually never had a classification
justified in terms of the way things look and their common membership in a
taxonomic category (Cole et al 1971: 79). Classification by functional entail-
ment, also often referred to as complexive, is a form of classification which is
typical of pre-operatory children, but is also used in primitive society, and in
our own society in appropriate contexts. It is easy to understand but is of little
use in the more advanced cognitive processes (see Hallpike 1979: 174224 for a
more extensive discussion).
In Hallpike (1986b: 1617) I also discussed a similar case of the evolution of
taxonomic classification in the history of library classification, from the idio-
syncratic, context bound systems of small medieval libraries to the modern
systems, showing the development of increasingly conceptually integrated,
abstract, and generalized systems in response to major increases in number,
diversity, unfamiliarity and rate of change of phenomena. It is therefore obvi-
ous, for example, that in reflecting on conduct men have also been driven to an
ever-increasing reliance on taxonomic classification: the notions of ethics,
law, duty, justice, obligation, responsibility, and so on are examples of
this. We may therefore expect to find in the development of collective represen-
tations those features of increased simplification, generality, order, and sys-
temization, flexibility and context-independence which are characteristic of
social organization in which an increasing reliance on taxonomic classification
is very obvious (see also Dougherty and Keller 1982).
Children who have been to school are also superior to the unschooled in
their ability to explain verbally their reasons for making particular choices in

test situations, and schooling also seems to develop the search for rules for the
solution for problems and the awareness of ones own mental operations:
attendance at school apparently encourages an approach to classification
tasks that incorporate a search for a rule for a principle that can generate
the answers. At the same time, schooling seems to promote an awareness
that alternative rules are possible one might call this a formal approach to
the task in which the individual searches for and selects from the several
possibilities a rule of solution. Finally, the one unambiguous finding in the
study to date is that schooling (and only schooling) contributes to the way in
which people describe and explain their own mental operations. (Cole and
Scribner 1974: 122)
In a later study of the Vai in Liberia Scribner and Cole emphasized the in-
fluence of schooling on logic in particular:
Of all the survey tasks, logic problems proved the most predictable and
demonstrated the strongest effects of schooling. Not only did amount of
school increase the number of correct answers, but it contributed to the
choice of theoretical explanations, over and above correct answers. School-
ing was the only background characteristic to improve performance; neither
Vai script nor Arabic literacy had an effect on either measure. (Scribner and
Cole 1981: 127)
The effects of schooling in stimulating debate are of particular importance:
The most pervasive effects in our studies were in ways people handled ver-
bal explanations. We have no reason to believe that skills required to explain
why problems were answered in a certain way are fostered by the knowl-
edge of a written language. Rather, they strike us as being exactly those
skills that are required in teacher-pupil dialogue in the classroom. Teachers
ask questions very much like those we ask: What made you give that an-
swer? How do you know? Go to the board and explain what you did Re-
cent studies of classrooms show that teacher-student exchanges com-
monly involve talk about mental operations or the procedures for accom-
plishing various intellectual tasks. (Ibid., 255)
Outside schooling, the principal factor in cognitive growth was found to be
urban residence:
Living in cities was a major influence in shifting people away from reliance
on functional modes of classification to use of taxonomic categories Jobs
in the modern sector were associated with better communication skills. A
cluster of factors indicating the obverse of cosmopolitanism (farming only,
playing a personal role in bush school) retarded a formal approach to verbal
problems (or, in another interpretation, adequacy of verbal explanation.
(Ibid., 252)
This study of 1981 by Scribner and Cole to which I have referred was de-
signed to test the theory, advanced by Goody (1977, 1986, 1987, Goody and
Watt 1963) in particular, and also by Havelock, Ong, and others, that literacy
has a unique and essential cognitive function in the development of formal op-
erational thought. It is certainly no accident that all the societies in which for-
mal operational thinking becomes established in collective representations are
literate, but we should also bear in mind that reading and writing, considered
simply as intellectual skills, can be fully mastered by children before they have
attained even concrete operational thought, let alone formal operations. Writ-
ten scripts also existed for centuries or even millennia in Mesopotamia, Egypt,
and China before the emergence of philosophy and science requiring formal
thought, and for these reasons alone we might suspect that literacy by itself is
unlikely to have any decisive effect on cognition, and that a great deal depends
on the uses to which literacy is put (Hallpike 1979: 131).
The Scribner/Cole study was made possible by the unusual fact that the Vai
script is not taught in schools, but is passed on by informal instruction, and
used for such purposes as writing letters and keeping personal accounts, and
for this reason provided an opportunity to study the cognitive effects of liter-
acy as an independent variable. The really important consequence of this re-
search of Scribner and Cole is to show that literacy by itself produces very little
in the way of significant cognitive development. Non-schooled Vai literates
showed superiority to non-literates in ability to remember sentences which
they had heard read aloud, in using graphic symbols to represent language, in
using language as a means of instruction, and in talking about correct Vai
speech (Scribner and Cole 1981: 244), but as the authors say, these are unim-
pressive results.
Writing is only an indication of the presence of a number of other social fac-
tors that, taken together, are implicated in the development of higher levels of
cognition centralized government and bureaucratic record-keeping, com-
merce, urbanization, specialist classes of scribes or scholars, and some system
of formal schooling. I would therefore agree with Halversons criticisms of
Goodys theory on the specifically cognitive effects of literacy:
We may, if we like, call reading, writing, using a dictionary, and solving a
crossword puzzle cognitive skills, but do any of these involve different
modes of thought or cognitive structures from those of non-literates?
Goodys view conflates what we think about and how we think; only the lat-
ter is the concern of cognitive theory. And it is extremely unlikely that solv-
ing a crossword puzzle or using a dictionary involves cognitive structures
different from any other problem-solving or search procedures. (Halverson
1992: 313. See also Harris 1989: 412.)
But once a written literature has developed in the context of high civiliza-
tion one may readily accept that it has a number of important consequences for
thinking which are primarily dependent upon what Halverson calls the pre-
servative potential of writing:
This is not mysterious and requires no laboured psychological speculations;
it has nothing to do with visual comparison of texts, word isolation, lists,
scepticism, and so on. It simply means that, to the extent that texts are pre-
served, disseminated, accumulated and read (an obvious but important pro-
viso), the amount of available information can increase far beyond the carry-
ing capacity of human memory, individual or collective; it means that each
generation of thinkers can therefore build on the work of its forebears with-
out starting all over again, thus making possible a much more rapid ad-
vancement of knowledge than is possible under oral conditions; it means
that thought can be communicated more easily and accurately over space as

well as time; that it can provide intellectual stimulation beyond the possibili-
ties of isolated oral societies; that it can, in short, expand the mind and
sharpen intelligence. These are the kinds of possibilities only possibilities
opened up by writing, all of them probable and rather obvious. (Ibid., 315
16)
Again, the written word may provide opportunities for developing more
advanced cognitive skills than those involved merely in reading. Scribner and
Cole, for example, give some illuminating insights into the cognitive effects
produced by the exegesis of the Koran. While literacy in Arabic by itself had no
significant effects, like others before us, we were repeatedly impressed by the
theoretical interests and conversational acumen of the Quranic experts with
whom we worked (Ibid., 245), and they quote the French scholar Marty:
the reading and explanation of texts has refined their minds and one is
amazed to see certain mallams [teachers] explain difficult texts with a real
feeling for exegesis and grammar. Our practice framework suggests that
participation in disputation and comments on the Quran may be the crucial
activities underlying this feeling for exegesis Interpreting the word of
the Prophet is likely to involve critical reasoning which proceeds by fine dis-
criminations in meanings. Such reasoning might lead Quranic scholars to
heightened awareness of semantic distinctions and contextual implications
of linguistic expressions. (Ibid., 245)
The exegesis of written law codes also introduces a new range of intellectual
problems that have been of great significance in the history of human thought,
and when writing becomes a significant tool of administration it is a powerful
force in the development of radical social divisions between rulers and ruled:
Writing separates administration civil, religious, commercial and other
from other types of social activities. Administration is unknown in oral cul-
tures, where leaders interact non-abstractly with the rest of society in tight-
knit, often rhetorically controlled, configurations (Ong 1986: 40).
d. The relation between moral words and moral thought
The preceding discussion of modes of thought in relation to the general social
milieu provides the basis on which we can now discuss the way in which we
should assess the ethnographic evidence relating to moral concepts, especially
the evidence of moral words and expressions. In the first place, it is possible for
the members of a society to have an implicit, unverbalized concept. When
Socrates asked the questions What is virtue?, What is justice?, How should
we live? he and his fellow Athenians were discussing ethics, but they had no
actual word for this subject until Aristotle invented the term ta thika. (In fact,
he gave a new abstract meaning to a word already in current usage.) It would
obviously be absurd, however, to suppose that the Athenians had no concept of
ethics until Aristotles linguistic innovation. We can say this with certainty be-
cause we know what sort of issues had been discussed prior to Aristotle and,
indeed, if there had been no implicit concept of ethics, Aristotles new term
would have been incomprehensible.
Methodologically, therefore, our first principle is that it is the sorts of prob-
lem that are discussed, and the way they are discussed, that give us our pri-
mary data on the moral thought of a society. The second principle, related to
the first, is that our interpretation of the moral thought of the members of a
society has to take account of the kinds of experience that are available to them,
and the interpretation of moral words or expressions must always be based on
this. The fact, then, that a particular language has a word that, lexically speak-
ing, may properly be translated as goodness does not entitle us, by itself, to
conclude that the members of that society therefore have an idea of moral vir-
tue in a philosophical sense. To establish this it would be necessary to study
the ways in which they use the word in different contexts, their thinking in
general on human conduct and character, and the nature of their social experi-
ence. The mere existence of a word may therefore have little to tell us about
how it is understood: our own word duty, for example, is essentially un-
changed from the middle ages but it has acquired a greatly enriched meaning
as the result of centuries of philosophical reflection and the need to resolve
complex dilemmas. Let me illustrate this by considering the Tauade word kakit.
The essential meaning of this is a reciprocal exchange; so it can, in different
contexts, be applied to revenge, to compensation for injury or homicide, or to
an exchange of gifts, or nowadays to payment for goods in a shop. It can also
be used of punishment imposed by a government court, though this use, too, is
modern. (Even here, it should be noted, the Tauade do not think of punishment
as anything like retribution for the violation of norms, but as government
revenge.) Does it follow, therefore, that the Tauade can be said to have or to
understand the concept of justice? In our discussion of justice in Chapter II we
saw that while it includes reciprocity as one of its basic aspects, it extends
much more widely than this to impartiality, not unreasonably favouring our-
selves at the expense of others, the equal application of rules in equal cases,
and rendering to others what is due to them, so that it is closely related to the
general problem of enforcing and obeying rules. The retributive, restorative,
and procedural aspects of justice all reflect this central concern.
But traditional Tauade society was typical of New Guinea in having no me-
diatory institutions at all. Every dispute was settled by personal confrontation
between the parties concerned, and the outcome was decided by their particu-
lar personalities and their relative social importance. Nor were there any insti-
tutions for the imposition of punishments. Big men might take violent meas-
ures against those who offended them, but this had nothing to do with the im-
position of sanctions on those who violated social norms. Indeed, while there
were conventions about land tenure and residence rights, these were very
flexible and, apart from the requirements of reciprocity, there was little in the
way of general rules or norms about how people in general ought to behave
which could be appealed to in settling disputes. Judgements about whether a
particular action was good or bad would depend on the relationship one had to
the person whose conduct was being evaluated, and every situation would
therefore be interpreted relativistically.
Against this background one can then ask what basis there was in Tauade
social experience on which they could possibly have developed an idea of jus-
tice that went beyond reciprocity. It seems quite obvious, from a knowledge of
their social conditions, and from the way in which they used the word kakit
The evolution of moral ideas 165

and made moral judgements, that there is no evidence that their understanding
of the concept went beyond reciprocity.
By contrast, let us consider the fact that in the Hebrew of the Old Testament
there was no word for duty. Does this mean that, for example, post-Exilic To-
rah scholars had no idea of duty and could not have understood our word for
duty if it had been explained to them? Clearly they would have done, and we
know this from the whole context of Jewish law and religion. For their pur-
poses, however, the idiom of divine commandment was sufficient to convey
the idea of duty.
But this does not mean that we can infer nothing from the presence or ab-
sence of moral words in the language of a society. There is plenty of evidence
that the discussion of moral issues, especially in the context of philosophy and
jurisprudence, leads to an increasingly precise set of analytical terms. We shall
see that in Greece and Rome, India, China, and Arabia words corresponding to
virtue, justice, duty, equity and so on became essential parts of moral
thought, which would be virtually impossible at an abstract level without
them, and the process of this development can be traced. Such a development
only occurs, however, in the context of complex literate societies where there is
a class of professional thinkers, and in the absence of these conditions there is
no reason to expect that people will, by pure intuition, somehow generate out
of their own minds an understanding of virtue or justice that is of an abstract
type.
The evidence of moral language, including etymologies, is therefore only
part of the data of our enquiry, and the simpler the society the less significant it
will be because a specialized moral vocabulary scarcely exists. To this extent,
therefore, the absence of specific moral terminology can be used to confirm
what we know about the rest of their society. But, as I have already stressed,
the mere absence of a term does not prove, by itself, that the people do not
have an implicit idea of the concept in question. This can only be decided by
considering the wider features of their culture, and the type of experience that
the people have which could be the basis of such a concept. Generally speak-
ing, we shall find not so much that a particular concept does, or does not, exist
as that the understanding of it is of varying degrees of adequacy and depth
such as the Tauade notion of justice by comparison with that of the Greeks.
4. The evolution of moral ideas
There has been more evolution in some aspects of moral thought than in oth-
ers. People in all societies object to being insulted, cheated, assaulted or killed
by their neighbours, and to having their property destroyed or stolen, while
the greedy, the mean, and the quarrelsome are regarded everywhere as pests.
Health, prosperity, victory and length of days are universal goods, and disease,
starvation, death, and defeat are universal evils. It is unlikely that much has
changed during the course of history with regard to these basic conceptions of
human welfare, and while societies may differ in their priorities, so that to be
fat, to have many children, and to be victorious over ones enemies in battle
will perhaps be rated more highly in many tribal societies than in our own,
these are trivial differences that can be explained with reference to the particu-
lar circumstances of each society. One would not expect, then, to find any fun-
damental changes in our ideas concerning welfare or utility during social evo-
lution.
a. The range of moral concern
But from the evident fact that all the vices that we know, lying, theft, murder,
rape, are discountenanced in the life of a closed society, Boas concluded that
there is no evolution of moral ideas (Boas 1932: 227). This is an extremely nar-
row and inadequate conception of moral ideas, and even Boas was obliged to
concede with many other scholars (e.g. Tylor 1871; Westermarck 1906, Hob-
house 1929, Ginsberg 1944, MacBeath 1952) that in the evolution of moral
thought The best established trend is the extension of the range of persons to
whom moral judgements are held to apply. As T.H. Green has pointed out,
1
it
is not so much the sense of duty to a neighbour that has varied as the answer to
the question who is my neighbour (Ginsberg 1944: 19). There are numerous
examples of primitive societies whose names for themselves mean people,
real people or human beings, and what counts as being human means be-
longing to a socially defined group rather than possessing such common at-
tributes as bodily form or the capacity to speak. A stranger may enter a com-
munity with a safe conduct, or under the protection of some god or some ta-
boo. He may come as a guest under the aegis of his host. But except under such
special conditions he is destitute of rights (Hobhouse 1929: 233). This obvi-
ously does not mean that members of primitive societies kill or maltreat unpro-
tected strangers as a matter of course. There are many examples of kindness
towards strangers (as distinct from hospitality to guests), but such treatment is
a matter of sentiment, not of principle, and the stranger as such is owed noth-
ing at all because he is outside the network of social obligation.
Hobhouse explains this on the principle of group morality: In the early
stages of ethics, rights and duties do not attach to a human being as such. They
attach to him as a member of a group (ibid., 233), and the notion of the human
race only appears in literate civilization. In primitive society the moral order is
a specific institutional order, made up of a certain number of clans or other de-
scent groups, age groups, residential and occupational groups, all of which
stand in prescribed relationships to one another and are the basis of a number
of social roles whose duties are well defined. Those who fall outside this spe-
cific social order can therefore have no moral existence at all because they have
no status, no defined place on the social map. It also follows that as hierarchical
systems of rank develop those occupying the most inferior position will be
treated as of inherently less human worth than those of higher status. The dis-
tinction between social importance and human worth is a late development in

1
In his posthumously published Prolegomena to Ethics (1884: 220). A year before Greens
death in 1882, E. B. Tylor had written It must be clearly understood also that the old-
world rules of moral conduct were not the same towards all men. A man knew his duty
to his neighbour, but all men were not his neighbours (Tylor 1881: 4111412).

moral thought, and we shall take up this very important point again on various
occasions in the rest of the book. Our immediate concern, however, must be to
explore the implications of the evolution of notions of order.
b. Order
We observed in Chapter II that as human beings we need to construct a social
and cosmological order comparable with the natural order as the necessary
basis for the pursuit of our ends in society. Order is what is reliable and pre-
dictable, and what is reliable and predictable is also the true, in which there can
be trust, as opposed to what is deceitful, misleading, and false. Especially in
primitive societies, order is fundamentally concerned with status, and with
acts, rather than with the inner life, intentions, motives, and virtues of the
agent, with the public rather than the private, and in such a context law cannot
be distinguished from morality. Responsibility is objective rather than subjec-
tive and sanctions for social conduct are those of social norms and public opin-
ion rather than an appeal to abstract moral principles. A good example is the
Indo-European arta (Skt. rta):
we have here one of the cardinal notions of the legal world of the Indo-
European to say nothing of their religious and moral ideas: this is the con-
cept of order which governs also the orderliness of the universe, the
movement of the stars, the regularity of the seasons and the years; and fur-
ther the relations of gods and men, and finally the relations of men to one
another. Nothing which concerns man or the world, falls outside the realm
of order. It is thus the foundation, both religious and moral, of every soci-
ety. Without this principle everything would revert to chaos. (Benveniste
1973: 379380)
The natural and social orders are not clearly distinguished until we come to
the major literate civilizations of antiquity, and so the society which is harmo-
nious and properly regulated will by this means obtain health and prosperity,
the fertility of crops and animals, and victory over its enemies in short, all the
benefits of Life. The idea of order is frequently expressed in metaphors of the
right, the true, the straight, and the upright, e.g.:
The adjective rectus [right] can be interpreted straight as this line which
one draws. This is a concept at once concrete and moral: the straight line
represents the norm, while the regula is the instrument used to trace the
straight line, which fixes the rule. Opposed to the straight in the moral
order is that which is twisted, bent. Hence straight is equivalent to just,
honest, while its contrary twisted, bent is identified with perfidious,
mendacious etc. (Benveniste 1973: 311)
Evil, then, can be represented by the lie, by confusion, and also by excess:
the English word evil is derived from Indo-European *up-, connoting up or
over, and it can be interpreted as extreme, excessive, or exceeding due
limits in other words, going too far (R. Needham 1981: 82).
We shall encounter these metaphors of moral order repeatedly in the rest of
this book. Ideas of order are, of course, capable of great elaboration and con-
ceptual sophistication the Greek Logos, the Indian Brahman, and Chinese Tao
being the most obvious examples. As we noted in Chapter II, all societies,
however complex in organization, must have regard for order in this funda-
mental sense, which goes far beyond mere social control and the institutions
of police and law courts. The two primary aspects of order are those we distin-
guished in Chapter II as duty and justice.
c. Duty
Duty is, initially, simply a matter of the proper performance of ones various
social roles, ones social function, and not a general moral principle in terms of
which we assess our obligations to others considered as human beings, inde-
pendent of social status. As Read says of the Gahuku-Gama of Papua New
Guinea moral obligations are primarily contingent on the social positioning
of individuals. They are not derived from, neither do they refer to anything
which is intrinsic to the nature of the agent himself or to the nature of other
human beings as such (Read 1955: 260). Fortes says of the kinship system of
the Tallensi that it is the primary mechanism through which the basic moral
axioms of a society of the type represented by the Tallensi are translated into
the give and take of the social life (Fortes 1949: 346).
Reads examples of the highly specific nature of the kinship obligations
among the Gahuku-Gama are a good illustration of this:
we may speak of the reciprocal moral duties of elder and younger broth-
ers, and we may compare the ideal in this instance with the kind of behav-
iour enjoined between kinsmen who are age-mates. A younger brother, for
example, is expected to be mindful at all times of his elder brothers superior
status. He is required to show the latter respect, to accept his criticism, to
heed his wishes and to obey his commands. There are moral duties on the
side of the elder brother too, for he has to see that his younger brother does
not want. The latter looks to him for assistance in obtaining a wife, for pigs
with which to start his household and for a fair share of their fathers prop-
erty. From the younger brothers point of view, however, the moral quality
of the relationship is primarily one of constraint, of obedience and the accep-
tance of discipline. It contrasts, therefore, with the moral relationship be-
tween kinsmen who are the same age. Here, the ideals of friendship and
equality are stressed. Mutual help, frankness, and comradeship which is ex-
pressed in sharing one another secrets and in freely asking and giving all
these add their measure to the moral quality of the age-mate relationships.
The comparison could be carried further, to take in, one by one, all the
categories of kin which a man recognizes. The moral quality of the
individuals relationship with his mothers brother is, for example, quite
different from the moral quality of the ties he has with his fathers brothers,
different again from those which he recognizes with his wifes parents and
her brothers, and different again from his responsibilities towards his sisters
husband. (Read 1955: 258259)
In more complex societies with nobles and commoners there is a similar ap-
peal to the obligations of status:
In the Iliad (11.404410) Odysseus reminds himself that he is an aristocrat,
and thereby resolves his doubts how he should conduct himself in a critical
situation. He does it by concentrating on the thought that he belongs to a

certain social order and that it is his duty to fulfil the virtue of that order.
The universal which underlies the predicate I am a noble is the group; he
does not reflect on abstract good but upon the circle of which he claims
membership. It is the same as if an officer were to say: as an officer I must
do this or that, thus gauging his action by the rigid conception of honour
peculiar to his caste. (Snell 1960: 159)
While the concept of noblesse oblige survives into modern Europe, and we
continue to recognize a diversity of obligations derived from status to chil-
dren, parents, employers, and so on, Read points out that
Closer examinations suggests, however, that the diversity in our moral
obligations is more apparent than real, for we recognize that there is or at
least that there should be a certain common measure of ethical content in
all our relationships. Ideally, we may say that certain duties are felt to be
independent of status. There are minimum responsibilities which apply to
all circumstances in which the individual finds himself, and there are actions
and attitudes which are considered wrong in all situations. (Read 1955: 259)
Read is surely correct when he attributes this element of universality to our
distinction between the individual as the occupier of a number of statuses, and
the individual as a moral being, independent of his status: Ultimately, this
common measure of rights and responsibilities depends on the intrinsic ethical
value which we attach to the individual. We recognize that is, that all men, in
virtue of this intrinsic worth, have a valid claim to be treated as moral equals;
they make identical demands which, as moral agents, we are required to re-
spect (ibid., 259). This distinction between the person as socially defined and as
a moral being becomes very clear in the thought of the major literate civiliza-
tions of antiquity, so that it is then possible to formulate certain general norms
of conduct that, ideally, should be applied to all human beings.
d. Justice and responsibility
At a more specific level than order the notion of justice undergoes a signifi-
cant development in the course of social evolution. Indeed, the most elemen-
tary and apparently universal notions of justice are those of reciprocal and dis-
tributive justice. Even the members of the simplest societies seem to feel that to
return good for good and evil for evil is somehow right or fitting, and that it
is wrong for those who have received benefits not to reciprocate them in due
course. There is also a universal belief that those who have in abundance
should give to those who have less; generosity is always admired, and mean-
ness is always despised. These are the most elementary ideas of justice which
seem to be common to all societies, but the more advanced idea of the Golden
Rule, of doing to others as one would like them to do oneself and not doing to
them what one would not like done to oneself, only appears as an explicit prin-
ciple in much more advanced societies. This seems to depend on the ability to
take another persons point of view, which as we have seen is cognitively more
advanced, and on the separation of moral principles from social status, so that
individuals can regard one another to some extent independently of social
status, and this only becomes common in the conditions of the state.
The development of explicit notions of justice is closely linked with the
emergence of legal institutions in general, and especially with kings as the dis-
pensers of justice. Here, too, the idea of justice as punishment and retribution
as the application of appropriate or fitting sanctions to crime also becomes
much more elaborate and articulate.
A further significant development in the concept of justice is the movement
from what may be called objective to subjective responsibility, the shift from a
predominant concern with the act and its consequences towards the recogni-
tion of subjective factors of motive and intention on the part of the agent: The
moral evolution of man has rendered responsibility more and more subjective
(Fauconnet 1928: 351).
The reasons for this predominance of objective responsibility in primitive
society are various, and at different levels of social complexity different factors
are responsible. The simplest is undoubtedly that of a desire to gratify emo-
tions of grief and rage produced by the death or suffering of a relative or
friend, and in such cases the intentions of the person or persons who caused
these may easily be disregarded.
But one of the most important factors in sustaining objective responsibility
is the close association between the social order and life, in which acts have a
central importance. As Gluckman says, These are clearly the views of a small
scale society which sees the working of the universe as closely involved in the
particularities of its own social system and the personal relationships this con-
tains it is therefore characteristic of these societies that their rituals and
ceremonies demand that individuals act in prescribed and specific roles in
order that they may receive the good things of life (Gluckman 1967: 237). In-
deed, Fauconnet points out that if we think in terms of any social order, it is the
criminal act at which the punishment is really aimed, but, because the act is
necessarily in the past, therefore a symbol, a substitute for the act must be
found, and this is the agent who can be held responsible for the crime (Faucon-
net 1928: 231, 233234). But this responsibility may extend beyond the agent to
the responsibility of all the beings; men, animals, objects, who play any kind of
part in the crime, the part of instrument for example, which are not, properly
speaking the agents (ibid., 234), and this may extend to times and places asso-
ciated with crimes.
But the predominance of objective responsibility also depends to a consid-
erable extent, as we shall see, on the inability of the members of primitive soci-
ety to analyze subjective states of mind, to express their inner feelings, and
fears and desires, in articulate form, and to distinguish in a manner which we
take for granted between mind and body. The growth of understanding of the
inner life of the individual plays a crucial part in the evolution of moral
thought, and only as it develops can the demands of objective responsibility be
rationally qualified and restricted.
e. The extension of altruism and benevolence
The morality of the good, as distinct from the right, and the emphasis on altru-
ism and benevolence, clearly originates in the relations between close kin, and

one of the most important developments of moral thought is the progressive
extension of the norm of benevolence to an ever-widening range of persons.
This development is closely related to the gradual extension of those forms of
reciprocity, which initially obtain only between close kin, to the rest of society
and even beyond.
Sahlins distinguishes between three types of reciprocity. The first
generalized reciprocity, refers to transactions that are putatively altruistic.
At the extreme, say voluntary food-sharing among kinsmen the expecta-
tion of a direct material return is unseemly. At best it is implicit. The mate-
rial side of the transaction is repressed by the social; reckoning of debts out-
standing cannot be overt and is typically left out of account. (Sahlins 1974:
193194)
The typical social situation in which this type of reciprocity will be appropriate
is the close kin group, or a stable residential group with a high level of solidar-
ity, within which mutual trust is the norm, so that cheating by those who try to
exploit the good will of others is not a problem. One-way flows from benefac-
tors to beneficiaries can be tolerated, and a strict accounting of benefits is not
kept.
Sahlinss second type is balanced reciprocity:
The parties confront each other as distinct economic and social interests. The
material side of the transaction is at least as critical as the social: there is
more or less precise reckoning, as the things given must be covered within
some short term. So the pragmatic test of balanced reciprocity becomes an
inability to tolerate one-way flow; the relations between people are dis-
rupted by a failure to reciprocate within limited time and equivalence lee-
way. It is notable of the main run of generalized reciprocity that the material
flow is sustained by prevailing social relations; whereas for the main run of
balanced exchange, social relations hinge on the material flow. (Ibid., 194
195)
The most obvious features of balanced reciprocity are the absence of mutual
trust and altruistic feeling, and the potentially competitive nature of the ex-
changes, so that this type of reciprocity is appropriate between those who per-
ceive one another as strangers in some degree, or even as enemies. It is also
worth noting that acts of assistance are more appropriate in situations where
generalized reciprocity prevails as opposed to balanced reciprocity, since they
are obviously dependent on the needs of others, whereas gifts are quite inde-
pendent of the context of need. Again, the exchange of valuable objects is par-
ticulary appropriate to the inherently competitive atmosphere of balanced
reciprocity (see Hallpike 1975).
Sahlins third type of reciprocity is negative reciprocity, the attempt to get
something for nothing with impunity (Sahlins 1974: 195). He includes in this
category not only barter and haggling, but also theft and other varieties of sei-
zure. Established relations of mutual cattle raiding between pastoral groups
would be an example, and hostile relationships in general may be an element
of a social structure. The reciprocal exchange of theft relates one [Sarakatsani]
family to another in a nexus of debt (Campbell 1964: 212).
Sahlins has therefore established a clear correlation between types of recip-
rocity and social relationships:
Kinship distance is especially relevant to the form of reciprocity. It is in-
clined toward the generalized pole by close kinship, towards the negative
extreme in proportion to kinship distance. The reasoning is nearly syllogis-
tic. The several reciprocations from freely bestowed gift to chicanery amount
to a spectrum of sociability, from sacrifice in favour of another to self-
interested gain at the expense of another. Take as the minor premise Tylors
dictum
1
that kindred goes with kindness, two words whose common deri-
vation expresses in the happiest way one of the main principles of social
life. It follows that close kin tend to share, to enter into generalized ex-
changes, and distant and non-kin to deal with equivalence or in guile. (Ibid.,
196)
Given this close relationship between forms of reciprocity and social relation-
ships (for which Sahlins provides ample ethnographic evidence ibid., 231
275), we can expect that the changes in social organization which occur in the
course of social evolution will have a marked effect on the nature of reciprocity
as a social bond.
2

With the development of a clear corporate order of society which occurs in
agricultural and pastoral societies, the bounds of mutual trust can be extended,
and hence the foundations for a shift to more generalized types of reciprocity
are laid, so that the idea of altruistic behaviour towards non-kin becomes a
more practical possibility of everyday life. The development of a morality of
the good, as distinct from the right, stressing, instead of duty and obligation,
the claims of compassion and mercy and benevolence, is clearly bound up with
the generalization of the norms of kinship and the theme of human brotherhood
is an explicit element in the teachings of all the great religions. In the literate
civilizations of antiquity, when local boundaries between groups were com-
prehensively broken down, there was a very marked emphasis on the impor-
tance of kindness and unselfishness as general norms in our dealing with other
people, whether or not they are friends or strangers, which is one of the most
obvious features of this development of moral thought.
f. Conventional versus principled morality
Until an explicit morality of principles has developed it is extremely difficult
for the rules of conduct to be justified by appeals to what is right in itself.
While there may be appeals to custom, or the teaching of the ancestors, often
the most persuasive argument is the unpleasant consequences of wrong-doing
people will laugh at you, or will be angry with you, or will not help you if
you do such-and-such. Conversely, right action is reinforced by social rewards:

1
Tylor 1881: 405.
2
It should be noted, however, that the obligation found in many foraging societies for
successful hunters to give away the meat they have obtained should really be consid-
ered a case of redistribution rather than of sharing or generalized reciprocity (see Wood-
burn 1998).

the generous man gains social prestige through his gifts, and the man who
shares his catch with his neighbour is popular and well thought of. This is a
morality of shame rather than of guilt, an inner conviction of wrong-doing. In
more advanced societies wrong actions may also be considered as violations of
absolute moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments, and obedience to the
moral laws of God certainly goes beyond the fear of social ridicule and the
wish for social success but here, too, the fear of divinely sanctioned conse-
quences will remain a powerful disincentive against wrong-doing for many
people. Only on the basis of principled morality is it possible to present duty as
something obligatory which can be understood as such independently of its
consequences, and as being right in itself. There gradually emerges the notion
that goodness is something which the mind can apprehend as self-sustained
and independent of external sanctions. Among the simpler peoples, as de-
scribed by anthropologists, the sanctions behind customary rules are relatively
external and prudential (Ginsberg 1944: 23). Thus the category of the moral
itself is slowly disentangled from social obligation in general which includes
customary, legal, and ritual obligations. I think that Kluckhohn is right in also
associating this development with a clearer notion of the self:
The clear-cut demarcation of the self which develops in the larger societies I
believe to be a precondition of the personal interiorization of the moral order
which is also a characteristic of these societies. The smaller groups largely
exteriorize moral sanctions. It is the gods or the implacable operations of ex-
ternal natural or supernatural forces or public opinion within the commu-
nity which punish the individual. I think that Breasted (1934) has correctly
designated what occurred in Egypt during the transition to urban and liter-
ate existence as the dawn of conscience. That is, the self-aware individual
comes to punish himself in accord with the standards of a more inclusive
moral order (Kluckhohn 1960: 396).
I will return to this whole question of self-awareness later, however, and for
the moment will concentrate on the emergence of an explicit awareness of dis-
tinctly moral principles.
1

So Hobhouse refers to the rationalization of the moral code which, as soci-
ety advances, becomes more clearly thought out and more consistently and
comprehensively applied (Hobhouse 1929: 30). Ginsberg developed this idea
in the following terms: This is to be seen in the gradual elimination of the
magical elements, in the distinction which comes to be drawn between ritual
rules and distinctively moral rules, in the persistent criticism to which custom-
ary morality and institutions embodying it are subjected, and the attempts
which are made at their deliberate reconstruction in the light of principles that
can be rationally defended (Ginsberg 1944: 25).

1
It has been suggested that anthropologists have not written much about ethics and
morality as distinct topics in their ethnographies because under the influence of Durk-
heim they have conflated social and moral phenomena (Wolfram 1982: 274, and see
Parkin 1985: 45 and Pocock 1986: 8). While there is no doubt some truth in this, it also
seems that this relative neglect of ethics or morality as a distinct topic in ethnographies
also reflects a genuine evolutionary difference between societies.
The factor of increasing social size is certainly of great importance here:
If the minimum of social order and of the capacity of one individual to pre-
dict the behaviour of his fellows in a group where many persons never en-
counter other persons at all and where numerous contacts that do occur are
casual and transitory is to be maintained, the moral code must be relatively
abstract. In primitive society, ethics is based upon acts more than upon
words and upon concrete words more than abstract ones (cf. Radin 1927: 72).
While it is mythological to maintain that no abstract terms are found in
primitive languages, no one would dispute that abstractions (and not least
the large moral abstractions) are less prominent. Where all adults have had,
to a first approximation, the same experiences the functional need for ab-
stractions is appreciably less. Moreover, the moral order must be codified so
that it is publicly accessible in standardized form rather than dependent
upon the idiosyncratic version which a given priest or shaman or headman
might give in a particular context (Kluckhohn 1960: 39495)
When one speaks of society advancing to a principled morality one means
therefore to an explicit, articulate conception of moral principles as distinct
from law and custom, and formulations of prima facie rules like Thou shalt not
steal, principles which are understood as a consistent body of concepts which
are true independently of the norms and institutions of ones own society. In
the implicit sense, however, all societies have an awareness of some moral prin-
ciples, such as the requirements of reciprocity, but it is the explicit elucidation
of moral principles that distinguishes the major civilizations of antiquity from
early states and tribal societies.
g. The moralization of religion
The lack of principled morality in primitive society is one of the main reasons
why its religion has little or no distinctively ethical content.
1
It is essentially
concerned with obtaining Life, with health, prosperity, and victory over ene-
mies, and the relations with supernatural beings are essentially political in
type, dominated by authority, allegiance, and covenant.
The clearest evidence of moral progress is to be found in the gradual
moralization of religion. The distinction sometimes drawn between nature-
religions and ethical religions is perhaps not warranted, since there appear
to be moral elements in all religions. But it seems clear that both the concep-
tion of the divine and that of the afterlife are gradually transformed by
growing moral insight and that in the later phases there is even a tendency
to identify the spiritual with the ethical. The demand is then made that reli-
gious beliefs must satisfy ethical tests. (Ginsberg 1944: 29)

1
Many anthropologists have held the opposite opinion, and claimed that in primitive
society morality and religion are indistinguishable. Malinowski, for example, consid-
ered that morality is one of the three essential aspects of religion, the others being ritual
and dogma (Malinowski 1936). His pupil Godfrey Wilson wrote that morality is that
part of custom that is sanctioned by religion (Wilson 1936: 75); see MacBeath (1949) for
a good critique of this view.

In the moralization of religion a number of factors are of particular signifi-
cance. The first is the very common assumption that the social order is a part of
a cosmic order, and that therefore the harmoniously regulated society will
thereby also receive physical prosperity in the form of health, wealth, and the
fertility of its women, animals and crops. This is a very powerful basis for the
existence of religious sanctions in social control. Secondly, it is possible for re-
ligious rules to be set up in opposition to brute force, in the form of elders or
priests, who despite or even because of their physical weakness, nevertheless
wield supernatural sanctions in the form of blessing and cursing. Thirdly, to
the extent that God is seen as essentially different from us, the more plausible it
is for prophets and religious teachers to condemn existing social practices,
which can no longer claim to be the sole justification for behaviour. Fourthly, to
the extent that God is seen as being remote from man in His knowledge and
omnipotence, the more similar will all human beings appear by contrast, and
the less significant and important will be the distinctions of a social nature.
Fifthly, the religious order gives special significance to the soul, to the inner life
of man, as opposed to external appearances and social relations and status, and
it is the relation of the soul to God which then assumes a unique moral signifi-
cance independent of society (c.f. Ginsberg 1944: 24). The soul, as opposed to
the socially defined person, is inherently vague and generalized in nature,
and souls can easily be thought of in a one-to-one relationship to God. Sixthly,
religion provides an organized body of concepts that can be used as the basis
of world rejection, and the view that pleasure, as well as the values of men,
must be transcended. In all these respects a theistic world-order has important
concordances with the generalized body of principled ethics which developed
in the literate civilizations.
h. Virtue
In primitive and traditional society the generous, courageous and dutiful man
will be socially successful, and the identification of law and morality means
that acts have a far greater significance than intentions and inner states. It is
only when society becomes very much more complex, particularly with the
emergence of the state and commerce, that people begin to doubt what they
should do, because traditional roles and statuses no longer provide sufficient
guidance, and hence they come to reflect more deeply on what it means to be a
good man, as distinct from a socially successful man.
In the early period they [arete, virtue, and agathos, good] are not as palpably
moral in content as might be supposed; we may compare the German terms
Tugend and gut which originally stood for the suitable (taugende) and the
fitting (gatte). When Homer says that a man is good, agathos, he does not
mean that he is morally unobjectionable, much less good-hearted, but rather
that he is useful, proficient and capable of vigorous action. We also speak of
a good warrior or a good instrument. Similarly arete, virtue, does not denote
a moral property but nobility, achievement, success and reputation. (Snell
1960: 158)
Thus reflection upon virtue shows a development from the conventional to
the principled and a good example is the changing meanings of the Latin vir-
tus, which in its original sense meant manliness from vir, a male. This manli-
ness was displayed in various aspects of social life: the soldier, the farmer, the
citizen, the father, had demands upon him which he had to fulfil, this was his
virtus, and it may be appropriately analyzed into three separate qualities (Fer-
guson 1958: 161). The first of these was virtus in the narrow sense of physical
courage, essential for the soldier, whose responsibilities were basic for the male
citizens of the Roman republic, though later it was extended to moral as well as
physical courage. Virtus for the Roman in a wider sense also included two
other qualities besides courage; these were first of all pietas, meaning not piety
but proper behaviour towards parents and a sense of duty: it is exercised
within what a Biblical scholar might almost call a covenant relationship. It is as
if when one entered into a certain relationship one covenanted to behave in a
certain way within that relationship, whatever might happen outside. The
three main fields within which pietas might be exercised were the family, state,
and divine purposes (ibid., 164). The third quality was gravitas, meaning dig-
nity or presence, and refers essentially to a quality of demeanour: gravitas is
in fact peculiarly associated with the ancient offices of state, with judges, with
the censor, and above all with the senate. In this way it is frequently linked
with auctoritas, maiestas (ibid., 174).
Roman virtus was therefore thoroughly embedded in the characteristic fea-
tures and requirements of Roman society, and is in many respects typical of
tribal society. The difference between this conception of virtue (which corre-
sponds very well to Kohlbergs bag of virtues) and that of a principled, phi-
losophical concept is well illustrated by the classical four cardinal or funda-
mental virtues of antiquity, first formalized by Plato (Republic 427e) and con-
ventionally translated as courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom, whose im-
plications were developed by a long line of subsequent thinkers from Aristotle
to the Stoics and Cicero. This conception of virtue is, in the first place, far more
generalized than Roman virtus, so that it can reasonably be claimed that any
human being, whatever his society Roman, Greek or barbarian should
strive to develop these qualities; secondly, they are mutually interdependent,
functionally linked in relation to the end for man, rather than simply being a
list of good qualities or the necessary attributes of a male Roman citizen; and
thirdly, they have an essential concern with the inner life, both intellectual and
emotional, of the agent, rather than being solely concerned, as was Roman vir-
tus with social behaviour.
The analysis of virtue and a more profound awareness of the inner life
therefore goes hand in hand with the articulation of ethical principles and the
need for basing ones actions on general and rational principles rather than on
social conventions alone. Thus the Greeks drew the essential distinction, paral-
leled in other literate cultures, between moral principles and social conven-
tions, and it is only when one has this distinction in mind that one can formu-
late the notion of conscience, and distinguish ethics from custom.
The idea of conscience, the understanding of moral principles, as well as
distinguishing morality from custom immediately links morality with wisdom
and the stage is thus set for two types of conflict. The first is between the indi-
vidual and his society when, like Socrates, Jesus and the Jewish prophets, Con-

fucius, Muhammad, Buddha and other religious reformers, the enlightened
man may condemn the beliefs and practices of his own society, and the Way
finds no reward in this world. To follow the path of righteousness may now
mean, not being a good conformist, but being a rebel, and this introduces a fur-
ther new element in moral evolution, that of self-sufficiency, which implies
not selfishness but the necessity of following ones conscience in ones relations
with ones fellows, in preference, if need be, to social conventions and the
temptations of social success.
The second type of conflict is between conscience and physical temptation,
including all those appetites and desires which incline us to sacrifice duty to
pleasure. This, too, is a new element in moral evolution, for while it is common
in primitive society to find all sorts of prohibitions on diet and sexual activity
at certain times or between certain persons, these are required for the good of
the group or to ensure the success of certain activities, or as expressions of
good manners. The notion that physical appetites themselves should be re-
pressed for the moral good of the agent is new, even if the notion of physical
restraint itself is ancient.
It leads, together with the idea that virtue is inherently linked with wisdom,
to the idea that moral character is not simply a static collection of virtues (cour-
age, pietas, gravitas) but a process of gradual moral self-improvement towards
enlightenment and self-control which can take a life-time, in which a crucial
element is a struggle against temptations, from society and the lure of success,
and from ones own bodily desires, towards a state of moral health. The notion
of health was particularly significant in Greek moral thought: The notion of
the measure and that of the Golden Mean spring from such rules as this. From
the earliest times the aspirations of the soul are guided and restrained by the
image of health. Healthy thinking, sophronein, is the knowledge which gov-
erns our health and well being, and thus our happiness; it is an appreciation of
organic nature with a bent toward the practical (Snell 1960: 163). The Greeks
were profoundly impressed with the harmonious character of health and fit-
ness; the ideal of harmony, order and measure is propagated in countless posi-
tive admonitions (ibid., 162). This more inward view of virtue then comes to
see wrong-doing as more than injury to others it is also self-destruction. The
sinner sins against himself; the unjust man is the victim of his own injustice, in
that he makes himself evil (Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius IX.4).
i. The Self
In our discussions of the public and the private, objective and subjective re-
sponsibility, and the changing conceptions of virtue we have repeatedly en-
countered, from different points of view, one of the fundamental ways in
which the moral consciousness of man has developed, and this is the growing
awareness of the inner life of the individual, of something which can be ana-
lyzed and used to understand why other people behave as they do, what ef-
fects our actions are likely to have on them, and how it would feel to be in their
place. Mauss expressed something of this shift in awareness in his celebrated
essay on the Self, but his distinction is between personne (the socially defined
notion of the person) and moi (the inner self) (see Carrithers 1985: 235). All so-
cieties of course have a social conception of the person and an awareness of the
existence of an inner life as well, but Read makes a more useful distinction with
regard to the inner self. He points out that we think of the self as a rational,
self-conscious agent whose characteristics are freedom, objectivity and self-
consciousness, and being endowed with these qualities man possesses the abil-
ity to choose rationally from the alternatives which confront him. He is not, as
some regard him, the mere resultant of his psycho-physical nature, but rather a
creature of reason and free will, able to distinguish true from false, right from
wrong, and to pursue ideals and follow the good, even when this conflicts with
his immediate desires (Read 1955: 249). This self stands
above the institutions which it creates and uses We are aware of the
self as a spiritual entity, as something distinct and apart from the social me-
dium in which it is involved. This conception of individuality, or, if we pre-
fer, of a higher self, an alter ego, is radically different from mere self-
consciousness at the psycho-physical level. Self-consciousness in the latter
sense may involve a pronounced feeling or regard for the idiosyncratic me,
the lower self or ego, without, however, giving rise to that which is distinc-
tive of the consciousness of the person. (Ibid., 249)
We shall see that it is only the major literate civilizations of Greece and
Rome, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and China that really de-
velop this awareness of the higher or rational self which is often at odds with
the desires of the lower self or ego, and this awareness is certainly not unique
to the Christian tradition. It clearly involves a growing consciousness of the
mind, of our self as a thinking agent, and it is not something which is in any
way a cultural universal. Far from existing as the primordial innate idea,
clearly engraved since Adam in the innermost depths of our being, it continues
here slowly and almost right up to our own time, to be built upon, to be made
clearer and more specific, becoming identified with self-knowledge and the
psychological consciousness (Mauss 1985: 20). There is a great deal of ethno-
graphic evidence that in primitive societies there is no awareness of the mind,
no thinking about thinking. Lienhardt, for example, says of the Dinka of the
Sudan: [they] have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our
popular modern conception of the mind, as mediating and, as it were, storing
up experiences of the self. There is for them no such entity to appear, on reflec-
tion, to stand between the experiencing self at any given moment, and what is
or has been an exterior influence upon the self. (Lienhardt 1961: 149).
From his research with Uzbek and Khirgiz peasants Luria concluded that
There is every reason to think that self-awareness is a product of sociohis-
torical development and that reflection on external natural and social reality
arises first; only later, through its mediating influence, do we find self-
awareness in its most complex forms. Accordingly, we should approach self-
awareness as a product of consciousness of the external world and other
people, and should seek its social roots and traits in the stages through
which it is shaped in society. (Luria 1976: 145)

Table 6: Evaluation of ones own psychological features
As our observations showed, the task of analyzing ones own psycho-
logical features or subjective qualities went beyond the capabilities of a con-
siderable proportion of our subjects. In general, subjects in the first group
failed the task. As a rule, they either refused to name positive or negative
qualities in themselves or dealt with the question by describing concrete and
material aspects of their lives They frequently found it much easier for
them to characterize other people than to characterize themselves Only in
the later [social] developmental stages primarily among young people ac-
tively involved in progressive [i.e. collective farm] social life and with at
least some education could we discern a process of singling out and evalu-
ating personal qualities. (Ibid., 1478)
It may be observed at this point that while we find in the languages of
primitive peoples many words which we should regard as referring to inner
states, such words can always be interpreted in terms of behaviour e.g. selfish,
bored, doubt, and shame, for example. A selfish man is one who hides his
food when visitors appear, or disappears into the bush when his neighbour
needs help. A bored man yawns, drums his fingers on his knee, or lets his eyes
wonder aimlessly; doubt is expressed by verbal statements of disbelief, or by
lack of enthusiasm in agreement; shame is obvious in blushing, downcast
looks, or by rapid change of subject in conversation. All these are characteris-
tics of behaviour, and while all concerned are no doubt aware that these out-
ward manifestations are accompanied by certain inward sensations and dispo-
sitions, these do not require to be assessed when we use terms like shame,
boredom, selfishness, doubt and so on.
Again, we also encounter in the languages of primitive society words like
think, know, remember, forget, think back, change ones mind, imagine, etc.
But the point is that all these aspects of cognition have behavioural manifesta-
tions too, so that a man who knows something is able to answer questions on
that topic or carry out the necessary actions of a craft. To remember a geneal-
ogy is to be able to repeat it; to understand, which in many primitive lan-
guages is translated by the same word as to hear, may be to act in accordance
with instructions or to correct a mistake when making something, and so on.
Group
Refusal to analyze, refer-
ence to material condi-
tions and situation
Transitional
group
Analysis of psycho-
logical features
Illiterate peasants from re-
mote villages (20 subjects)
13 (65%) 6 (30%) 1 (5%)
Collective-farm workers
who completed short-term
program (15 subjects)
0 13 (86%) 2 (14%)
Young people with short-
term education, farm activ-
ists (17 subjects)
0 6 (45%) 11 (65%)
Source: Luria (1976)
We thus have a kind of physiological psychology which is well illustrated
by Reads account of the Gahuku-Gama of Papua New Guinea:
The biological, physiological and psychic aspect of [mans] nature can not be
clearly separated. They exist in the closest interdependence, being, as it were
fused together to form the human personality. To an extent which it is per-
haps difficult for us to appreciate and understand, various parts of the body,
limbs, eyes, nose, hair, the internal organs and bodily excretions are essential
constituents of the human personality, incorporating and expressing the
whole in each of their several functions. (Read 1955: 265)
Or, Unlike us, a Wintu self is identical with the parts of his body and is not
related to them as other, so long as they are physically part of him (Lee 1950:
540). In myths, people are described, in terms of the spatial dimensions of their
activities, observationally. Extremely rarely is there a statement that might be
called introspective, such as she was furious or he was happy, and even
here, I am not sure that this is not an observers statement. The songs that the
Wintu call love songs refer not at all to the sensations or emotions of love,
though they do convey love to us (ibid., 543). Again, in Israelite thought
man is conceived, not so much in dual fashion as body and soul, but
synthetically as a unit of vital power or (in current terminology) a psycho-
physical organism. That is to say, the various members and secretions of the
body, such as the bones, the heart, the bowels, and the kidneys, as well as the
flesh and the blood, can all be thought as revealing psychic properties
(Johnson 1964: 87).
For the early Greeks, thought is identified with breath and speech and
thinking occurs with the lungs (Onians 1954: 13, 6768), and among the Trobri-
anders The mind, nanola, by which term intelligence, power of discrimination,
capacity for learning magical formulae and all forms of manual skills are de-
scribed, as well as moral qualities, reside somewhere in the larynx. The natives
will always point to the organs of speech, where the nanola reside. The man
who cannot speak through any defect of his organs is identified in name (tona-
gowa) and in treatment with all those mentally deficient (Malinowski 1922:
4089).
We thus find that while the members of primitive societies are aware of the
existence of inner states, these are typically regarded as inaccessible, and peo-
ples behaviour is interpreted by their acts. In my own experience neither the
Konso nor the Tauade ever spontaneously referred to the thoughts or inten-
tions of individuals when discussing behaviour beyond occasionally using
such vague generalities as he was afraid, he was angry, he was sorrowful,
etc. The only exception was a highly intelligent informant among the Tauade,
Casimiro Kog, who had worked for many years with the Fathers of the Catho-
lic Mission in assisting them with the selection of Tauade words to express
Christian doctrine and in translating the Bible, although he spoke no English or
French. His texts were remarkable and unique for several references to what
the protagonists in his stories were thinking as an explanation of their actions.
For example, Amenai Papai, a big man of the Loleava tribe, invited the Sene
tribe to take refuge with him after their defeat in warfare, and after several
years held a feast to mark the eventual return of the Sene to their own land. A
number of other tribes had been invited to this feast, including the Laitate,

neighbours of the Sene. Some of the Laitate men were relatives of the Sene, and
had looked after their gardens and pigs while they were away. They told the
Sene how their gardens and pigs were getting on, and they all cried together.
Amenai the big man was very angry to see this, and wanted the Loleava to kill
both the Sene and the Laitate. Why should he have had this reaction?
Casimiros explanation was as follows: What he thought was that it was not
the responsibility of the Loleava to look after the Sene, and if the Laitate were
so sorry for them now, they should have taken care of them then. He was an-
gry because he had looked after the Sene, and now they were being friends
with the Laitate though the Laitate had abandoned the Sene in the past. In the
course of four years fieldwork in Africa and Papua I collected hundreds of
texts, but Casimiro was the only informant, Tauade or Konso, who ever gave
me this sort of psychological insight into what the protagonists were thinking.
In the context of primitive thought, therefore, actions have a privileged po-
sition as the means by which intentions are expressed, since the private world
of intentions and thought is regarded as inaccessible. There is, among our-
selves, a constant interaction between the expression of private points of view
and those of the group or of society as a whole, which is largely missing in
primitive society. Primitives know quite well from their own experience that
individuals have these private points of view, since their comments on the very
impenetrability of private experience attest to this awareness, and they may
deliberately do things to upset other people or to please them, but because pri-
vate experience goes unexpressed there is no means of developing any aware-
ness of the ways in which it differs from, or misrepresents, or for that matter
corrects, public representations. It is precisely this awareness of the distinction
between private and public representations, explored in particular by novelists
and playwrights, and poets, that is of such importance among us in generating
an awareness of the mind. Only when we are aware both of the actions of char-
acters in the public arena and the social significance of what they do (as it
might be in the case of Hamlet) and also of their differing private representa-
tions of these public events, is our attention focused on the way in which pub-
licly observable events are privately interpreted that is, on the mind as the
agency which mediates private and public experience.
In conjunction with his remarks on the Gahuku-Gamas view of the indi-
vidual as a psycho-physical whole, Read notes many aspects of their life which
display their concern with the conditions of their bodies, and he concludes a
lengthy survey of examples of this concern:
In other ways too ways which soon become so familiar that an observer
ceases to notice them we can see this preoccupation with the body. It is re-
flected, for example, in the attention lavished on the skin, in the long period
which people spend delousing each other, in their delight of bodily orna-
mentation and decoration, in titivation and in the ceremonial application of
unguents pigs grease and other substances to the hair, the limbs, and
other parts of the body. Indeed, this fixed interest in the physical aspects of
mans nature and the continual attempt to make physical contact to touch,
to hold or to caress and to pass remarks about one anothers attributes is
one of the most noticeable elements in interpersonal relationships. (Read
1955: 268)
This concern with the body has been noted by innumerable ethnographers
of other primitive societies, which Kroeber summarises as
The obtrusion of physiological or anatomical considerations, or with the re-
lated matter of the taking of human life. Some of these practices are: blood or
animal sacrifice; segregation of women at parturition and menstruation as
being contaminating to others; contamination by death or corpses, often
with segregation with mourners until purified; puberty ritual crises, espe-
cially for girls on the onset of physiological puberty; pre-occupation with the
dead body, including mummification, skull preservation and skull cult,
wearing of skull or jaws by widows, disinterment and reburial, eating of bits
of the body or of cremation ashes; ritual prostitution or inversion; human
sacrifice; retainer burial; head hunting; cannibalism. These practices almost
invariably contain an element of the magical or the supernatural and so far
as they do they are allied to the class of traits we have just reviewed as being
apparently characteristic of cultural retardation. But they contain also a sec-
ond element, towards which cultures that have once abandoned such prac-
tices react with aversion, disgust, revulsion, or the shame of bad taste. This
other element has as its common denominator what strikes us as a gratui-
tous obtrusion into public recognition of the social order of physiological
happenings, including blood and death and decay, in which we tend to re-
gard as matters best kept private and unemphasized, and their public obtru-
sion as unpleasant and useless. Deformation of the head by pressure, filing
or knocking out of the teeth, pattern scarifications, distensions of lips and
earlobes and other anatomical mutilations, can perhaps be included here be-
cause they also have to do with the human body. (Kroeber 1948: 300)
This concern with the body is also in turn closely bound up with the notions of
purity and pollution which are frequently of great significance in the moral
lives of primitive peoples, and which reinforce the importance of the act rather
than the intention. Purity and pollution are also closely related to order, but the
subject is very complex, and I shall defer a full discussion of it to Chapter VI.
5. Conclusions
We can summarize the general direction of the evolution of moral ideas by say-
ing that it increases in three main dimensions. One is in its grasp of social or-
ganization; the second is the ability to distinguish the individual from his vari-
ous roles and statuses and consider him simply as a human being; and the
third is the growing awareness of ones own inner states, both mental and emo-
tional, and those of other people. These different aspects of moral understand-
ing are closely interrelated, so that ideas about sanctions and responsibility,
obligation, moral principles, the self, and the virtues form parts of a mutually
reinforcing system of ideas:
Sanctions: from prudential and pragmatic calculation, fear of vengeance and
public opinion, shame, custom, and supernatural sanctions to greater depend-
ence on explicit moral principles and private conscience, and the notion of re-
Conclusions 183

sponsibility from being primarily objective increasingly takes subjective factors
into account.
Obligation: from those based on social roles and status and specific relations
within society, and group membership, to general obligations to others as fel-
low human beings, with mutual perspective-taking; the extension of altruism
and a morality of the good beyond the bounds of close kinship or even ones
own society.
Moral principles: increasing generalization and abstraction; the idea of justice
develops from simple reciprocity and vengeance to the Golden Rule, to trading
places mentally with others, and the capacity to see ones relations with others
from a third-person perspective. General moral principles become distin-
guished from law and custom as an explicit and articulate body of ideas.
The self: there is increasing individuation and internalization of conscience,
from shame to guilt, in which the importance of intentions is emphasized
rather than actions alone, and correspondingly greater awareness of the inner
states of others.
Virtues: these are increasingly distinguished from social functions, and are
treated as basic characteristics of the morally responsible agent that are organi-
cally related to one another. Virtue is distinguished from success and social
conformity, and become a matter of enlightenment and wisdom, resistance to
temptation and the result of life-long training. (Some of these general conclu-
sions can also be found, for example, in Hobhouse 1906, Ginsberg 1944, and
Kluckhohn 1960).
It will at once be apparent that there are major resemblances in the way in
which moral understanding has developed in the course of human history and
in the development of individual thinking, between what can be called the his-
tory and the ontogeny of moral thought. Kohlbergs three levels of Concrete
Individual Perspective, Social Order Perspective, and Principled or Post-
Conventional perspective, and Piagets dichotomy between Heteronomy and
Autonomy between them capture many of those differences of moral and so-
cial understanding between primitive and more advanced societies which have
been noted by ethnographers and historians.
In this process of evolution we do not find, however, that the more elemen-
tary moral ideas simply disappear, either in history or in ontogeny. So, for ex-
ample, the norm of reciprocity by which one good turn deserves another re-
tains its force at all levels of social organization and moral thought, but be-
comes only part of a much more comprehensive notion of justice. The static
and rigid hereditary forms of order have been greatly modified in modern so-
ciety, but no society can possibly cease to be concerned with order, just as so-
cial sanctions and fear of public opinion continue to be important aspects of
our moral thought. The evolutionary process is therefore one in which older
forms diminish in importance and becomes encapsulated in new forms, rather
than disappearing altogether.
In order to understand this relation between cognitive development and so-
cial evolution we must distinguish between the formal structure of institutions,
such as segmentary lineages, marriage systems, gift exchange, and age group-
ing, and look instead at the types of experience and problems which the indi-
vidual encounters in such society, and the cognitive demands which this ex-
perience places on the individual. In this connection we have considered such
factors as shared experience, lack of awareness of alternatives, instruction in
the context of real life situations, the amateurish qualities of knowledge, lack of
demand for taxonomic classification in the articulate expression of knowledge,
the relative lack of demand for the functional analysis of primitive institutions,
the low division of labour and the highly specific nature of obligation, and the
great importance of symbolism in collective representation.
Developmental psychologists are generally agreed that one of the most im-
portant factors in cognitive growth is the experience of conflict and dissonance,
and here the increase in the size of societies, and the exponential increase in
disputes and new forms in property relations, and the introduction of commer-
cial relations will be of particular importance. The frequency of encounters
with strangers will be greatly increased by trade, by contact with members of
different cultures as a result of conquest warfare, and by urbanization, all of
which will increase their awareness of alternatives. The link between cognitive
and social forms is therefore one in which new situations are brought about
as by a shift to agriculture, political conquest of other societies, the develop-
ment of money, the breakdown of ascriptive institutions and so on. These gen-
erate new problems, which require a somewhat higher level of cognitive skill
on the part of the average and especially of the elite members of the society. As
these cognitive skills increase it then becomes possible to develop new legal,
political, philosophical, and religious representations. These in turn create new
types of problem which in their turn produce an increase in the cognitive skills
of individuals and so on. In this process we shall note that the real importance
of language is as the prime tool for new thinking, not as a prison in which the
mind of individuals is confined.
In the following chapters we shall apply the theory developed so far to the
ethnographic facts about societies of differing degrees of complexity. But this
sort of comparative survey of the ethnographic literature may incur the charge
from some anthropologists that it is Frazerian. By this they would mean, first,
that to take isolated ethnographic facts out of their social context distorts their
true significance, and secondly, that it makes a selective use of data to support
the authors theory and ignores counter-examples. In answer to the first objec-
tion, I would reply that if we are not, in some way, to be allowed to take iso-
lated ethnographic facts out of their social context then comparison as such
becomes impossible, which would reduce social anthropology to a collection of
mutually unrelatable ethnographies. Frazer was vulnerable to this objection for
a number of reasons which apply to him but not necessarily to everyone who
makes comparative surveys, particularly at the present time: the fact that Fra-
zer was an imperfect comparativist is no argument against comparison as such.
He was himself that rather unfairly derided figure, an armchair theorist, who
had never had any experience of primitive societies in the field, and so never
knew what it was to study a living society and see how its different aspects
were related to one another. His information therefore had to be obtained from
those who were actually in contact with these societies, as missionaries, gov-
Conclusions 185

ernment officials, traders, and so on, but who themselves were not in the posi-
tion to provide information of the quality now expected from professional an-
thropologists. Finally, his theory of the development of thought from magic to
religion to science was a bad theory (like a great deal of early anthropological
theory), and so it is hardly surprising that it could not be substantiated by the
facts he quoted in support of it.
Since Frazers day, our understanding of the way in which stateless socie-
ties work has increased out of all recognition as the result of a mass of detailed
ethnographies based on fieldwork, and we are also in the position to provide a
general theoretical explanation of how social evolution has occurred. I have
myself spent approximately four years in the field in Ethiopia and Papua New
Guinea, and have had the experience of seeing how the ethnographic facts fit
together in two very different societies. When, therefore, I or any other field-
worker read each others ethnographies we are in a much better position to
understand the significance of particular ethnographic facts in relation to the
whole than Frazer was, and our facts are much better than his anyway. So any-
one who claims at the end of the twentieth century that comparative surveys of
the ethnographic literature are Frazerian has himself not grasped the way in
which anthropology has progressed since Frazers time.
In answer to the second criticism, that such surveys are selective and ignore
counter-examples, I would reply that I have read quite widely in the ethno-
graphic literature and have not knowingly suppressed any counter-examples.
The purpose of the frequent citations of evidence from different sources is to
give the reader a cumulative sense of what these societies are like and how
people in them think. Since, unlike Frazer, I am relying entirely on published
data and all my facts are supported by bibliographical references, my readers
can verify them for themselves, and I offer this general challenge to those read-
ers who think that my account of moral thinking in pre-state societies is dis-
torted or biased. Go to the ethnographies of tribal societies and find there some
convincing examples of stage 5 modes of moral thought that are comparable to
those which I quote from the major literate civilizations in Chapter VII, and if I
cannot explain these by some unusual features of the society or individual in
question then I will have to modify or abandon my theory.
In conclusion it must be emphasized again that it is not proposed that all
the members of a certain type of society will be at a single stage of develop-
ment in moral thought. We are always concerned with modal stages, and,
moreover, we may expect to find that the thought of the decision-makers and
leaders in a society will tend to be on a higher level than that of non-leaders
and ordinary people. This becomes most obvious in the case of the literate civi-
lizations of antiquity considered in Chapter VII.
There is clearly a general correlation between social complexity and modes
of moral thought and between what may be called the stages of social evolu-
tion and the stages of moral understanding, so that the levels of social organi-
zation distinguished as atomistic societies, societies of corporate order, and
literate civilizations each have characteristic modes of moral thought. But the
notion of stages of social and cognitive development is used only for exposi-
tory convenience, to allows us to discern the underlying order in a vast mass of
data, and these stages are in no way conceived as a hierarchy of rigid rungs on
a ladder up which cultures leap in a series of sudden bounds. The stage con-
cept is not a substitute for understanding the wide range of factors that are re-
sponsible for the growth of moral understanding, and it is these factors which
are of primary explanatory importance. Evolutionary studies, then, are funda-
mentally concerned with process, and any stages that we find it useful to for-
mulate are merely summaries of our results.

V. Atomistic Societies

1. Introduction
One of the first anthropologists to use the term atomistic society was Ruth
Benedict, who was referring especially to hunter-gatherers, although the con-
cept also applies to some of the simpler agricultural societies: They recognise
only individual allegiances and ties they lack the social forms necessary for
group action (cited in Honigmann 1968: 220). When she refers to individual
allegiances and ties she does not deny the importance of kinship roles and
statuses, such as father, wifes brother, and so on, but these roles are not related
to membership of any groups such as clans or lineages. Nor do we find roles
beyond the level of kinship, such as priest, chief, or elder.
The term atomistic society has subsequently proved to be a useful label for
a cluster of social traits, which Honigmann defines as:
1. Primary concern is put on a persons own individual interests and on
great freedom from, or avoidance of, social constraint
2. People reveal a tendency to retreat from too intense or unnecessary
contacts with neighbors, with the result that interpersonal relations
are marked by empirically demonstrable reserve, restraint, or caution

3. Closely related to withdrawal from intense or unnecessary relation-
ship is a reluctance of people to commit themselves to large groups,
even when ecological conditions allow such forms to appear As a
consequence, such communities typically lack social structures ex-
tending much beyond the range of the household or local segment of
kin. When attempts at larger scale organization are made, they often
fail because people are unready or unwilling to collaborate and coop-
erate
4. Weak and ineffectual leadership and reluctance to delegate or even to
assume political authority are further features of social atomism, and
are closely related to those already mentioned. In the absence of
compelling political authority and of ritual devices to secure wide-
group identification or sense of unity, social ties are brittle
5. Finally, social relations in an atomistic community are marked by
strain, contention, or invidiousness (Honigmann 1968: 220221)

188 Atomistic Societies
Honigmann immediately qualifies point 5, however, by stating yet, ex-
pressed hostility does not necessarily accompany the atomistic syndrome. As
Benedict observed, varying with other factors in the social order, behaviour
may be mild instead of violent (ibid., 221). Social atomism therefore primarily
refers to a form of social organization in which individual ties are paramount,
and group structures are weakly articulated, and where close sympathy and
trust would not go much beyond the extended family. More recent writers on
hunter-gatherer societies reach much the same conclusions, e.g.:
Similarities among foragers include: egalitarian patterns of sharing; strong
anti-authoritarianism; an emphasis on the importance of co-operation in
conjunction with great respect for individuality; marked flexibility in band
membership and in living arrangements generally; extremely permissive
child-rearing practices; and common techniques for handling problems of
conflict and reinforcing group cohesion, such as often merciless teasing and
joking, endless talking, and the ritualization of potential antagonisms. (Lea-
cock & Lee 1982: 78)
Cohen, too, states that foragers are characterized by fluid group organiza-
tion, individual freedom of movement and group membership, immediate and
relatively easy access to resources, immediate consumption, simple division of
labour, and relatively direct personal leverage over other individuals(Cohen
1985: 99100).
Morris (1991: 26667) refers to a normative stress on symmetric relations
and egalitarianism, both between parents and children and between the sexes;
second, a normative stress on self-sufficiency third, a general looseness of
social ties so that camps are shapeless, unstructured aggregations of related
kin, there being no corporate groups of any kind; and finally, a general lack of
emphasis on formalised knowledge and ritual procedures.
Woodburn places special emphasis on the egalitarian ethos of hunter-
gatherer societies:
In these societies equalities of power, equalities of wealth and equalities of
prestige or rank are not merely sought but are, with certain limited excep-
tions, genuinely realised. But, the evidence suggests, they are never unchal-
lenged. People are well aware of the possibility that individuals or groups
within their own egalitarian society may try to acquire more wealth, to as-
sert more power or to claim more status than other people, and are vigilant
in seeking to prevent or limit this. The verbal rhetoric of equality may or
may not be elaborated but actions speak loudly: equality is repeatedly acted
out, publicly demonstrated, in opposition to possible inequality (Woodburn
1982: 432).
1

1
Woodburn considers that this emphasis on equality is particularly strong in societies
characterised by what he calls immediate return, that is, where the produce of hunting
and gathering is consumed on a daily basis, and there is no significant capital invest-
ment in technology or food storage. In delayed-return systems, on the other hand,
where such accumulations occur, greater inequalities may arise. We shall consider the
implications of delayed-return systems later, but Woodburn considers the Eskimo, in
particular, to be examples of delayed-return systems.
Introduction 189

While it can be said that reciprocity in the form of gift exchange and sharing
is of paramount importance in hunter-gatherer societies, this is often not really
generalized reciprocity as Sahlins defines it, but compulsory redistribution to
enforce equality. We also frequently find that in such societies formal dyadic
relations of friendship between unrelated or distantly related individuals are of
great importance.
There are also no judicial institutions, no persons who have the authority to
act as go-between, or to mediate or arbitrate in disputes. Disputes are settled
by public pressure and ridicule; mutual avoidance; discussion; payment of
compensation; and vengeance, which may be formal, as when the wrong-doer
permits the victim some limited physical retaliation before witnesses, or infor-
mal, involving assault or homicide.
While we may find richly developed cosmologies in these societies, and be-
liefs in many types of supernatural beings, these beings are not linked with
groups or with social authority, as it might be with the elders or chiefs, nor are
they associated in any significant way with the norms of proper conduct. While
some forms of behaviour may be believed to incur the anger of supernatural
beings, and therefore to incur unpleasant consequences for the offender and
possibly the whole community, a list of such religious offences in any of these
societies would not be significantly correlated with those types of act which are
condemned from the social point view assault, theft, quarrelsomeness, and so
on.
It has also been observed (Gardner 1966, Morris 1976, 1991) that while the
members of such societies obviously have a great deal of practical knowledge
of their environment, not only are their taxonomic systems limited in scope
but they have a relative unconcern with systematisation (Morris 1976: 544).
Gardner refers to this as memorate knowledge, that is, knowledge based on
personal, concrete experience, and it has been noted as a characteristic of a
wide range of hunter-gatherer societies, as well as some shifting cultivators. It
extends to social relations as well as to the natural world, and Gardner for ex-
ample says of the Paliyans Just as [they] have problems with natural taxon-
omy, they manifest difficulty providing models or rules to describe social prac-
tices such as residence(Gardner 1966: 398).
In the first part of this chapter we shall examine some typical hunter-
gatherer societies, and in the second consider some cases where this type of
social organization, and its associated structure of moral thought, are also
found among shifting cultivators. In such societies, there are, to be sure, some
important differences from the typical organization of band societies, but the
ethnographies give the strong impression that many of these societies, despite
their larger populations and more complex organization, are fundamentally of
the atomistic type.
There are significant resemblances between the moral thinking of atomistic
societies and Kohlbergs Pre-Conventional Level, Stage 2, characterized as In-
dividualism, instrumental purpose, and exchange:
What is right: Following rules only when it is to someones immediate inter-
ests and needs and letting others do the same. Right is also whats fair,
whats an equal exchange, a deal, an agreement.
Reasons for doing right: To serve ones needs or interests in a world where you
have to recognize that other people have interests, too.
Social perspective of Stage: Concrete individualistic stage. Aware that every-
body has his own interest to pursue and these conflict, so that right is rela-
tive (in the concrete individualistic sense). (Kohlberg 1984: 174)
On the other hand, there is a rigid and inflexible attitude to convention and
taboo, guilt consists in being found out, and responsibility is objective with
little interest in motive or intention.
A general problem of this type of society is the equilibration between self-
assertion and conformity to group norms; in some respects ethnographers de-
tect a kind of individualism reminiscent of modern industrial societies, but an
individualism which lacks certain essential features of that which is found in
complex societies, notably an articulate awareness of the inner psychological
states of oneself and of others. We shall return to this question in the conclud-
ing section.
2. Band societies
a. General features of hunter-gatherer societies
The bands of foraging societies share a number of very important characteris-
tics. In the first place they are small, their numbers varying between about 25
50, or 612 adult males and their dependents. The basic component units of
bands are nuclear or extended families but, with the exception of Australia,
these are not usually organized into wider patrilineal or matrilineal descent
groups, and even in Australia it is not these groups but the band which is the
basis of residence and daily co-operation. The typical mode of reckoning de-
scent is therefore usually cognatic. Band membership is never rigidly pre-
scribed, and movement from one band to another is, as we shall see, a basic
method of reducing social tensions between those who have quarrelled, while
children normally inherit rights to live in the band of their father and their
mother. There is also often some seasonal variation in the dispersal of the band,
with families foraging alone for part of the year, and coming together at certain
seasons, e.g. for the hunting of large animals when the maximum number of
adult males is needed. for a band to be a band the people do not have to be
closely physically associated as a face to face residential group, at all times, or
even much of the time (Service 1972: 59).
Secondly, people have little in the way of personal property which can be
the source of friction and disputes, and weapons and tools which exist are too
few and too well known to be stolen. Nor is it possible in these societies, where
the bands territory is the common property of all, for anyone to accumulate
and store wealth, or for any relations of economic dependence to become estab-
lished, because there is direct access to all resources. Thirdly, clearly defined
Band societies 191

social roles (other than kinship) are generally lacking, and political authority,
in the sense of inherited or elected office, whose holders can issue orders that
are obeyed as a matter of course, does not exist. We shall see that while some
men have an important influence on the decisions of the band, this is essen-
tially informal and based entirely on seniority and personal qualities. Leader-
ship, in so far as it exists, is derived from generational seniority and age, and
social obligations are based on kin ties or formal friendships of a dyadic, recip-
rocal nature. But there is no form of official mediation or dispute settlement,
and the basic means of resolving disputes is for those involved to move to dif-
ferent bands or camps. The notion of punishment for offences against the com-
munity as opposed to individuals, scarcely exists, and instead of the notion of
retribution in the sense of the just consequences of an action there is simply the
idea of vengeance or retaliation.
b. Lack of political authority
Lack of political authority among hunter-gatherers is reported by all ethnogra-
phers, and such as exists is primarily based on age and family seniority. Com-
mon to all these tribes on the level of food gatherers is the absence of any
institutionalized authority capable of enforcing laws and punishing offenders
(von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 32). Petty quarrels can be settled by the informal
mediation of the older and more respected men of the local community, but
there is no institutionalized system of arbitration and no provision for any co-
ercive action in more serious cases such as the abduction of a wife (ibid., 20),
and the sanction of public opinion however is very important in restraining
anti-social behaviour. Of the Mbuti Pygmies, Turnbull quotes Putnam that
there are no chiefs, councils, or any formal governing bodies in a Pygmy
camp. There is respect for old age and experience (not for elders). The opin-
ions of the old and the wise are generally heeded at the same time every
man in the band has a full say in any discussion (Turnbull 1965: 228).
Endicott says that among the Batek no adult can coerce another. Husbands
have no authority over their wives, and even that of parents over the children
is weak. There is no formal leadership (Endicott 1979: 10). According to
Woodburn, among the Hadza I would say that there are no household
heads Older children and young married adults in these societies are not
dependent on the senior generation for access to property, to food or to re-
sources though they may receive some property, food and resources from
them. Among both Hadza and !Kung, children do relatively little work and
what they do is done at their own choice rather than under parental direction
(Woodburn 1982: 439). The Chewong of Malaysia, hunter-gatherers who have
also begun shifting cultivation in the last fifty years or so do not acknowl-
edge any form of institutionalized authority among themselves. Old people,
due to their wider experience and knowledge are, however, accorded a fair
amount of respect, but this does not mean that they can assert any form of au-
thority over the rest (Howell 1989: 42).
Among the !Kung there is also no formal political office of chief or head
man. The claim by Marshall (1976) that the Bushmen had the inherited political
office of headman has been disproved by later research by Lee (1984: 58), who
says that they have only informal leaders: These leaders work in subtle ways.
They are modest in demeanour and may never command but only suggest a
course of action. There is no hereditary basis to their rule, and as often as not
they are outsiders men who have married into a group of land owners.
When fights do break out there is no one within !Kung society with the force of
law behind him (or her) to separate the parties and reach a settlement (ibid.,
9091). Radcliffe-Brown says of the Andamanese, Of authority the leading
men have little or none, but of influence they have a good deal (1922: 47).
Women may occupy a position of influence similar to that of the men. The wife
of a leading man generally exercises the same sort of influence over the women
as her husband does over the men (ibid., 47). The virtuous man inevitably ac-
quires a position of influence in the community. His opinion on any subject
carries more weight than that of another even older man In each local group
there was usually to be found one man who thus by his influence could control
and direct others (ibid., 45).
Among the Netsilik Eskimo the collaborative activities of the extended fam-
ily were supervised by the headman, inhumataq, the one who thinks:
In summer he gave the signal for the beginning of fishing or caribou hunt-
ing, and he decided matters pertaining to migration and camp selection. Yet
all these decisions were taken informally and gently, in consultation with the
other adult hunters of the extended family, involving long discussions when
everyone present could freely expressed his opinion. In a sense the head-
mans task was to achieve consensus without hurting the feelings and de-
signs of the other hunters, whose autonomy he respected. (Balicki 1970: 116)
Leadership among the Siriono is described in the following terms:
Although his authority theoretically extends throughout the band, in actual
practice its exercise depends almost entirely upon his personal qualities as a
leader. In any case, there is no obligation to obey the orders of the chief and
no punishment for non-fulfilment. Indeed, little attention is paid to what is
said by a chief unless he is a member of ones immediate family. To maintain
his prestige a chief must fulfil, in superior fashion, those obligations re-
quired of everyone else. (Holmberg 1969: 148)
Age is therefore often a significant factor in social control among hunter-
gatherers. Von Frer-Haimendorf says that among the Chenchus in cases of
adultery a weak man may appeal to the older men of his own group and ask
them to intervene with the leading men of the culprits group, and petty quar-
rels can be settled by the informal mediation of the older and more respected
men of the local community (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 20). Among the
Paliyans of south India, When friction does arise, mature individuals fre-
quently step forward and talk to the parties in conflict, joking with them or
soothing their feelings (Gardner 1966: 396), but Gardner explicitly adds that
such individuals cannot actually mediate in the dispute.
Writing of the Andamanese, Radcliffe-Brown says The affairs of the
community are regulated entirely by the older men and women. The younger
members of the community are brought up to pay respect to their elders and to
submit to them in many ways (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 44). According to
Turnbull there is reason to believe that elders can settle disputes among the
Band societies 193

Mbuti (Turnbull 1965: 185), and in Australia old men derive authority and
prestige through their knowledge of ritual and mythology (R.M. and C.H.
Berndt 1964: 180).
Aboriginal Australia is nominally gerontocratic; that is to say, the authority
of the elders is paramount. But we use the term nominally advisedly. It is
true that most elders, not all, are viewed as the final repositories of custom
and religious belief. But it is also true that middle-aged men are far more
powerful in both the religious and secular or mundane affairs. Men become
leaders and responsible elders, with a decisive voice in tribal matters, not on
the grounds of age alone but because they have something to offer. This is
the major criterion. (Ibid., 180)
Endicott says that the Batek require respect for the aged (1979: 81) but does
not discuss their role in dispute settlement. Among the !Kung fathers have au-
thority over their sons-in-law as well as their sons, but the general emphasis
seems to be on corporate sanctions rather than on the influence of elders as
such, while among the Eskimo the authority of age was a generational author-
ity of the older men over his sons or nephews: The age factor was crucial in
the authority structure of the extended family (Balicki 1970: 116). Even in these
cases, however, we are dealing with personal influence, not with political or
judicial authority as such.
c. Dispute settlement and social control
Several aspects of hunter-gatherer society have a general tendency to inhibit
quarrels, or to facilitate their resolution even when they break out. One of the
most important of these is the ability of band members to take up residence in
bands other than those of their birth. Since kinship is cognatic it is always pos-
sible to live in ones mothers as well as ones fathers band, while a marriage
allows one spouse to live in the band of the other spouse. This clearly makes it
much easier for enemies to avoid one another by living in different bands.
Among the Chenchus, when a quarrel occurs: it is usual for one of the parties
to leave the group and rivals would then avoid each other The person at
variance with a kinsman or fellow tribesman experiences no difficulty in mov-
ing to another group, and tensions lessen or disappear when face to face con-
tact is broken off (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 2021). But the number of
groups a Chenchu can join is limited, and a man notorious for anti-social
behaviour or a difficult temperament may find no group willing to accept him
for any length of time hence the sanction of public opinion is normally
enough (ibid., 22). Mobility between bands is high among the Batek (Endicott
1979: 11), and among the !Kung camps change in number and composition to
resolve social conflict (Lee 1984: 60). Only when one or both of the feuding
parties leave or when they settle their differences can the sharing be restored
(Lee 1984: 61).
All this visiting, shifting, and adjustment of numbers would make sense to
us when we realize that the !Kung camp is a unit of sharing. The food
brought into a camp each day is distributed widely so that each member re-
ceives an equitable share. Thus, it is crucial that the people in the camp get
along well together. If arguments break out, then sharing breaks down, and
when that happens the basis for camp life is lost (ibid., 61). Avoidance was
also a very important strategy of social control among the Netsilik Eskimo,
and those who dislike each other live at opposite ends of the camp or move
to other bands altogether (Balicki 1970: 192193).
Apart from avoidance, certain other modes of dispute settlement are widely
recorded among hunter-gatherer societies. Self-help, if a man feels strong
enough, is one common recourse. The !Kung distinguish three levels of conflict:
talking, fighting, and deadly fighting. In talking, jokes can break the tension; in
fights, others would attempt to pull the combatants apart, and this is followed
by avoidance and separate residence for some time. Formal talks seem to be
rare: People went to sit at each others fires, forming little groups who agreed
and supported each other. From where they sat, but not all at once and not in
an excited babble, they made their remarks clearly, with quite long pauses be-
tween (Marshall 1976: 353). A few days later the person who was the object of
the talk gave the required gift, and peace was restored. When fights do break
out there is no one within !Kung society with the force of law behind him (or
her) to separate the parties and reach a settlement (Lee 1984: 90). In the period
19201955 there were 22 homicides, 15 of which were vengeance killings; there
were none between 19551970, but since then homicides have increased again.
Executions of dangerous anti-social individuals can occur in !Kung society
with community agreement, and the relatives would not defend someone who
deserves this (ibid., 9596). The kgotla court of the Tswana is welcomed because
it offers the !Kung a legal umbrella and relieves them of the heavy responsibil-
ity of resolving serious internal conflicts under the threat of retaliation (ibid.,
9596).
Among the Andamanese there was no such thing as the punishment of
crime (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 48). Two kinds of anti-social action were re-
garded as wrong: 1) Actions which injure private individuals. Murder by am-
bush occurred, and it was left to the relatives and friends of the victim to exact
vengeance if they wished and could. Theft was rare. It was left to the ag-
grieved person to take vengeance upon the thief, but if he killed him or seri-
ously wounded him he would have to expect the possible vengeance of the
relatives and friends. Adultery was regarded as a form of theft (ibid., 50). The
frequent occurrence of serious quarrels is prevented by the influence of the
older men and by the fear that everyone has of the possible vengeance of oth-
ers should he in any way offend them. 2) Anti-social acts, e.g. laziness, break-
ing ritual prohibitions, marital unfaithfulness, lack of respect, meanness, bad
temper, led to the result of loss of esteem by others (ibid., 50).
Among the Eskimo
Blood revenge is compulsory for kinsmen in cases of murder (except among
the Copper, Iglulik, and East Greendlanders, where it is optional, and de-
pends on relative strength). It can be delayed for years, and then suddenly
and treacherously carried out. Bravery is not relevant here. The homicidal
recidivist, however, becomes a social menace, liable at any time to strike
down another victim. As a general menace he becomes a public enemy. As a
public enemy he becomes the object of public action. The executioner seeks
and obtains in advance community approval, including that of the mur-
Band societies 195

derers own kin, to avoid blood vengeance. Close kinsmen of the murderer
may themselves be called upon to carry out the execution. Not only are
murders executed, but also sorcerers, those who threaten and abuse others,
and chronic liars. There is also regulated combat, and song duelling. (Hoebel
1954)
Among the Netsilik the execution of seriously anti-social individuals was
always carried out by close relatives, and the decision itself was taken within
the circle of relatives (Balikci 1970: 192). But fear of public opinion and of the
ridicule and shame it engenders is perhaps of the most importance in regulat-
ing social life among hunters and gatherers. Von Frer-Haimendorf stresses
the sanction of public opinion in restraining anti-social behaviour among the
Chenchus (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 22), and Endicott refers to the moral
unity of the Batek camp (Endicott 1979: 1011), and the prohibition of a large
number of socially disruptive and disrespectful acts, especially those directed
towards older people (ibid., 81). Marshall gives considerable detail on social
conformity among the !Kung. Separation and loneliness are unendurable to
them (Marshall 1976: 350). And
Any expression of discord (bad words) makes them uneasy. Their desire to
avoid both hostility and rejection leads them to conform in high degree to
the unspoken social laws. I think that most !Kung can not bear the sense of
rejection that even mild disapproval makes them feel. If they do deviate,
they usually yield readily to expressed group opinion and reform their ways
(ibid., 351) [talking] keeps up good, open communication among the
members of the band; through its constantly having expression it is a salu-
tary outlet for emotions; and it serves as the principal sanction in social dis-
cipline. Songs are also used for social discipline. The !Kung say that a song
composed specifically about someones behaviour and sung to express dis-
approval, perhaps from the deepest shadow of the encampment at night, is a
very effective means of bringing who deviate back into the pattern of ap-
proved behaviour. (Ibid., 351)
Radcliffe-Brown says of the Andamanese that The only painful result of
anti-social actions was the loss of esteem of others. This in itself was a punish-
ment that the Andamanese, with their great personal vanity, would feel keenly,
and it was in most instances sufficient to prevent such actions (Radcliffe-
Brown 1922: 52). Among the Netsilik, while derision caused resentment and
anger, at the same time the threat of derision caused a fear of being laughed at
and so it acted as a kind of control, keeping deviant behaviour in check
(Balikci 1970: 174). So also did gossip. Every Netsilik was surrounded by a cir-
cle of gossipers who watched his behaviour and commented on it. This
checked deviancy (ibid., 185). Lazy hunters were barely tolerated by the com-
munity. They were objects of backbiting and ostracism for a long time until the
opportunity came for an open quarrel. On the one hand, therefore, we have
that considerable degree of personal autonomy to which we referred to in (b),
but on the other a high level of conformism enforced by peer pressure within
the group.
d. Moral norms
It will have become clear from the previous section that while there is no politi-
cal coercion of followers by leaders in these small scale societies, and consider-
able personal freedom in daily activities and residence, there is no room for
individualism in the sense of personal deviation from group norms. The gen-
eral emphasis is on avoiding disputes and fighting as a practical necessity for
daily life. It should be noted however that, in these societies, an emphasis on
non-violence is not the same as altruistic love for ones fellows. Among the
Paliyans, Avoidance of aggression is considered to be their first rule (Gardner
1966: 394), and one man said, If struck on one side of the face, you turn the
other side toward the attacker(ibid., 394). But it is clear from Gardners general
account of the Paliyans that this did not express forgiveness and love of ones
enemies, but was pragmatic advice to avoid fighting within the group.
Those who fail to observe group norms can expect to suffer the practical
consequences, and there is no evidence of any appeal to moral principles as
obligatory in themselves. The human qualities most highly valued [among the
Chenchus] are helpfulness, generosity, courage and an amiable temper con-
versely, greed, cowardice and quarrelsomeness are condemned, and there are
stories which in the manner of morality tales show how those exhibiting these
obnoxious qualities come to a bad end (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 19).
Among the Mbuti Sluggards find they receive no share when game from the
hunt is divided; the selfish woman who does not share any of her gathering
products is ostracized. Incorrigible thieves, and above all those suspected of
sorcery are expelled (Turnbull 1965: 186). Batek ethics strongly emphasize
the need for sharing and mutual aid among all the people living together.
Food, especially meat, is always shared with as many people as possible,
whether it is needed or not (Endicott 1979: 11). The !Kung bushmen
stressed generosity, in particular. In the words of one Bushman The worst
thing is not giving gifts. If people do not like each other, but one gives a gift,
the other must accept. This brings a peace between them. We give to one an-
other always. We give what we have. This is the way we live together (Mar-
shall 1976: 370).
Marshall records a more extended discussion of moral values:
One day, when I wanted to talk with a group of informants about what the
!Kung considered to be a wrong doing, I began with IT: !Kai. He said
promptly Making crooked arrows and fighting, but could not think of any-
thing else that was a wrong doing. Informants had previously said that not
sharing food was the worst thing they could think of. Others had mentioned
that the breaking of the incest and menstruation taboos would be very
wrong, and that girls should not sit in immodest postures. No one seemed to
think lying was very serious wrong doing, and no one mentioned stealing. I
finally asked directly and KXau replied immediately they had not thought
to mention stealing because they did not steal. (Marshall 1976: 370)
Marshall records that the !Kung were in fact very honest, and that Stealing
without being discovered is practically impossible in !Kung life because the
!Kung know everybodys footprints and every object. Respect for ownership is
strong. But, apart from that, ITi:Kai said, Stealing would cause nothing but
Band societies 197

trouble. It might cause fighting (ibid., 370). Marshall records having heard of
a man who took honey from a tree which had been found and marked and
was therefore owned by someone else. He was killed for it by the furious
owner. That was the only episode of stealing we discovered (ibid., 370).
The !Kung also emphasize lack of greed, and restraint, as the essence of
good manners: A person does not reveal eagerness or take more than a modest
share. When a visitor comes to the fire of a family which is preparing food or
eating, he should sit at a little distance, not to seem importunate, and wait to be
asked to share (ibid., 335).
The polite way to receive food or any gift is to hold out both hands and have
the food or other gift placed in them. To reach out with one hand suggests
grabbing to the !Kung Good manners in general should be inoffensive.
Any behaviour which is likely to stir up trouble is regarded with apprehen-
sion and disapproval by the !Kung People are expected to keep their
tempers and this they do to a remarkable degree.
Lee makes a special note of the importance of modesty among the !Kung.
One of his informants said When a young man kills much meat he comes to
think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his
servants or inferiors. We cant accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for some
day his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as
worthless (Lee 1979: 49). Woodburn describes a very similar Hadza disposi-
tion to cut the superior person down to size.
Among the Andamanese, Radcliffe-Brown noted that Generosity is es-
teemed by the Andamanese as one of the highest of virtues and is unremit-
tingly practised by them (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 43). Besides generosity, the
Andamanese also have a high regard for kindness, freedom from bad temper,
and skill in hunting and warfare (ibid., 45). Laziness is particularly condemned:
Every man is expected to take his proper share in providing for himself and
others with food, and those who fail to do this lose the esteem of their fellows
(ibid., 50). Theft and adultery, and lack of respect to others are also condemned
(ibid., 50).
According to Balikci, co-operation is a basic norm for the Netsilik Eskimo:
Steenhovens informants from Pelly Bay assert that no one may be excused
from hunting except in the case of bodily infirmity. This norm implies the rejec-
tion of unproductive members and reaffirms implicitly the necessity for joint
effort Collaboration is deeply rooted in the Netsilik system of behaviour
norms (Balikci 1970: 128). all able bodied men should contribute to hunting,
and the return for the hunt should be shared according to established customs.
The lazy hunter, nuniurut, nobody liked sharing with them (ibid., 176). Theft,
although cheerfully practised in relation to strangers, practically never oc-
curred among camp fellows. Household objects were few, anyhow, and their
owners well known which made theft in the camp virtually impossible to con-
ceal (ibid., 178).
Netsilik society did have behavioural norms, mostly concerned with the
broad interests of the community as a whole. There were definite obligations
with regard to food procurement and food sharing. Freedom of access to
important natural resources was also essential. When camp stability was en-
dangered by individuals who disregarded these community interests, or up-
set the social balance by disruptive activity or by evil sorcery or insanity, the
community did take action, even to the extent of execution, if it was needed.
(Ibid., 193)
The obligation to give as a moral norm is typical of hunter-gatherer society,
and is specifically referred to by a number of ethnographers, e.g. by Endicott
for the Batek in the passage already quoted (1979: 11), and in much more detail
by Woodburn for the Hadza and Marshall and Lee for the !Kung Bushmen:
The custom of gift-giving comes second only to meat sharing in aiding the
!Kung to avoid jealousy and ill-will and to develop friendly relations Almost
everything a person has may have been given to him and may be passed on to
others in time (Marshall 1976: 363). No special gift objects are used, but the
common artefacts and materials of everyday life. They borrow and lend a
great deal, but this does not blur the clarity of ownership. Private property is
owned whether by manufacture or gift, but lending and borrowing increase
social solidarity. The acquisition of objects is not the primary motive (ibid.,
365). Instead of keeping things they use them to express generosity and
friendly interest and to put people under obligation to make return tokens of
friendship (ibid., 367). Even more, they mitigate jealousy and envy, to
which the !Kung are prone The two rigid requirements in gift-giving are
that one must not refuse a proper gift and that one must give in return (ibid.,
368). Among the Andamanese, Radcliffe-Brown notes:
the custom of constantly exchanging presents with one another. When
two friends meet who have not seen each other for some time, one of the
first thing they do is exchange presents with one another. Even in the ordi-
nary life of the village there is a continual giving and receiving of presents
At the meetings that take place between neighbouring local groups the
exchange of presents is of great importance. Each of the visitors brings with
him a number of articles that he distributes amongst the members of the
group that he visits. When visitors depart they are loaded with presents re-
ceived from their host. It is considered a breach of good manners ever to re-
fuse the request of another Almost every object that the Andamanese
possess is thus constantly changing hands. (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 42)
And E.H. Man states of the Andamanese selfishness is not among their charac-
teristics, for they frequently make presents of the best thing they possess and
do not reserve, much less make, weapons of superior workmanship for their
private use. At the same time it must be confessed that it is tacitly understood
that an equivalent should be rendered for every gift (Man 1885: 26).
The Australian Aborigines
usually know quite well what individual ownership means. There are ob-
jects which are personally owned, and rarely if ever lent or shared: a
womans digging stick, for instance, a mans favourite spears, and various
sacred objects. But the Aborigines set much less store than we do by material
possessions; and there is in every community an arrangement of obligation
which every growing child has to learn. In this network of duties and debts,
rights and credits, all adults have commitments of one kind or another.
Mostly, not invariably, these are based on kin relationships. All gifts and
services are viewed as reciprocal. This is basic to their economy every-
Band societies 199

thing must be repaid, in kind or in equivalent within a certain period. (R.M
and C.H. Berndt 1964: 107)
Among the Murngin of Australia The foundations of [kinship] are built en-
tirely on reciprocity, and the whole structure might be described as a dynamic
equilibrium (Warner 1937: 461) and for the Arunta Generosity is certainly one
of his leading features. He is always accustomed to give a share of his food, or
of what he may possess, to his fellows It is with him a fixed habit to give
away part of what he has (Spencer and Gillen 1938: 53). Among the Eskimo
compulsory distribution seems to have been absorbed into the institutions of
sharing and borrowing.
There were no extensive and rigid rules for sharing Caribou meat. Rasmus-
sen (1929: 173) mentions that the lucky hunter usually gave away the fat
hind quarters to be shared by others while keeping for himself the rest of the
carcass including the skin and valuable sinews. Closely knit extended fami-
lies usually kept and used the return of their communal hunts. Non-related
or distantly related families present at the camp received nothing or little.
Whenever game was abundant, sharing among non-relatives was avoided,
since every family was supposedly capable of obtaining the necessary catch.
In situations of scarcity, however, caribou meat was more evenly distributed
throughout the camp Camp commensality was another way to share
meat, essentially with people outside the extended family. After a kill it was
considered appropriate to set up a feast for all camp fellows. When two non-
related men were stalking caribou together the lucky hunter would always
give the hind quarters to the other. At the end of the caribou-hunting season
when time for moving camp came, the unsuccessful hunters again receive
portions of caribou meat. Finally in winter, when the band assembled at the
sealing camp, the hunter who brought a sledge load of caribou meat had to
throw a feast for all his camp fellows. (Balikci 1970: 117118)
The demands of reciprocity are liable to create tensions, however, as Holm-
berg describes in the case of the Siriono: Reciprocity is always forced, and is
sometimes even hostile. One usually has to demand something in return for
that which one has reluctantly given. Indeed, sharing rarely occurs without a
certain amount of mutual mistrust and misunderstanding; a person always
feels that it is he who has been taken advantage of (Holmberg 1969: 151). And,
indeed, among the Siriono there is a great deal of secret eating of food to avoid
having to share it. It might seem paradoxical that in such societies, where gen-
erosity and sharing are so strongly emphasised, that we also find clear evi-
dence of a fundamental lack of altruism, yet this reported by a number of eth-
nographers.
e. Mutual indifference and assertiveness
It is therefore necessary to distinguish generosity from a true, selfless interest
in the well being of others. The balanced reciprocity which is so marked a fea-
ture of atomistic societies is actually the result of lack of trust in others mainly
brought about by the absence of cohesive group structures. So while the Pali-
yans rigorously enforce reciprocity this is because Paliyans are self-conscious
about receiving anything that sets them off from others(Gardner 1966: 395).
Balanced reciprocity is thus quite compatible with an envious individualism
that is the opposite of true co-operation.
Marshall refers to the jealousy and envy to which !Kung are prone (Mar-
shall 1976: 368).
Their security and comfort must be achieved side by side with self-interest
and much jealous watchfulness. Altruism, kindness, sympathy, or genuine
generosity were not qualities that I observed often in their behaviour. How-
ever, these qualities were not entirely lacking, especially between parents
and offspring, between siblings, and between spouses On the other hand,
people do not generally help each other. They laugh when the lame man
!Xem falls down and do not help him up. KXaus jealous eyes were like
those of a viper when we gave more attention to her husband Toma, than
to her on one occasion because he was much more ill than she (Ibid., 350)
They laugh at mishaps that happen to other people, like the lions that eat up
someone elses meat, and shriek over particularly telling and insulting sallies in
the joking relationship (ibid., 353). Howell says of the Chewong:
Although they do not compete, they do not help each other either. The ide-
ology of non-interference that permeates Chewong life, on some levels could
be described as non-involvement, a more negative way of regarding it. Indi-
viduals are expected to, and on the whole do, carry on their activities on
their own. It is a rare sight to witness someone asking someone else for assis-
tance. Similarly, offers of assistance are also rare. I have many times watched
strong young people lying about all day while old, and sometimes ill, people
toil with heavy work without asking for or receiving help. (Howell 1989: 38)
One of the best examples of mutual indifference comes from the Siriono:
Unconcern with ones fellows is manifested on every hand. On one occasion
Ekwataia a cripple who, although he was not married, had made an ad-
justment to life went hunting. On his return darkness overcame him about
five hundred yards from camp. The night was black as ink, and Ekwataia
lost his way. He began to call for help for someone to bring him fire or to
guide him into camp by calls. No one paid heed to his request, although by
this time he was but about few hundred yards from camp. After about half
an hour his cries ceased, and his sister Seaci, said, A jaguar probably got
him. When Ekwataia returned the following morning he told me that he
had spent the night sitting on the branch of a tree to avoid being eaten by
jaguars. His sister, however, although she manifested a singular unconcern
for his survival the night before, complained bitterly that he gave her such a
small part of his catch. (Holmberg 1969: 260)
Gardner says of the Paliyans that they work and live in parallel rather than
joint fashion and exhibit little co-operation outside their rather loose nuclear
families. They are hesitant to become emotionally involved with others and
equally reluctant to unite toward practical goals. There is a very strong expec-
tation for autonomy (Gardner 1966: 394).
Woodburn confirms this general impression of lack of interpersonal concern
for the Hadza as well:
The Hadza are strikingly uncommitted to each other; what happens to the
individual Hadza, even close relatives, does not really matter very much.
Band societies 201

People are often very affectionate to each other, but the affection is generally
not accompanied by much sense of responsibility. If someone becomes ill he
is likely to be tended only so long as this is convenient. (Woodburn 1968: 91)
He discusses, in this connection, the frequent occurrence in the hunter-gatherer
literature of the abandonment of the sick, and gives a Hadza example of a para-
lyzed boy abandoned by his mother and other close relatives only a few miles
from water, to which they could have carried him without too much difficulty.
He concludes, from this and other cases, that ecological explanations are insuf-
ficient, and says that the individualistic quality of social life is of much greater
importance:
With a few exceptions, a Hadza does not depend on specific individuals
standing in particular relationships to him for access to property or to adult
status, or for assistance in cooperative activities. In this respect the Hadza
and similar hunters and gatherers differ very fundamentally from most
other tribal societies. (ibid., 91)
Whiting cites a cross-cultural study by Barry, Child and Bacon (1959), which
found that foraging cultures tend to stress assertiveness and independence
rather than compliance, which is typical of agricultural and pastoral norms.
Cattle and cultivated fields are part of the establishment which must be cared
for responsibly and obediently according to rules set by the older generation.
The successful forager, however, with no accumulation to protect, should be
assertive and is so trained as a child (Whiting 1968: 337).
Active suspicion and hostility are also reported as pervasive in some of
these societies. In the case of the Netsilik,
Practically any minor or trivial event could produce a quarrel and lead to
overtly aggressive behaviour. The more so if personality factors provided a
suitable setting for it (Balikci 1970: 173). Mockery or derision was one behav-
ioural trait among the Netsilik that frequently provoked resentment and
hostilities (ibid., 174).
Not surprisingly, therefore, strangers fell entirely outside the range of those
to whom concern is due:
All of the available data indicate that in traditional times fear, intense suspi-
cion, and potential or actual hostility permeated relations between strangers.
Although such negative sentiments were usually directed towards complete
strangers from neighbouring tribes with whom the Netsilik were only
vaguely acquainted, non-relatives within the tribe were not always ex-
empted. Suspicion and fear could lead almost any time to outright aggres-
sion overtly expressed in fist fights and murder, or in more subtle forms of
aggressive magical techniques. (Balikci 1970: 158)
Among the !Kung
Wild animals we call !hohm Lions, leopards, cat, hyenas and wild dogs
!hohmatsi wild things of the bush. Tswana, Gobai, Hereros and Europeans
like you, Tontah, we call !homsachulo, wild things of the village we call
creatures who are different from us !hohm, because when they speak we
cannot understand a word. We called the blacks and whites !hohm long ago
because we were afraid of them like we were afraid of wild animals. Today
we do not fear them. (Lee 1984: 131)
And Turnbull remarks that A Pygmy thinks nothing of stealing from Negroes;
they are, after all, only animals as seen by Pygmy eyes (Turnbull 1962: 120).
The general impression one gets from the literature is that the moral quality
of relationships is highly dependent on group membership: within the group
reciprocity and co-operation are engaged in because of their self-evident value
to each individual in daily life, not out of any altruistic concern with the needs
of others; and outsiders do not count at all and are owed no moral concern.
f. Supernatural sanctions and morality
While supernatural sanctions may be of great importance in the control of be-
haviour in some foraging societies, we frequently find that those acts which
incur such sanctions are in themselves without significant moral content.
The Chenchus do believe in a number of deities imagined anthropomorphi-
cally, but divine injunctions do not, on the whole, refer to social relations.
Thus it is said that in olden days Chenchus killed only male animals, for kill-
ing a female angered the powerful and morally benevolent deity Garelamai-
jama Though believed to intervene at times in human affairs, Garelamai-
jama is not thought to concern herself with such actions as adultery, vio-
lence, or even murder, and there is little to suggest that moral lapses are sub-
ject to supernatural sanctions. There is certainly no trace of any idea that
morally desirably actions lead to an accumulation of merit determining
mans fate after death, and the belief in the possible ill effect of evil deeds
has thus no positive counterpart. (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 2324)
The Chenchus have no belief in collective responsibility, nor do they believe
in the polluting effect of deviant behaviour. In their view every individual is
only responsible for his own actions, and a mans misdeeds cannot jeopard-
ize the well being of his kinsmen and neighbours. (Ibid., 21)
Among the Batek,
The enforcement by the deities of certain rules of human behaviour is
merely part of their general function of maintaining cosmic order The la-
wac rules have mainly to do with preventing the mixing or confusing of
things and behaviour which, in the proper order of things are separated
And with preventing ridicule of the hala and the created order. They do not
regulate the conduct of persons toward each other so much as they regulate
the conduct of humans in relation to the environs. (Endicott 1979: 203)
The rules of lawac, which may be derived from an old word for lightning, are
concerned with what we should call ritual offences. All thunderstorms are in
theory the punitive act of Gobai for persons who have broken lawac prohibi-
tions. These are: laughing at certain animals, cooking certain combinations of
food over a single fire, pouring certain kinds of blood into a stream, and im-
proper sexual behaviour such as incest. They all serve to affirm the order of
the world as the Batek conceive it it is only laughing at the animals which is
prohibited. They can be and are abused and killed without any trace of empa-
thy or compassion (ibid., 69). Acts supposed to caused people to smell like raw
meat are forbidden drinking raw blood and crushing head lice because they
would attract attack by tigers (ibid., 79). Also forbidden are the irreverent
rhyming of food names, the hala of sun, moon, stars, sky and fruit trees; and in
Shifting cultivators 203

such case culprits are stricken with reway, a wasting disease. By distorting the
names of things it confuses their identity and threatens the world order (ibid.,
80).
Radcliffe-Brown notes that the Andamanese believe that breaking ritual
prohibitions, such as burning bees-wax or killing cicadas, may bring storms
that endanger the whole group (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 50). Supernatural sanc-
tions for conduct were very important for the Eskimo. Religious beliefs and
ritual observances had a great influence on Netsilik social life and formed the
intellectual basis of its culture While certain religious activities were thought
to be beneficial to the people, others were distinctly malevolent in nature. This
dichotomy proves to be the basis of Netsilik morality (Balikci 1979: 197).
Taboos were also basic in religious life (ibid., 218), and Hoebel says, So
comprehensive is the taboo system that the paucity of legal rules in Eskimo
culture is in large part caused by the encompassing supernatural sanctions
which dominate social and economic life. Magic and religion rather than law
direct most of their actions (Hoebel 1954: 70). These taboos apply to hunting,
and to events in the personal life cycle. Eskimos (and Australians) seem how-
ever to have been exceptional in the elaboration of their cosmology, and Mor-
riss picture of the foraging Hill Pandaram of India is probably more typical:
The Hill Pandaram are an idiosyncratic people and place little emphasis on
the formalisation of culture. Life-cycle rituals puberty, marriage and funer-
ary rites are invariably celebrated without ceremony, and their religion is
completely uniconic. Centred on the worship of hill deities and ancestral
spirits, which are contacted through possession states, their religious beliefs
are vague, and it is difficult to discern any general agreement about the na-
ture of these hill deities or life after death. As far as I could ascertain they
have no myths and few magical rites, and though songs form an important
aspect of their cultural life, these are personal and idiosyncratic. (Morris
l976: 544)
3. Shifting cultivators
a. Introduction
There is no clear dividing line between foragers and shifting cultivators, since
in many such societies hunting and gathering may still make an important con-
tribution to subsistence. But while the shift to agriculture is often a slow proc-
ess, it produces very significant social changes. These are higher population
density, greater opportunity and need for sedentism, larger local communities,
and a new relationship between people and land. For whereas each band owns
its territory, larger communities of agriculturalists have within them kin
groups or families claiming areas of land which they or their ancestors were
the first to clear for growing crops, and animals such as pigs, sheep, goats, and
cattle are also owned by corporate groups or individuals in the local commu-
nity. These economies are referred to by Woodburn as delayed-return sys-
tems, since People hold rights over valued assets of some sort, which either
represent a yield, a return for labour applied over time or, if not, are held and
managed in a way which resembles and has similar social implications to de-
layed yields on labour. Examples are
1. Valuable technical facilities used in production: boats, nets, artificial
weirs, stockades, pit-traps, bee-hives and other artefacts which are a
product of considerable labour and from which a food yield is ob-
tained gradually over a period of months or years.
2. Processed and stored food or materials in fixed dwellings.
3. Wild products which have themselves been improved or increased by
human labour: wild herds which are culled selectively, wild food-
producing plants which have been tended and so on.
4. Assets in the form of rights held by men over their female kin who
are then bestowed in marriage on other men. (Woodburn 1982: 432
33).
These new forms of property relations are clearly the basis for a range of so-
cial relations and associated disputes which cannot exist at the hunter-gatherer
level. Again, the increase of the population of the local community from,
roughly, the 2550 or so of the band to the 200 to 250 which seems to be typical
of societies where shifting agriculture predominates, creates a very much lar-
ger number of social relationships. In any group the number of dyadic relation-
ships is given by the formula (n
2
n) so, in a group of 50 persons, there are
1225 such relationships. But in a group of 200, which is only 4 times larger than
a group of 50, there are 19,900 dyadic relationships, a 16fold increase, and in a
group of 250 the number rises to 31, 125, a 25fold increase. While some of
these relationships will be of less social significance than others, it is neverthe-
less clear that a fairly modest arithmetic increase in group size will produce an
exponential increase in dyadic relations of dramatic proportions which must
significantly increase the possibility of disputes, and, of course, there is now
much more to dispute and to compete about.
We noted that the basic forms of social control in hunter-gatherer society
are weak: the leadership of the headman is informal and based on persuasion
and force of character; and while the members of the senior generation are
usually deferred to, there are no formal judicial institutions. Disputes are re-
solved by mutual avoidance, or compensation and vengeance, or by public
ridicule, and the whole tenor of such societies is predominantly individualistic.
It seems likely that the new circumstances of agricultural production may
therefore impose unprecedented strains on social organization which the tradi-
tional controls of hunter-gatherer society are inadequate to deal with, and as a
result we may expect to find that many societies of shifting cultivators are
marked by a higher degree of social disorder than is typical of hunter-
gatherers, and by a marked increase in warfare. As Harris says:
Village houses, food-processing equipment, crops in the field, domestic
animals, secondary-growth forest, and prime garden lands represent capital
investments closely identified with the arduous inputs of specific groups of
individuals. The defence of this investment laid the basis for the develop-
ment of stable exclusive territorial identity. Villages often oppose each other

as traditional enemies, repeatedly attack and plunder each other, and often
expropriate each others territory. (Harris 1988: 363)
While Harris exaggerates the frequency of land conquest at this economic level,
his basic picture is correct, and Cohen notes that the adoption of agriculture
often, though not invariably, leads to an increase in violence and warfare
(Cohen 1989: 116, 211 n.53)
The norms of balanced reciprocity may continue to dominate personal and
group relations, and when property rights have become more important the
potential of balanced reciprocity for becoming competitive and individualistic
is much more obvious than in hunter-gatherer society. Extensive systems of
exchange tend to weaken corporate groups and to reinforce social atomism by
promoting a spirit of individualistic competition and the obsession with
wealth. Achievement in warfare, exchange, and oratory may be the basis for
significant gradations of rank and prestige, but such hierarchies are expres-
sions of power obtained by competition rather than normative systems of rank-
ing. Men who have obtained a reputation as war leaders and ferocious killers
may exercise considerable control over such groups, which become cliques of
followers dependent on the prestige and personality of the leader. This style of
leadership is essentially unstable, and, like that of the headman of the hunter-
gatherer band, depends on personal qualities and cannot easily develop into an
inheritable office. While some formal institutions such as the clan, the mens
house, and age-sets based on initiation may develop, the ethos is likely to be
one of agonistic individualism, in which the control of the group over its mem-
bers is weak. The Daflas of the Indo-Tibetan border (von Frer-Haimendorf
1967) are one well known example of shifting cultivators with these social
characteristics. Writing of Papua New Guinea, where such societies are also
typical, Langness says Perhaps the most curious and important ethical feature
of many Papua New Guinea societies is the capacity for allowing a maximum
amount of human freedom, even in spite of significant threats to group sur-
vival. Thus it is possible for individuals to refuse to fight against groups in
which they have kinsmen while simultaneously remaining members in good
standing of their own groups (Langness 1973: 198).
Nor do we find that religious beliefs play any more significant part in regu-
lating social behaviour than they seem to do in band societies. Relations with
supernatural beings are mainly to obtain material benefits, or to remove sick-
ness and other misfortunes, and such beings are not the supervisors of moral
conduct, nor are they the basis of any social authority either of the elders or the
political leaders. The religions of such societies are primarily concerned with
power and material well-being, not with conduct, or, if they are then with spe-
cific types of offences, by specific categories of people. There is a great variety
of beliefs in supernatural beings ancestral ghosts, nature spirits, deities, and
culture heroes and in the ways in which they are supposed to intervene in
human affairs:
Sometimes the ghost is concerned only with the morality of their surviving
kinsmen and not that of others; sometimes a god is concerned only with vio-
lation of incest rules but not with stealing; sometimes the supernatural be-
ings intervene only upon the failure to perform certain rituals, and so on
In contrast in the above there are many societies in which there is no rela-
tionship between moral rules and supernatural sanctions, or, indeed, be-
tween religion and morality. Even when a belief in ghosts exists, for exam-
ple, such beings are not necessarily believed to affect the moral affairs of the
living. (Langness 1973: 189) In general the belief in supernatural beings
who validate their morality is relatively uncommon. (Ibid., 188)
Surveying the societies of Papua New Guinea as a whole, Langness con-
cludes:
There are certain universal features of the moral systems qua systems.
Shame, as noted, is probably universally present. In that sense they might be
categorized as shame cultures as opposed to guilt cultures assuming
that it is a valid distinction. Another universal feature is that the moral code,
along with whatever sanctions support it, is always group specific. That is,
the moral rules do not apply beyond some known and finite body the clan,
the parish, and alliance of parishes, or at most a language group. (Langness
1973: 197) Still another universal feature is that moral rules are not ab-
stracted from their social context or their locus in the system. The people do
not think of a category morality as opposed to other aspects of behaviour.
(Ibid., 198)
b. Some examples from Papua New Guinea
The intensification of agriculture in most of Papua New Guinea is probably of
quite recent date, which is why many features of band organization are con-
spicuous in these societies. D. K. Feil, in his Evolution of Highland Papua New
Guinea Society (1987), has argued, building on the work of J. B. Watson, that the
sweet potato has only been cultivated in Highland Papua New Guinea in the
last two to three centuries (Feil 1987: 26), and that apart from certain restricted
areas in the Western Highlands which have an ancient history of intensive ag-
riculture based on taro, large areas, especially in the Eastern Highlands, had
simpler and less productive economies than they do now, in which foraging
would have been of proportionally greater significance.
The spread of the sweet potato had extremely important economic and so-
cial repercussions: The sweet potato was a superior food for both people and
pigs because it was prolific and it had the ability to be cultivated over a range
of soils and altitudes hitherto less productive, or altogether unproductive with
taro as staple (ibid., 27). Population sizes, sedentism, and production of pigs
will all therefore have increased substantially after the introduction of the
sweet potato.
There is considerable evidence that Tauade society, which I studied from
197072 (Hallpike 1977) has been greatly affected over the last two centuries by
the shift to the sweet potato as a staple crop, and that this has led to a marked
increase in pig production, population size, warfare, and ceremonial exchange.
Their social organization, however, retains many of the features of band soci-
ety, and as a result they have had very great problems of social control in

which the lack of mediatory institutions has been of particular significance.
1

They are divided into autonomous, named groups which I term tribes, num-
bering on average about 200 people, inhabiting fairly clearly demarcated areas
whose boundaries are usually mountain torrents separating spurs and ridges.
Tribes are split into a number of small hamlets, each of which coheres around
one or two big men. Named clans exist, with vague territorial areas within the
tribal land, but though the clans can be said to have a patrilineal character,
there is no conception of lineality as a clear jural principle, and it is possible for
people, especially big men, to change clans by exercising their cognatic ties.
The clans tell us nothing about peoples residence, marriages, migrations, gar-
den co-operation, or any other aspects of social relations. The membership of
hamlets is not based on agnatic kinship except for that between fathers and
sons or a group of brothers, who often live together. Cognates, affines, and
friends are all to be found in the same hamlet. These heterogenous friendship
groups often migrate together from one hamlet to another. Hamlets are con-
stantly changing in the composition of their membership, and hamlets them-
selves often break up and new ones are formed elsewhere. While hamlet mem-
bers may make gardens together, it is also common for members of different
hamlets to cooperate in this respect, and for members of the same hamlet to
make gardens in different places. Relations between members of the same
hamlet are fairly harmonious, but there is considerable conflict between mem-
bers of different hamlets within the same tribe. These hamlets are often only a
few hundred yards apart, and there are many occasions for disputes between
them over damage done to gardens by pigs, theft of panadanus nuts, and adul-

1
When I wrote my book on the Tauade I was unaware of the significance of the rela-
tively recent adoption of the sweet potato on the societies of Papua New Guinea; I had
not taken into account the resemblances between these societies and those of hunter-
gatherers, and I was not thinking in evolutionary terms. My revised interpretation of
Tauade society is therefore that it was in a state of transition to a more intensive de-
pendence on agriculture, and that this sheds significant light on many of the problems
of conflict and social control with which my book was concerned. There is further evi-
dence on the recent introduction of the sweet potato among the Tauade, besides that
referred to in the text:
J. Watson 1967 has pointed out that the lore, ritual and other contexts surround-
ing taro (and to a lesser extent yams, bananas, and sugar cane) in the Kainantu
area [Eastern Highlands] strikingly exceed those of the sweet potato. These crops
(and also Pueraria lobata) all belong to the male sphere, while sweet potato be-
longs to the female sphere. These other crops figure as a focus of beliefs and
practices beyond their use as food; sweet potato rarely does. (Feil 1987: 32)
Among the Tauade, sweet potatoes are planted by women, while yams, taro, and sugar
cane are cultivated by men (Hallpike 1977: 64); in ceremonial presentations the honour-
able foods are yams, taro, sugar cane, and pandanus nuts (also cultivated by men), and
the sweet potato is merely used on such occasions to satisfy hunger and in this respect is
similar to offal, whereas pork is always distributed in ceremonial form by men. The size
of language populations in the Tauade area is small and this, too, supports the sugges-
tion that groups were correspondingly small and not regularly in contact through the
sort of widespread systems of exchange found in the Western Highlands (ibid., 34).
tery. There are almost as many accounts of offences within tribes as there are
between them (Hallpike 1977: 119). Groups of relatives in each tribe have nu-
merous relatives in other tribes and there will be much social intercourse be-
tween them. There are, in any tribe at any one time, many temporary residents
from other tribes living with their cognates, affines or friends, and similarly
many of the natal members of the tribe will be living elsewhere even though
they usually return after a few years.
In the traditional society there was formal initiation of boys, and perhaps a
rudimentary and informal system of local age-sets as a result, but there is no
evidence that the senior men of a tribe ever had any significant corporate
function resembling those of the elders of many African societies.
In this society, then, relationships are undifferentiated in terms of descent,
residence, and co-operation; age is not the basis of any special respect, and
there is little polarization of society in terms of sexual stereotypes. Relations
within the nuclear family are close and affectionate, especially between sib-
lings. The younger brother is expected to help and assist the older brother, who
is superior in status to him. There is also obvious affection between parents
and children, who look after their parents well in old age. The extended family
is the widest support group, and beyond the range of first cousins, relations are
reserved and suspicious except for a few close friends, and individuals are con-
stantly obliged to maintain a network of personal ties, dominated by reciproc-
ity in the form of gift exchange, compensation, and vengeance. The relations
between individuals are emotionally highly loaded, and the Tauade are notable
for pride, self-assertion, envy, and for a capacity both for tearful sentimentality
and homicidal rage.
This is an extremely simple form of social organization, but none of my in-
formants, with one exception, was able to discuss Tauade society with me or
give me any general outline of its institutions. One reason was the absence of
generic terms for tribe, clan, lineage, or even for kinship the various words
for kinsman also mean friend. While there were words for mens house and
for the space between the houses used for dancing, the word for house also
meant hamlet. Instead of using generic terms for these social groupings,
proper names were always used, and one was expected to know to what cate-
gory of group these referred. In one sense the Tauade knew perfectly well
how their society was organized, but this understanding was based on a great
mass of concrete personal knowledge about individuals in terms of which their
social relationships were ordered. It would therefore have been very difficult
for a Tauade to have articulated this type of knowledge into general statements
about their tribes, clans, and hamlets. Even though I worked for about a year
and a half with a very intelligent and knowledgeable informant, who knew
that I was trying to understand the Tauade mode of life, it never occurred to
him to say You need to know about the Karuai, the Larima, the Kovete, etc.
[the names of the clans], and I only discovered the existence of the clans acci-
dentally six months before I left.
The Tauade could describe the typical characteristics of the big man,
amiteve, and the rubbish man, malavi (well known of course in other societies of
Papua New Guinea), but could not give a general account of how one became a

big man, or the role of the big man in their society. The closest I came to such a
description was when I was discussing them with Casimiro, the catechist with
whom I worked at Woitape (and referred to in Chapter IV). He wanted to ex-
plain to me that the big men had the authority to give the orders for the polo
(bull-roarer enclosure) to be erected, and so he said In your country only the
government can print money; so with us only the big man could give the order
for the polo. But Casimiro was unique in his ability to think at this level about
his own society.
Each clan has one or more big men, who almost invariably have two or
more wives, organize ceremonial pig feasts and dances, at which they make
speeches and distribute the honorific goods, and are or were often prominent
in warfare. They are conventionally dignified and impressive in their demean-
our, and generosity is an absolute requirement, but in traditional society they
could also act despotically towards the rubbish men, in particular, killing them
without fear of reprisal and paying only a small amount of compensation. (To
be a killer was a very important source of prestige, and men who had achieved
this status, by no matter what means, wore a shell ornament on the forehead.)
The big men each live in one of the mens houses with their followers, who
comprise a variety of agnates, cognates, affines, and friends. Peace-making be-
tween tribes is a vital function of big men both in war and for the organization
of dances, and is seen as a manifestation of power, not as weak and womanly
behaviour. The power of the big men to negotiate peace is one of their essential
qualities, and a tribe which has lost its principal big man has thereby lost a vi-
tal asset. A successful dance needs peace, and only a big man could organize
such an occasion, since some of the guests have usually come from many miles
away, which necessitates their passing through the territories of many inter-
vening tribes whose consent and co-operation must therefore be obtained. The
big men have also to maintain the peace during the dance itself and coordinate
the arrangements for the guests. They decide on the location of the dance vil-
lage and the house sites within it, on the time for killing pigs and the harvest-
ing of the pandanus nuts if they are to be used for the guests at a dance.
The rubbish men, malavi, at the other end of the social scale, are usually
unmarried, and the general sense of the word malavi is that of poverty and de-
pendence, a lack of capacity to control others or to defend oneself. An unmar-
ried man, with no wives to care for his pigs, and perhaps only a sister who
would look after one for him, can play little or no part in the system of ex-
change. So as well as being poor, the malavi are conventionally considered
mean, and also greedy. It is said that a malavi would go and hide in the bush
and try to avoid making contributions to a feast in the form of pork or food.
The characteristics of meanness and greed have the additional implication that
the malavi are thought to be worse thieves than men of high status, while theft,
on the other hand, is held to be beneath the dignity of the big men.
It was quite clear that the rubbish men were regarded as inherently inferior
to the ordinary members of society, and especially to the big men, who could
kill them with relative impunity. While some sort of compensation was ex-
pected as a matter of form by the relatives of the victim, I never heard of blood
vengeance being taken for the death of a rubbish man, so that their natural in-
feriority was accepted by their own kin as well as by every one else.
The attributes of the big man and the rubbish man express fairly concisely
the dominant values of Tauade society: success is based on power, wealth,
generosity, violence and sexual prowess, and those who cannot compete in the
struggle for these are treated with contempt. They are not, obviously, entirely
indifferent to social order, without which competition for the good things in
life would itself be impossible for them. For the Tauade a good man is one
who facilitates co-operation by his powers of coordination, and is prepared
both to offer and to accept compensation in the settlement of disputes. Such a
man is likely also to be a strong man, as we saw in our discussion of the big
man, and for the Tauade, therefore, strength is the basis of goodness as they
conceive it, so that might and right are essentially indistinguishable. Con-
versely, weakness, irresponsibility, and anti-social behaviour go together also.
One of the common bases of authority, respect for elders, that is found both
among hunter-gatherers and in more developed societies is conspicuously
lacking among the Tauade. Age has no claim to respect among them; they re-
spect the social skills of some old men, especially in such matters as oratory or
knowledge of legends, but there is no general sentiment of deference towards
older men as such. Indeed, the process of aging itself is the object of shame and
ridicule, and to avoid overt insult men publicly admit to the onset of old age on
ceremonial occasions; they traditionally bound their heads in bark cloths and
today wear hats to escape the humiliation of being called bald heads. The
Tauade are more impressed by the decrepitude and failing powers of age than
by its accumulated wisdom. Though the elderly continued to be loved by their
families and are well looked after, the elders have no group status and cannot
command obedience. While some older big men may retain a part of their in-
fluence, they have this influence because they are big men, not because they are
elderly, and there is no place for decision-making or adjudication by any cor-
porate group of elders.
The absence of mediatory institutions is a typical feature of New Guinean
societies (Koch 1974), and even where some sort of local council exists it has no
judicial effectiveness. Burridge, for example, says of the Tangu that the settle-
ment of disputes is made in public discussions called brngunguni, but these
are in no sense an authoritative type of tribunal. The basic purpose of the
brngunguni is to achieve a temporary equilibrium, the restoration of overt
amity, and accommodation to the current distribution of power (Burridge
1969: 126). It is therefore a political rather than a legal institution. The
brngunguni is, and always seems to be, as well adapted to making and exac-
erbating disputes as to settling them (ibid., 16). [T]here existed no authorita-
tive institution through which new formal rules to rationalize a changing situa-
tion might be initiated. Since brngunguni is and was a democratic institution
in which all could participate, the initiatives of the far-sighted and more com-
prehending few could always be thwarted by the more selfish and near-sighted
many (ibid., 16). The most one can say is that this type of body had the poten-
tial for developing into a more effective mediatory institution.

Among the Tauade big men could tell their followers to pay compensation,
if they did not wish their group to become involved in a dispute, but there is
no evidence at all that they acted as mediators in disputes between their fol-
lowers, who would in fact take vengeance on their own initiative. If a big man
were offended, his reaction would be a matter of his own discretion, not some-
thing which was a matter for discussion with other big men.
It is not surprising, therefore, that mediation is absent in such societies.
Where there are no clear social categories, and no judicial procedures, what
obligations could be appealed to, and where there are no authorities with
moral or ritual status, who could enforce them? Because each person has his
own view of the circumstances surrounding a dispute, any settlement will of
necessity leave one party dissatisfied. As Patrol Officer Kent observed of at-
tempts by government officers to settle disputes
It is very seldom that a dispute between two clans can be settled to the satis-
faction of both parties. The losing party, almost invariably, feels that it has
been unjustly done by and, to them, the decision is unsatisfactory. This is
only natural, but, the unfortunate aspect is that this dissatisfaction is not for-
gotten; it rankles in the minds of the losers until it finally develops into such
magnitude that it can only be settled by pay back or by an outbreak of open
warfare such as occurred in the Laitate area early last year. (Report of Febru-
ary/March 1950)
The basic mode of social control is by compensation or vengeance. They are
both known as kakit, payment, and their identity is more than purely verbal,
having its roots in the basic purpose of making the insides good. There is no
idea of a meeting between disputants and of their case being mediated by some
respected arbitrator or council of elders. The readiness with which compensa-
tion is offered will depend on the status of the guilty party, the nature of the
offence, the social distance between the parties, and their relative statuses. It is
not considered weak or unmanly to accept compensation in the first instance,
but is, on the contrary, the mark of a dignified man, a big man who should also
be prepared to offer it.
But the Tauade also regard rage and violence as wholly appropriate re-
sponses to injury. An aggrieved party might first take physical vengeance on
his enemy (assaulting him, burning down his house, cutting down his panda-
nus trees, killing a pig), after which each would exchange pork and/or valu-
ables such as shells and dogs teeth, to wipe out the hurt that each has sustained
from the original injury and the act of retaliation. A mans fellow hamlet mem-
bers will put pressure on him to give compensation if he has injured or of-
fended someone, because they do not feel obliged to risk a fight simply to de-
fend him. Men who steal a pig, for example, may be betrayed by other mem-
bers of the hamlet if the owner comes and finds the pig, because they see no
reason why they should share the blame with the culprit. Avoidance is a fur-
ther aspect of dispute settlement. A man who has killed or injured someone
will take refuge with relatives in another tribe until tempers have cooled, and
the injured party or his relations are prepared to discuss compensation.
More generally, those who dislike one another, or who have hereditary
grievances, tend to live in different hamlets of the tribe. When asked why they
do not live in a single village, but in scattered hamlets, the members of a tribe
will reply it is because of our ancestors, and various attempts, by government
and mission, to get the Tauade to live in compact villages have all been failures
because of these inherited animosities. A high degree of mobility between
hamlets and tribes facilitates avoidance, but also contributes to the weakness of
social control. When people live together in groups quarrels will inevitably be
generated, but if they cannot escape one anothers company they will be con-
strained to find means of settling disputes peacefully, and while avoidance is a
basic means of settling disputes, mobility may be taken to such a degree that it
removes any effective restraint on aggression, since those concerned are not
obliged to face the long term consequences of their actions.
The Tauade do not recognize the category of accidental homicide, and I
have numerous accounts in my notes of vengeance being taken for what was
clearly accidental killing. Nor do they generally speculate about intentions, and
my informant Casimiro was in fact unique in giving me an account (cited in the
previous chapter) of what he thought had been going on in someones mind.
Read provides a good example of the lack of significance of intention among
the Gahuku-Gama. Read had a close friend, the big man Makis whose wife
Gumae was expecting a baby. One day, when the birth was expected, Makis
took Read to the river where Gumae was in labour, assisted by some other
women. She was in great distress, as the labour had been obstructed for two
days, and both she and Makis asked Read for his advice. He said she must be
taken to the local hospital as soon as possible, and they immediately agreed.
After she had been helped back to the village a litter was prepared for her, and
she was carried to the hospital accompanied by Makis. When he returned, he
came to Reads hut and said:
If this woman dies, you cannot stay with us. For a moment I looked at him
without speaking, not even sure that I had heard him correctly. Then he hur-
ried on, answering the question I had not asked. If she dies, they will say it
was your fault. You saw their faces when we brought her back from the
river. They were talking saying she should not go to Humeleveka [the hospi-
tal]. They said she should stay here, and if she dies no one will talk to you.
Listen to me, friend, your work is finished. Leave us go away. Brother, you
cannot stay here any longer. (Read 1966: 86)
The villagers did not like the hospital because it had many strangers and ene-
mies as patients. Gumae was in fact safely delivered of a daughter; Later that
evening, the villagers came to my house as usual, but their attitude was dis-
tinctly different, informed by a new familiarity, a new ease and acceptance. A
short time before they had been ready to blame me if Gumae had died, now
they credited me with her successful delivery (ibid., 89).
The religious beliefs of the Tauade have no importance in the control of be-
haviour or in their moral norms. They believe in ghosts, and the major tribal
pig feasts and dances were intended to honour the ancestors. The bones of
those who had died since the last ceremony were placed in string bags and car-
ried during the dance, after which they were deposited in caves or in trees. But
it does not seem that the ghosts are thought to exercise any supervision over
the conduct of the living. They also believe in numerous spirits which live in

rocks, trees, and streams, and almost all of these are malevolent; their activities,
however, are not seen as punishment for wrong-doing, even in the form of the
violation of taboos. Religious beliefs are as unsystematic and unformalised as
their social organization.
Tauade culture also conforms to Gardners and Morriss model of memo-
rate culture in other ways. Colour terms are idiosyncratic and concrete, related
to the hues of specific objects, and the only basic terms are black/dark and
white/light. They have no verbal numerals beyond single and pair, and
counting is performed on fingers and toes. There is no calendar or any form of
time reckoning, and while they have a word for the moon, they do not use the
lunar cycle to calculate time. They have words for the places where the sun
rises and sets, but these are not used as directional indicators and they have no
general spatial orientations at all. While they have words for various plants,
trees, animals, and birds, these are not integrated into a general classificatory
system, and there is little in the way of a general symbolic ordering of the natu-
ral and social worlds.
At this point it would be instructive to consider how the Tauade language
expresses what we should consider to be moral judgements. Kato means good
in the same very general sense which it possesses in English, that is, it may be
used of things as well as people, to express approval for all sorts of reasons,
and, similarly, there is a word for bad kori which is equally general in sig-
nificance. Words for good and bad are linguistic universals, and have such
broad connotations that they tell us nothing about moral thought. There is a
word for debt, utu, and hence it is possible to construct sentences in which
someone is said to owe something to someone else, or in which he is described
as discharging a debt, but my impression is that this term is limited to transac-
tions in the system of gift exchange. It is certainly not generalized to mean ob-
ligation in general. The language does not seem to possess any modal auxilia-
ries comparable to the English ought, should, shalt or must, nor does the verb
structure seem to possess any form comparable to the gerund or the gerundive
and while there is, of course, an imperative mood, this has no distinctively
moral significance. Nor does the subjunctive seem to have the connotation, so
general in the Indo-European languages, of expressing the idea so be it.
The most generally used term, apart from kato and kori, to evaluate conduct
is kakit, which we have already discussed. Essentially it means payment or re-
ciprocal exchange, whether this be a benefit in return for an earlier benefit, or
an injury in return for an earlier injury, or compensation, and so it can also be
translated both as punishment and reward, though its use to mean punish-
ment only dates from the introduction of Australian government courts. It is
also used to express the idea of payment for goods with money in the modern
cash economy of Papua New Guinea. While the Tauade have no beliefs in any
supernatural agencies who are conceived to enforce any standards of behav-
iour on men, so that to this extent the objective implications of our use of pun-
ishment and reward are absent, it is, I think, true to say that they have an idea
that reciprocity is in some essential sense fair or just or right, and what ought
to happen. In this connection there is some evidence that the Tauade make the
extremely common association between what is right and what is true or
straight. There are several words for straight, and all these can be used to ex-
press the idea of right, in the sense of to put right. In particular, tsitsit means a
prop or pole used for yam vines, and this establishes a clear physical prototype
for the concept of uprightness as well as of straightness; so mi tsitsit ena can
mean to make straight or upright or to put right, of a grievance as well as in
a purely physical sense. vaeta means clear or true as well as right, and I think
that it is correct to state that they would understand the idea of the true, namu,
as being connected with straight and right as well. But there is no word for
peace, and the closest approximation I could find was the idea of two groups
of men who, instead of fighting, exchanged their sisters in marriage.
Reciprocity is also the basis of the Tangu moral order: The ideal of the good
man is one who maintains equivalent reciprocity in amity through the
brngunguni (Burridge 1969: 135), and who performs his customary kinship
obligations. The categories of kinship and institutionalized friendship describe
the limits of the moral order. One not so categorized is called ranguma,
stranger, one with whom there are no regularized reciprocities, no necessarily
foreseeable potential of them, and from whom, in consequence, loss or evasion
or damage or trouble are likely (ibid., 61).
The Tauade certainly have no word for law in the sense of a body of prin-
ciples that are obligatory on all, whether on all Tauade or even on members of
the same tribe. There is a word for custom or fashion, matut, but this is not used
in the normative sense of it is our custom, implying that therefore it ought to
be done in such a way. The big men can give commands, vagop, as when they
are making arrangements for a dance, and ni means to obey as well as to hear
and to understand, but the sanctions here are largely consequential the big
man may execute violent retribution on those who disobey. There are a num-
ber of words to express the custom of a prohibition or interdiction, as when a
relation or friend of a deceased person forbids the use of the deceaseds panda-
nus trees for a certain period, but here again the sanction seems to be perceived
in terms of the unpleasant consequences to the violator. Nor do these words
convey the general sense of some type of action which is forbidden as such.
Shame, katet, is a basic undercurrent of their lives, and they can definitely be
described as a shame rather than a guilt culture. So truthfulness, for exam-
ple, is not an obligation, and while it is insulting to tell a man he is lying, the
insult consists in saying it to his face. As in the case of theft or adultery, the real
shame lies in being caught, not in the act itself. The word varit means theft, and
kini means lie, but these should be construed more as categories of injury than
as delicts in themselves, since their evaluation must depend on the relation-
ships of those involved. It is significant that the Fathers of the Catholic Mission
have introduced the term kontrisio to express contrition, just as they have also
introduced pekat for sin.
Among the Gahuku-Gama, too, the basic sanction for good behaviour is not
conscience but shame: man is accountable only to his fellows and morality,
therefore, is bound up with concrete social relationships, so that there is no
clearly recognized distinction between the individual and the status which he
occupies (Read 1955: 255). Thus the manner in which people behave to those
who are outside the tribal system of inter-group and interpersonal relation-

ships is virtually a matter of indifference. More than this, the individual does
not regard himself as being bound to them by any moral obligation: it is justifi-
able to kill them, to steal from them and to seduce their women. (Ibid., 256257)
(Exactly the same is true of the Tauade. It is significant that while members of
the same tribe were not eaten after a homicide, those of other tribes were said
to be Our meat, like pork, as long as one were not related to them.)
1

Even within the tribe, the justification for good behaviour among the Ga-
huku-Gama as among the Tauade seems to be essentially prudential:
people do not appeal to abstract principles, but rather emphasise the
practical consequences of moral deviation. Instead of saying that it is good
or right to help others, they state quite simply that if you do not help oth-
ers, others wont help you. (ibid., 255)
It was extremely difficult to elicit any general value judgements from my
Tauade informants, beyond vague categories of good/bad or, more frequently,
weak/strong. A Tauade said to me of one patrol officer, who was eventually
dismissed from government service and imprisoned for the unlawful punish-
ment of natives, Yes, he was bad: he burned our houses, and killed our pigs,
and beat us. But he was good he was like us, he understood our fashion.
There was no suggestion here of any appeal to wider standards of conduct, by
which the patrol officer in question could be said to have behaved cruelly or
unjustly. Read encountered a similar unwillingness among the Gahuku-Gama
to make generalized propositions about morality divorced from the social con-
text of the case, and this seems to be the general pattern of moral thinking in
Papua New Guinea.
Pressed for an evaluation, their usual reply is a neutral I dont know (gele-
muve), and it is exceedingly difficult to ascertain whether the act is regarded
as right or wrong nor are the Gahuku-Gama alone among New Guinea
peoples in showing this unwillingness to judge. Dr J. B. Watson of Washing-
ton University has told me that he has also come across it among the Aga-
rabe of the Eastern Highlands. Dr K.O.L. Burridge has mentioned a similar
attitude among the Tangu of Madang district, and I have heard it referred to
by Miss Chowning, from the University of Pennsylvania, among the Naka-
nai of New Britain. (ibid., 282)
Read explains this in terms of the domination of their thinking by status
and the inherent relativism that this entails:
They say that men are not dogs, that is, they have an idea of a certain
minimum standard of behaviour appropriate for human beings [and the
same is true of the Tauade] but the Gahuku-Gama do not conclude that be-
cause man is a human being there are invariable standards which he must
apply in his relationships with all other human beings (ibid., 261). Human
life therefore has a variable value depending on the social status of each per-

1
The Tauade refer to themselves and, I think it would be true to say, the other peoples
in their area at least, as real people, vale namuma. The white man is agoago, cognate
with agotevaun, the non-human culture-heroes of myth. It was clear that they regarded
the white man as belonging to a different species.
son, and morality is basically contextual. So the value of truth is not abso-
lute, nor related to intrinsic human nature. The prudent individual is truth-
ful because lying makes people angry; it causes trouble but lying is consid-
ered acceptable in many situations, as is theft and adultery, which are all
condemned, however, when committed within the kin group.
The same relativism is found among the Tangu: right and wrong are situ-
ational (Burridge 1969: 270). To attempt to analyse social relations in terms of
rights and duties would not do justice to the field material. For Tangu the
situations are characteristically fluid and dynamic. Tangu have only loose ex-
pectations of others and attempt to exercise claims in the face of counter-claims
within a context of choice, priorities, and ambitions related to the precedents of
the past and the demands of the present and future (ibid., xix-xx).
4. Conclusions
The ideal type of atomistic society presented in this chapter clearly embraces
a considerable diversity of societies, extending as we have seen to cultivators as
well as foragers. As a stage in socio-economic development it has significant
parallels to Kohlbergs Stage 2 of moral development (the Pre-Conventional)
especially in the emphasis on concrete individual relationships, on what is
right as equal exchange, and on following rules only when they are in some-
ones immediate interests, such as avoiding social ostracism, and the lack of
commitment to the requirements of a social order as such. But the concept of
stage does not imply rigid uniformity, nor can such stages be clearly
bounded, because this would preclude the very possibility of development. In
both cases, stages are characteristic modes of organization but their concrete
manifestations may contain some features which are elements of the next stage.
It could be said, however, that atomistic societies seem to resemble in one
way the far more complex civilizations that we shall consider in Chapter VII,
since in both cases the individual is not under the overriding claims of status
and membership of corporate groups. As Morris says (1991: 2626), these indi-
vidualistic features of atomistic societies in some ways contradict Dumonts
image of all traditional societies as formations in which the individual is sub-
merged in corporate groups. This might therefore seem to invalidate the evolu-
tionary sequence by showing a circularity rather than a progression in com-
plexity, and we must therefore come to terms with this essential qualification
in social typologies.
In the first place, in atomistic societies the relations between individual and
group are not equilibrated by such principles as everyone should do their part
for the common good, or might is not right. There is simply self-assertion,
counterbalanced by group pressure or personal violence. Secondly, there is no
idea of principled opposition to convention and popular feeling there are no
idealistic rebels against the majority point of view. Thirdly, there is certainly no
conceptualization of the individual as distinct from his or her social status.
Despite the autonomy of personal choice, status relations still determine obli-
gations, and there is no notion of the pure individual who deserves our con-
cern simply as a fellow human being. Finally, there is certainly no capacity for
Conclusions 217

articulate introspection, or the analysis of the states of mind of others in the
explanation of their behaviour. (It is sometimes held that cheating or deceiving
others which is universal and not even confined to human beings involves
the ability to take the point of view of others and so to reflect on their inner
states. But it is easy in fact to show that even complex forms of cheating can be
based on nothing more than behavioural observations and simple models of
reinforcement.)
Thus, at this level of social organization and moral thought we have an ego-
centrism that is, however, unlike the egocentrism of complex societies because
it is unaware of itself and incapable of explicit justification, by contrast to the
hedonism that we shall consider in Chapter VII.

VI. Corporate Order

1. The implications of corporate order
The term corporate order is intended to stress two fundamental changes
which transform atomistic societies; first, the emergence of a clear organiza-
tional structure based on well defined corporate groups and associated dispute
settlement procedures; and, secondly, the endowment of that structure with
cosmological and symbolic meaning, whereby society and cosmos are closely
linked, so that the proper ordering of society brings all the benefits of Life.
We may begin with social organization. This often takes the form of consid-
erably larger residential communities than are found in atomistic societies. A
typical example is that of the Apa Tanis of northeastern India, who are rice cul-
tivators with permanent irrigated fields and numbering approximately 15,000,
living in seven large villages. These are each divided into several wards, each
of which has a shrine as a symbol of the unity of the ward. Members of each
ward belong to several exogamous clans, and each clan has a large assembly
platform, the lapang, where the clan members meet and hold councils. The
clans each appoint a representative, the buliang, who is a member of a village
council which decides matters of tribal law (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 74
75). Although almost all the examples of societies of corporate order in this
chapter are agricultural, it should be noted that pastoral societies may also de-
velop a social organization of considerable complexity. As we saw in Chapter
IV, these changes in social organization are closely linked with increasing so-
cial size based on agriculture or pastoralism.
The corporate groups are typically based on the ascriptive criteria of kin-
ship and descent, relative age and birth-order, and gender. They are considera-
bly wider in membership than the familistic and cooperative groups of atom-
istic societies, and their internal solidarity both protects and controls their indi-
vidual members. Service calls such groups pan-tribal sodalities:
Sodalities sometimes exist in band societies under special circumstances, but
they are few and limited in scope, that is, they are not pan-tribal. Probably
the most usual of pan-tribal sodalities are clans, followed by age-grade asso-
ciations, secret societies, and sodalities for such special purposes as curing,
warfare, ceremonies, and so on. These institutions were all foreshadowed to
an extent [in band societies] but they are now transformed in certain ways.
(Service 1971: 102)
The development of such types of group is linked with the emergence of au-
thority in the form of specific offices, hereditary or elective, which are clearly
defined, and are usually legitimated by supernatural status and sanctions. Clan
220 Corporate Order
and lineage heads, village councils, and the special roles of elders are typical
examples. With increased political authority go more effective judicial proce-
dures, involving the mandatory intervention of third parties, usually village
councils and heads of descent groups, who typically function not only as me-
diators in private disputes but also as the agents of the political group as a
whole to punish those offences against the group which impair its solidarity
and harmony. Such tribunals are occasions for the development of articulate
norms of conduct binding on all group members, and which can be appealed
to in disputes.
In these societies the individual is not the type of relatively free agent
whom we encountered in the previous chapter but, on the contrary, interacts
with other people on the basis of his membership of various groups, especially
his descent group:
in all societies of this type a grouping of some kind of kinsmen and/or
kinswomen, with their spouses and usually their children, tend to live to-
gether. As a group, sometimes through particular representatives, they own
certain rights of access to land, in which they have other rights as mem-
bers of smaller units and as individuals Goods are appropriated by the
individual who produces them, despite some collaboration in production ac-
tivity, but consumption involves considerable and constant sharing. Since
there are no specialized priests, these groups also form congregations, wor-
shipping the spirits of their dead kin or supplicating at common land shrines
or other ritual objects. There are no schools, and children are educated as
well as reared in the settlement. The settlement also tends to form a political
unit for important purposes, whether or not the tribe be organized under a
chief. Relations among the members of these groups are thus directed to a
multiplicity of purposes and I have therefore named them multiplex. It is the
situation that I describe continuously as one dominated by status. (Gluck-
man 1965: 5)
In societies based on corporate order, balanced reciprocity, especially that
involving gift exchanges between individuals, often loses much of the impor-
tance which it has in atomistic society. It tends to become transformed into
prestations between groups for specific and limited purposes, notably for mar-
riage payments and blood compensation, into exchanges between the heads of
descent groups (eg. Firth 1967), into vertical exchange in the form of tribute
from commoners to chiefs, or lineage members to lineage heads, and into gen-
eralized reciprocity so that there are strong norms of co-operation and friendli-
ness which do not rest on dyadic relations between individuals. In all these
cases however the basic norm of reciprocity is preserved, so that lineage heads,
chiefs and kings are supposed to return what is given them either through dis-
tribution of largesse, or by the services which they perform for society or for
groups within society. In some societies balanced reciprocity may survive to
some extent in formal pacts in relations of friendship between men who are
otherwise not related. A good example of this type of relationship is described
by Firth (1936) in Tikopia.
To say that societies of corporate order are characterized by generalized
rather than by balanced reciprocity is only another way of saying that the
The implications of corporate order 221

norms of benevolence are extended beyond the family to fellow members of
ones ward or village, age-set, or voluntary association. In societies with a sta-
ble social organization based on clearly defined groups with accepted mutual
obligations, it is possible to transcend the dyadic and individualistic relations
of atomistic society, and to extend the morality of the good to a much wider
range of persons. Consideration of others, kindness, generosity, and mutual
tolerance between non-relatives are thus given a firmer foundation. Among the
Kuranko of Sierra Leone of a generous person, mindful of others, who gives
without ulterior motive, it is said ke morgo (this is a person) Sociability is
expressed through giving and sharing. One who enjoys the company of others
is a sweet person An unsociable person is considered to be not a person
or is called a bush person (Jackson 1982: 1516).
The Navaho ideal is that one ought always to help other people and be gen-
erous to them. The usual argument is if you help others they would help you
back. In theory, the prescription applies to anyone whomsoever whether
he is related to you or not. In practice, there are customary preferences in
helping and asking for help Second it should be pointed out that help,
whether it be in the form of labour or gift, is thought to be free in that it
does not have to be paid for. Gifts or help are offered to create goodwill and
ostensibly without the thought or expectations of reciprocation; and the re-
ciprocation, when it does come, is not considered a return but a new act of
goodwill. (Ladd 1957: 254)
Gluckman (1965: 172) and von Frer-Haimendorf (1967: 112) say much the
same of the Barotse and the Konyak Nagas, and I found it among the Konso.
In such societies trade and commercial relations are relatively unimportant
aspects of life, and property is regarded as simply one facet of social relations,
so that in Gluckmans words
the Law of Persons is indistinguishable from the Law of Things or Prop-
erty In a society at this stage of development, when most transactions oc-
cur between persons already related by status, the law is interested in prop-
erty as an incident of a social relationship, in addition to the propertys ma-
terial value. To enable social relationships to endure, the law stresses the ob-
ligations to other persons involved by the holding of a piece of property,
even beyond its stress on claims to right over the property. The series of
rights of ownership over property constitute an essential part of the status
structure of a society; rights in property, and obligations to use property
generously thus define the social relationships themselves. Each piece of
property, land or title or chattel, may be a link in a complex set of relation-
ships between people who are bound to one another permanently. (Gluck-
man 1965: 151)
These societies tend to be relatively isolated from one another in the sense
that while individuals from different societies may meet one another at mar-
kets or similar occasions, daily life is basically confined to members of ones
own culture. As we shall see, the isolation and cultural homogeneity of these
societies is disrupted by commerce and conquest warfare, political and judicial
centralization, by state bureaucracy, urbanization and the requirements of in-
teraction between people of different culture.
222 Corporate Order
Education remains of the unspecialized type discussed in Chapter IV. Chil-
dren absorb adult knowledge by participation in social life, not by specialized
instruction out of context at schools, and such societies are also without liter-
acy. While there are, of course, in every society men who are acknowledged as
experts on different matters, there is no scope for full-time specialist thinkers
who can meet and debate together on matters of religion and philosophy, so
that there is no way in which men can develop an articulate, synthesized, over-
all understanding of their culture as a whole.
So far, we have been discussing corporate order in relation to social organi-
zation, and how the structure of corporate order solves the problem of scalar
stress produced by larger communities, but we must now consider a closely
related aspect of corporate order which is its function as a scheme of classifica-
tion linked with cosmological and religious beliefs. The natural phenomena of
sky and earth, sun and moon, fire, water, and stone, the forest and the bush,
become linked through symbolism and ritual, and beliefs in supernatural be-
ings, with social groups and statuses in such a way that no clear distinction can
be drawn between the social and the religious. The ascriptive categories of de-
scent, age, and gender are themselves closely linked with physiology and the
boundary between descent groups is maintained by rules of exogamy which
are often expressed in the idiom of incest. The quest for Life in its aspects of
fertility, health, and the flourishing of crops and herds is expressed in sacrifice,
whether of domestic animals or first fruits, and the symbols of Life are milk,
blood, navels, wombs, breasts, and phallus. The experience of the natural envi-
ronment also permeates this order through the sanctification of time in the
form of calendrical systems, and in space in the form of auspicious directions,
of opposition between the village and the bush or the forest, and in the special
importance of sacred places, while animals, too, are often very significant ele-
ments in the cosmological scheme as paradigms of the anti-social and the non-
social. The social order is therefore inextricably linked with the physical well-
being of men. Atomistic societies, to be sure, often have well developed cos-
mologies, as we observed in the previous chapter, but the point is that until a
social order of strong and clearly defined statuses and corporate groups has
developed, cosmological classification cannot become linked in any important
way with social relations.
Collective religious rituals therefore become much more significant ele-
ments of social life, and those who perform them often do so on the basis of
their ascriptive, hereditary status. Political and judicial authority is typically
legitimated by religious belief, and priesthood becomes a distinct inherited of-
fice rather than simply being achieved by personal qualities in the manner of a
shaman, so that the distinction between authority and power, or between right
and might, also becomes clearer. Corporate groups assume complementary
ritual roles in such an order, and this complementarity almost of necessity as-
sumes hierarchical forms. Dumont defines hierarchy as the principle by which
the elements of the whole are ranked in relation to the whole, it being under-
stood that in the majority of societies it is religion which provides the view of
the whole, and that the ranking would thus be religious in nature (Dumont
1970: 66). This organic notion of hierarchy is very different from the social

stratification of modern society, such as the British Registrar Generals social
classes A to E, with the richest in class A and the poorest in class E, since strati-
fication of this sort has no necessary relation to order, that is, to structure, of
any kind, but simply derives from individual competition in the economic race.
Corporate schemes of order thus relate man to the universe in an ideal fash-
ion, and this type of order is also highly specific, concerned with the proper
performance by each group of its appropriate function in relation to the whole,
and, it is also expressed in a wealth of natural symbols which permeate social
life. Consequently, it is highly vulnerable to disruption, and since the function
of order is the attainment of Life as well as of social control, confusion and
death are the inevitable results of the destruction of order. In what ways can
this order be confused or spoilt? The possible sources are numerous: offences
against society, such as murder, theft, adultery and violence; failure to perform
ones proper function in the scheme of things; changes of status; categorical
confusions and anomalies; the intrusion of outsiders who do not fit in; and the
intrusion of uncontrolled aspects of human physiology, such as sexuality,
birth, and death, while what is eaten also will often have a crucial bearing on
order. Ritual is primarily concerned with the maintenance of order, and its res-
toration after these various kinds of disruptions. Thus the Navaho conceive
safety either as restoration of the individual to the harmonies of the natural,
human, and supernatural world, or secondly, as restoration of equilibrium
among non-human forces. This is achieved by the compulsive force of order
and reiteration in ritual words and acts the keynote of all ritual poetry is
compulsion to orderly repetition (Kluckhohn and Leighton 1974: 304). Pollu-
tion beliefs, which flourish in societies of corporate order, and are an important
aspect of ritual, are centred on the human body not only because it is the point
of interaction between the social and the physical but because it is the prime
model of order (Douglas 1966: 115).
For these reasons we shall find that concepts of purity and pollution are of-
ten of great importance in the moral ideas of such societies, especially in the
maintenance of social and classificatory boundaries, yet, without understand-
ing how purity and pollution are related to order, it is tempting to explain such
ideas in terms of superstitious fear or of arbitrary taboo, and hence virtually to
dismiss them as moral ideas at all.
The linking of order with life produces a number of special effects. By giv-
ing social institutions a cosmological significance, ones duties are important,
but are often not those of a functional type which would be recognizable as
such by an expert in government or business administration. As we have
noted, purity and pollution become very significant, linking certain acts and
bodily states with order in a way which renders intentions and motives irrele-
vant, and priesthood is concerned with obtaining life, not with setting a moral
example, or teaching people how they should live. Virility, too, takes on a cos-
mic significance which goes well beyond a pragmatic need for physical cour-
age within ones group, or simple social effectiveness, so that killing frequently
becomes something good in itself, the male counterpart to female fecundity.
Male and female virtues thus often become sharply separated (to a greater ex-
224 Corporate Order
tent in some societies than others), so that the quiet female virtues of compas-
sion, obedience, and chastity are quite distinct from male virtues.
It is very important to note that such an order is an implicit order; it is not
consciously constructed, or justified, for the most part: its symbolism is perva-
sive and inarticulate, and is highly resistant to critical analysis and discussion.
It is fixed in its details, and therefore inflexible, and clearly bounded, so that it
is inherently isolated from the orders of neighbouring peoples. While individ-
ual outsiders can be admitted to such an order, they are inherently disruptive
and therefore dangerous, but paradoxically it seems that the general category
of outsider in some form is needed to provide a frame of reference within
which order itself can be located. Because such orders are rigid and inflexible,
and permeated with cosmological symbolism, they are easily disrupted by ex-
ternal influence, by trade, and foreign conquest, and the rapid collapse of such
societies as a result of these influences has been repeatedly documented.
We can therefore summarize the main differences between atomistic socie-
ties and those of corporate order in the following way:
1. There is greater size of groups and stability of residence.
2. The social groups, the pan-tribal sodalities, are much wider in scope
than the family and often based on other criteria than descent, such as
residence, age, and membership of voluntary associations for special
purposes.
3. Social structure becomes more hierarchical and differentiated, and no
longer restricted to kinship roles.
4. Membership of such supra-familial groups involves clearly defined
obligations, including norms of benevolence to other group members,
and group responsibility for, and control over, members becomes
greater.
5. Political offices, hereditary and elected, become clearly defined, and
are typically supported by supernatural beliefs.
6. Judicial institutions involving mediation and the arbitration by the
political authority become more strongly developed, and legal
disputes help to generate more articulate norms of conduct.
7. Private injuries may therefore also be violations of corporate order,
and receive public punishment, as well as private retaliation. Retribu-
tion, both social and supernatural, becomes an important concept.
8. There is greater emphasis on generalized reciprocity at the expense of
balanced reciprocity.
9. Cosmology becomes linked with social groups and statuses, so that in
the resulting order social categories are permeated with symbolic
values, and in one way it is difficult to distinguish between the social
and the natural because the social order is so closely linked with life.
10. Order emphasizes: hierarchy, boundaries, the performance of ones
proper function in relation to society as a whole, harmony and peace,
the true as clear, straight or upright, honesty and fidelity, oaths and
covenants. The right is the customary and traditional. Conflict is

therefore something to be healed as well as a dispute over the rights
and wrongs of particular issues.
Corporate order inevitably creates value distinctions between classes of
human beings: men over women, old over young, noble over commoners and
slaves, between occupational class, and between members of each social order
and outsiders. The individual has value and meaning as part of the social or-
der, not when considered in isolation or as opposed to that order. Jackson says
of the Kuranko, The most fundamental postulate in the Kuranko world view is
that persons exist only in relation to one another. The notion of morgoge [per-
sonhood] reflects the ontological priority of social relationships, not of personal
identity (Jackson 1982: 16). In Kuranko thought a persons moral commitments
to others are apportioned differentially. The individual is not set apart from his
social milieu and given an intrinsic moral value which is shared by all man-
kind. There is no notion that all men are equal in the sight of God. According to
this form of distributive morality (Read 1955), It is the relative social position
of an individual which decides the manner in which his action will be evalu-
ated. Moral propriety is a matter of living up to the expectation of a role, rather
than honoring an abstract, meta-cultural relationship with God (ibid., 24).
There are, therefore, important continuities between the moral thinking of
corporate and atomistic society. Status is still the primary determinant of per-
sonal value, and acts still retain a much greater significance than motives or
intentions. There is not much more awareness of the inner life of the individual
and of motives and intentions than in atomistic societies, and still no thinking
about thinking. The ethical remains embedded in the religious and the legal,
and is not abstracted as a distinct body of principles. The virtues remain a bag
of socially desirable attributes, and there is no idea of the possibility of a prin-
cipled rejection of the customs and institutions of ones society. Success in this
life is what counts and there is no emphasis on rewards and punishments in
the next life. While the notion of order does give an important emphasis to the
idea of truth, and that right and wrong are somehow part of the nature of
things, and appeals can be made to divine commandments, the predominant
emphasis in moral thought still tends to be, as Ginsberg says, relatively pru-
dential and external, on shame rather than on guilt and the awareness of what
is good in itself, while morality is still essentially public rather than private.
Nor is law clearly distinguishable from religion and custom:
Indeed, though law and religion are different kinds of social fact, I consider
that Maine was correct when he affirmed that they are closely associated in
early law. This must surely accompany the general lack of differentiation in
simple society, and disappear as social life becomes secularized The Lozi
have specialized priests and judicial bodies; and it is to be expected that in
societies which have not evolved these offices and courts, law, both as a dis-
tinct body of rules and as judgments, would be less clearly separated from
general morality, from custom, and from religion. (Gluckman 1967: 265)
Piagets definition of moral realism or heteronomy applies quite well to the
moral thinking of this type of society. We find unilateral respect for authority;
rules as external to the mind, with their own existence; conformity to rules as
good in itself; attention focused on the letter of the rules rather than on their
226 Corporate Order
spirit, and on acts rather than on motives or intentions; responsibility is objec-
tive and guilt consists of being found out; there is a belief in immanent justice,
and punishment is expiatory and retributive. In some respects the characteris-
tic features of moral thought in corporate societies also correspond with Kohl-
bergs Conventional, Stage 3.
What is right. Living up to what is expected by people who are close to you
or what people generally expect of people in your role as son, brother,
friend, etc. Being good is important and means having good motives,
showing concern about others. It also means keeping mutual relationships,
such as trust, loyalty, respect, and gratitude.
Reasons for doing right. The need to be a good person in your own eyes and
those of others. Your caring for others. Belief in the golden rule. Desire to
maintain rules and authority which support stereotypical good behaviour.
Social perspective stage. Perspective of the individual in relationships with
other individuals. Aware of shared feelings, agreements, and expectations
which take primacy over individual interests. Relates points of view through
the concrete golden rule, putting yourself in the other persons shoes. Does
not yet consider generalized system perspective. (Kohlberg 1984: 174)
Kohlberg here gives primary emphasis to roles father, brother, etc. and
to the perspective of the individual in relationships with other individuals, rather
than to the generalized system perspective, on the one hand, or to the indi-
vidualistic emphasis typical of atomistic societies, on the other. This is certainly
an accurate summary of an essential feature of societies of corporate order. It is
really only with the state and a centralized judicial system and administration
that it becomes possible to think of society as a total system (at Kohlbergs
stage 4).
But, in concluding this section, I must again emphasize that moral thought
will not be uniform, and that we can expect to find some differences in particu-
lar between the modes of thinking among leaders and non-leaders (e.g. Ed-
wards 1975). In their study of the Kipsigis of Kenya, Harkness, Edwards and
Super (1981) also found significant differences in this respect. For example,
with regard to paternal authority,
All of the men [leaders and non-leaders] agreed that children should always
obey and respect their father, but in the eyes of the leaders, a man should
command natural respect through his own superior moral qualities. His au-
thority should be maintained through being reasonable and nonarbitrary,
and he should teach his children to obey willingly for the common good of
the family According to the non-leaders, however, the head of the house-
hold was simply a strong man, a ruler. (Harkness, Edwards and Super 1981:
599)
Again, it was found that ideas corresponding to conscience were ex-
pressed by some of the leaders, but not among the ordinary men:
The idea of conscience, as described by leaders and non-leaders, varies from
an inner voice, or self-judgment, to an outwardly oriented concern about
wrongdoing and fear of punishment or disapproval. Conscience as an inner
voice or self-judgment was best expressed by one of the leaders: You remain
unhappy because you have something in your heart that will draw you to a
Order and Life 227

shadow of being afraid of something that you have done to someone else.
Because you will charge yourself according to your heart that you were not
right at that time. (Leader B, stage 3[4]) Most men, however, displayed
approval or punishment-oriented concepts of conscience. (Ibid., 600)
While substantial numbers of persons in these societies will presumably be
at Kohlbergs Stage 3, I have found no positive confirmation that the Golden
Rule is explicitly formulated, and one clear disconfirmation (Ladd 1957: 272). It
should be noted, however, that Kohlberg distinguishes between an implicit
concrete awareness of the Golden Rule, and the ability to formulate it in ex-
plicit form, but I shall discuss this in more detail later.
The intolerance of children towards new-comers to their group, and their
assumptions that their own customs are normative, is of course extremely well
documented (e.g. Berkowitz 1962, Piaget and Weil 1951, Opie and Opie 1957),
and is quite consistent with the data from the societies of corporate order.
There are, however, certain purely cultural features of societies of corporate
order which have no counterpart in the thinking of Piagets and Kohlbergs
subjects. Piaget notes that the idea of corporate responsibility was explicitly
rejected by the children in his studies, and we can see that this idea would have
little relevance in their social world. Again, ideas of purity and pollution re-
quire a specific type of social order which, too, is lacking in the experience of
Western children.
2. Order and Life
The main characteristics of order which I wish to explore in this section are the
moral significance of status, and the way in which order is linked with life in
all its aspects, especially with the body. This is extremely important in estab-
lishing the primacy of acts over intentions and the inner life of the individual,
and in creating systems of moral order that are sharply bounded and idiosyn-
cratic, in which the outsider has no place and is a fundamental threat. It is the
symbolic value of institutions which makes adherence to their norms so impor-
tant, yet peculiarly resistant to explicit analysis and discussion. When I
worked
1
among the Konso of Ethiopia (Hallpike 1972) it was much easier than
among the Tauade to grasp their social organization because they had devel-
oped clearly defined social groups, categories and offices and could use appro-
priate terms for these, like clan, age-set, ward, councillor, etc., in texts to pro-
vide me with an explicit account of the normative expectations that attached to
these groups and statuses. But even here, when it came to understanding their
very complex form of age-grouping (Table 7) I encountered similar problems to
those among the Tauade. In the Konso type of age-grading system ones grade
is solely dependent on that of ones father, not on ones actual age, and the sys-

1
My first field-work was conducted in 1965567, and published in The Konso of Ethiopia
(1972). I revisited them for a brief period in 1997, and a completely revised edition of
The Konso is in press. My description of the Konso in this chapter refers to them as they
were in 1965, revised as necessary in the light of subsequent information.
228 Corporate Order
tem expresses a conception of society as composed of a hierarchy of genera-
tions, each with its distinctive social functions: elders, warriors, and boys. One
aspect of this hierarchy is that only one generation should be procreating at a
time. It can be schematically represented as follows:
Table 7: Garati age-grading system
Grade Generation
Ukuda FFF Adult grades
Gulula FFF
Gurula FF
Orshada FF
Kada F
Hrela F
Farida S Juvenile grade.
No marrying.

Everyone is placed at birth in a grade two below that of his father, whatever his
actual age, and everyone is promoted simultaneously into the next grade at a
ceremony every 18 years. No marrying is allowed below Hrela, and ideally
procreation should cease in Orshada.
The age-grouping systems were clearly established by the conscious co-
ordination of experts at specific points of time in the past, and it seems almost
certain that those who were responsible for setting up these systems, or at least
substantially modifying them, were able to envisage the working of the sys-
tems as wholes, but having been established the systems could continue with-
out requiring the individuals governed by them to be able to explain how they
worked in any coherent way. One finds that the people themselves perceive
these systems in terms of large numbers of persons known to them, but even
intelligent informants with whom I discussed the systems were quite unable to
describe how the systems worked in general terms, e.g. A son is always two
grades behind his father, and so on.
One of the reasons for this was clearly cognitive that they could not grasp
the functioning of total systems but a further difficulty for people in such so-
cieties as these is the cultural factor that their institutions are permeated with
symbolic values, which are inherently resistant to explicit analysis, and it is this
aspect of corporate order that we must now consider.
a. The symbolic value of institutions
In societies of corporate order institutions are frequently inexplicable solely in
terms of their practical utilitarian functions, but also have a symbolic and cos-
mological significance related to Life in all its aspects. A few examples from the
Konso will show this very clearly. They are divided into nine patrilineal clans,
which are dispersed among about 35 towns, and each clan has its totems that
are associated in many cases with its corporate character and its cosmological
Order and Life 229

status. While the clans are therefore not corporate groups, they are strictly ex-
ogamous, and each clan has a forbidden food and a distinctive word that
members say when taking an oath before God. This number appears again in
the complex age-grading system, which in two regions is or was based on a
cycle of 9 years. When asked why their ancestors instituted it, the reply is that
it was to make the crops grow, by which they mean that it is the basis of social
harmony, which is thought to be intimately linked with the prosperity of na-
ture and, not surprisingly, the age system is associated with a complex system
of religious rituals.
Each town (the average size being around 1500) is divided into two moie-
ties, which are in turn divided into wards, and there is a rule that a man must
always live in the moiety where he was born. When one asks the Konso why
they have the moieties they can give no explanation, but they are quite clear
that the first duty of fellow ward members is to bury one anothers dead, since
this is forbidden to kin, both agnatic and cognatic, and must be performed by
unrelated neighbours. Dumont refers to the common practice of I bury your
dead, you bury mine (1970: 48) as a means of avoiding the pollution of death, a
belief which is also very strong among the Konso. It may well be that when the
towns were much smaller and there were no wards the ritual function of the
moieties was the religious office of mutual burial, because the effect of the rule
that a man born in one moiety could never live in the other would have en-
sured that all agnates lived in the same moiety, since a man is always born in
his fathers house.
We find the same concern with Life in the organization of the homestead,
which is always divided into an upper level, the oida, and a lower level, the
arhata. The family ideally lives on the upper level, while the livestock are
penned in stalls on the lower level, and this division also expresses a religious
distinction between humans and animals. If a bull climbs on to the oida it must
be sacrificed because it is believed that the father of the house will die, and if a
ram enters the sleeping hut of a lineage head it, too, must be killed for the same
reason.
One could give endless further examples of this, but for our immediate
purposes I wish to concentrate in the rest of this section on three particular ex-
amples of cultural symbolism that reinforce the cognitive problem I have just
alluded to: outsiders and disorder; purity and pollution; and honour and mas-
culinity.
b. Outsiders and disorder
Since corporate order is based on clearly defined groups and statuses, it is
strongly bounded, and some categories of persons are regarded as more central
to this order than others. Thus for the Konso order is maintained through men
in the form of patrilineal descent groups and inheritance, and of patrilocal mar-
riage, while women are seen as socially fluid, moving between lineages and
even between towns at marriage. Men bless, and take political decisions, while
women provide the physical necessities of life, and have virtually no active
part in religious life, nor in the public life of the mora (the sacred places within
230 Corporate Order
the towns where the men congregate during the day). In terms of age the same
theme of centrality and periphery asserts itself. Increasing age is associated
with increasing sanctity: the elders bless, and are the councillors and decision-
makers, while the young men act ideally in harmony with them but in the jun-
ior capacity of the wielders of physical force against internal criminals and ex-
ternal enemies, under the direction of the elders. Men in Farida (the age-grade
of the boys) have no political or religious status, and may not take part in
councils or religious ceremonies, and in some towns may not enter the most
sacred moras. The craftsmen, again, who are a despised hereditary caste, are in
many ways treated as partially outside Konso society, because of their depend-
ency on commerce and the markets, which are regarded as the antithesis of the
cooperative life of the town. The sacred drums of the regions and the towns,
which are the visible symbols of the Konso social order and of the peace by
which ideally it should be regulated, may not even be seen, much less touched,
by women, craftsmen, or foreigners. Nevertheless, women, Farida, and the
craftsmen are seen as performing complementary and necessary functions
within the Konso social order. The true outsider, however, is someone who
does not, in principle, have any defined part in this order and so does not elicit
or require moral concern.
As a category, the outsider is an intrusive and disruptive element, the em-
bodiment of chaos, the abnormal, and the immoral. The Kaguru of Tanzania
have developed rather more articulate representations of outsiders than have
the Konso:
At the broadest level, Kaguru contrast their land and themselves with out-
siders, with strangers whose language, diet, and customs are different.
Kaguru undertake marriage and alliances among their own kind. Outsiders
are feared because they are unknown and uncontrollable; they are able to
disguise their true thoughts and interests through an alien language, just as
Kaguru retreat into themselves through theirs Within their concept of
their own society, Kaguru contrast the ordered sphere of the settlements
with the dangerous sphere of the wilderness or bush. Various modes of cul-
ture and order, especially those involving the processing of consumption
and food, are contrasted with the raw aspects of wild beasts. (Beidelman
1986: 29)
This association of the bush and wild animals with disorder and the set-
tlement with order is well illustrated in Kaguru tales about baboons, tales
which relate the blurring of such distinctions between humans and animals
with confusion regarding diet, etiquette, and body grooming In many
popular Kaguru tales baboons don clothing and try to dupe humans into ac-
cepting them into society. Eventually their tails, hairiness and rough eating
habits (eating raw food and eating in a slovenly manner) betray them and
lead humans to drive them back into the bush. (Ibid., 36)
The Konso see their age system as defining their social order and speak of
those who have Fariyuma or Faridahood as by that fact belonging to their
social order. For the Kaguru
their morality is seen by them as quintessentially expressed through cir-
cumcision, and its concomitant moral instructions at circumcision. They do
Order and Life 231

not speak directly of matriliny as a key feature of their cultural identity but
put this in terms of customs and attitudes about sexual conduct, as it relates
to spouses, rules of exogamy, residence patterns, and etiquette of elders and
juniors. (ibid., 71) Kaguru also describe Baraguyu as half circumcised be-
cause they do not remove all of the foreskin at initiation. To Kaguru this
represents a failure to achieve total morality as is reflected in Baraguyu un-
concern over male nudity, the sexual freedom between warriors and unmar-
ried girls, and, worst of all, that warriors sleep in their mothers houses,
which for Kaguru is tantamount to incest. (Ibid., 71)
Middleton writes in very similar terms of the Lugbara of Uganda:
For Lugbara, a man, his family and his lineage are in the centre of a field of
social relations, which extends both in space and time. Although this field
can not be delimited too clearly, it consists essentially of relations of author-
ity which are based on kinship and validated by genealogy (Middleton 1960:
230). [On the other hand,] There are no right ways to behave to a stranger or
to a person with whom one has ties neither of kinship nor of fairly close
neighbourhood why else does a stranger enter another lineage territory ex-
cept to make trouble by force? Of those people beyond the bounds of so-
ciety people say How do we know where they came from or what deeds
they do? We fear them and we do not know them. The more distant of these
creatures, beyond the magicians and the sorcerers, are creatures hardly hu-
man in appearance who walk on their heads. Such are the Logo, the Mundu,
the Lenda, and people beyond them. These people love to eat meat that is
rotten, and bad meat such as snakes, frogs, hyenas and other night crea-
tures. People such as the Pygmies, Makaraka, the Mangbetu, the Momvu
and the people whom the Lugbara know as the Niam-Niam, the Azande, are
all cannibals. They walk on their heads, have terrible methods of sorcery,
and live in ways which men cannot understand in the thick forests beyond
the open Lugbara plateau. (Ibid., 247)
The same theme appears in Lugbara myths of the pre-human culture he-
roes, Jaki and Dribidu, who were not human as men are now: Dribidu means
the hairy one, since he was covered with long hair over most of his body. He
is also known as Banyale (eater of men), since he ate his children until he was
discovered and driven out of his earlier home on the east bank of the Nile
(ibid., 237). The first Europeans too were classified with the culture heroes: to-
gether they form a single complex: physical inversion, cannibalism, incest,
miracle working, absence of bride wealth, no fighting, living outside the
bounds of society (ibid., 236). What the Lugbara called good and bad can ac-
cording to Middleton be better understood by words such as normal and
abnormal, or moral and amoral, or social and asocial; at times
amoral and asocial may become immoral and anti-social or even pre-
social. I have used the word inverted to refer both to physical and moral
attributes; the concept perverted could be used on occasion to refer to the
latter (ibid., 250). Middleton emphasises the static quality of the Lugbara notion
of their society, which is
appropriate to the relationship between ideally unchanging and un-
changeable authority on the one hand and social change on the other
They lack concepts of what we see as historical change and causation; they
232 Corporate Order
see what are for us historical events and relations in terms of moral relations,
those of sociality and asociality. The authority of living and dead that is part
of the ideally unchanging system is thought of as good. Factors that
change, destroy or weaken the structure are bad. They are outside social
order and are seen as being both amoral and asocial. (Ibid., 250)
This would, I think, be quite appropriate to the Konso as well.
1

We must also remember that, quite apart from the classificatory significance
of order, in these societies local groups are frequently on hostile terms with
their neighbours despite sharing the same basic culture. As von Frer-
Haimendorf says,
Most tribal societies are concerned only with actions which affect their own
members. Their reaction to a crime of violence depends therefore on the
status of the victim [is he a member of the group or not?] No deed is
judged without reference to a specific social context Social sanctions are
imposed to safeguard the interests of the in-group, and not to prevent its
members from committing acts contrary to the tenets of absolute morality.
(Von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 212)
With specific reference to the Nagas he says:
To the Naga mankind appears sharply divided between the small circle of
his co-villagers and clansmen, from whom he expects assistance and to
whom he is bound by a number of obligations, and the entire outward
world consisting of the people of his own tribe living in others villages as
well as the people of neighbouring tribes who are his potential enemies and
also potential victims of head hunting. (Ibid., 86)
The mutual suspicion and hostility which are often characteristic of relations
between different groups in such societies therefore reinforce the negative view
of the outsider as inherently hostile to order.
In western Sumba, specifically in Kodi, there is a phrase: He does not know
the difference between outside and inside. This is the equivalent to our He
does not know the difference between right and wrong. The limit in ques-
tion is that of the local patri-clan or major lineage, confined within a fortified

1
It should be noted, however, that the Konso were conquered by the Amhara in 1897,
and so by the time of my fieldwork had had sixty years experience of interaction with
outsiders. I was therefore much too late to gauge their traditional moral classification of
foreigners. It is interesting that they had a very strong objection to the idea of selling
people, and gave as their reason for disliking the craftsmen that they had sold their
children to the Borana in times of famine. It might therefore be argued that they did
have a concept of the human being as such, who was owed moral concern independent
of status, but I am not at all sure that this follows. They have the firm view that ordinary
social relations, especially between kin and neighbours, should be governed by the
norms of generalized reciprocity, and regard trade as inherently selfish and in a way
anti-social. Thus selling ones children would simply be an extreme violation of this
norm, and would not imply that they typically conceived human beings in an abstract
moral sense. Their aversion to the idea of selling people would no doubt also have been
accentuated by their experience of having some of their population enslaved by the
Amhara after the conquest, which they clearly recall.
Order and Life 233

village. Within it there is recognized the expectable range of kinds of wrong
doing, but outside it anything goes: murder, assault, rape, theft, the lot.
There are of course qualifications to this, e.g. one would not molest a village
sister who had been (as all women born into the village must be) married
out, and one would not commit any offence against a member of ones dis-
persed matri-clan, but by and large the moral boundary of a village deter-
mines the rightness or wrongness of an action. The reason outside is ut-
tered first, in the expression in question, is that it is the rule with Sumbanese
couplets that the lesser term of a dyad is named first and then the superior.
(R. Needham, personal communication)
Kluckhohn and Leighton say of the Navaho This tendency to be ill at ease
when beyond the circle of ones relatives is a truly primitive quality and is
characteristic, to varying degrees, of most non-literate folk societies (Kluck-
hohn and Leighton 1974: 306).
c. Purity and pollution
It will have become clear in the preceding sections that because corporate order
is essentially concerned with Life, it stands in a close yet ambiguous relation-
ship with the physical nature of human existence, ambiguous because physical
well-being is an essential goal, yet the physical characteristics of the human
body, and indeed, of animality in general, are potentially disruptive of order.
Beidelman expresses very well this close relationship between physical nature
and corporate order when he says of the Kaguru:
The abstract notions of continuity, order, disorder, affection, passion, moral-
ity and immorality, are imagined through various substances and things to
which they are attributed. There is for Kaguru an inter-penetration between
persons and things, between society and the world in which it is set For
Kaguru such imagery of social and physical being, of moral and physical
realms, derive greatly from their bodies, from their bilateral orientations in
terms of right and left, up and down, ahead and behind, and from their
blood, flesh, hair, and bones. Most powerfully of all it is reflected in every-
day practices of household and village life. In these, images of preparing
food, eating, the activities of hearth and bed, evoke the body, forming as-
sociational clusters which weld together the social and natural realms,
where sexual and alimentary appetites are regulated and enhanced through
the home by way of the regulation of marriage and kinship, cuisine and eti-
quette. (Beidelman 1986: 30)
Pollution concepts are therefore of great importance in societies of corporate
order, and Professor Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger advances the theory
that dirt is essentially disorder (1966: 35) or matter out of place, in Lord
Chesterfields maxim. In Douglass structuralist view, things or states of affairs
are not dirty or impure in themselves, but only as elements of some larger sys-
tem of order. Dirt, then, is never a unique isolated event. Where there is dirt
there is system (ibid., 35). So she considers that anomalous categories are espe-
cially likely to be regarded as impure because they are violations of order. In
Leviticus, for example, Those species are unclean which are imperfect mem-
234 Corporate Order
bers of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the
world (ibid., 55).
One would agree entirely with the basic premise of her theory, which links
purity and pollution with order and disorder, and therefore with her rejection
of naive explanations based on hygiene for rules of purity in the Bible and
other traditional societies. But one only has to reflect for a moment on many of
the things that we call dirty dishes and glasses used for a meal, soiled hand-
kerchiefs, baths with a ring of scum around them to see that the dirt here is a
case of matter very much in place, but matter that is closely associated with
contact from human bodies. More generally, we know that in an immense
range of societies pollution centers on certain bodily states birth, sexuality,
eating, excretion, and death and one might go further and suggest that the
archetypal image of dirt is that of faeces and Meigs (1978) suggests decay as
well. (The original meaning of dirt was ordure, excrement, from ME drit,
OED.) For these reasons the structuralist theory of purity and pollution is in-
adequate, and Dumont puts his finger more accurately on the central notion of
impurity when he says that it derives from the irruption of the biological into
social life and that it corresponds to the organic aspects of man [my emphasis].
Religion generally speaks in the name of universal order; but in this case,
though unaware in this form of what it is doing, by proscribing impurity it in
fact sets up an opposition between religious and social man, on the one hand
and nature on the other (Dumont 1970: 5051). Parker, in his study of Greek
concepts of pollution, rightly says that notions of pollution can best be under-
stood by
relating them very generally to the norms of an ordered existence. By do-
ing so we are once again rejecting the idea that a cultures beliefs about pol-
lution derive from anxiety or a sense of guilt. They are rather by-products of
an ideal order. A first requirement is, it seems, the veiling or repudiation of
what is disruptively or disgracefully physical. Civilized life has no place for
those dying or being born, excreting, or engaged in sexuality. The [Cynic]
philosophers who made it their ideal to live in agreement with nature at-
tacked cultures precepts in just these areas. Rules against dying, copulating,
and being born in sacred precincts, Chrysippus points out, divide us, irra-
tionally, from the animals. (Parker 1983: 325326) [Similarly, in the cases of
disease, madness, monstrous births, cannibalism, incest, and parricide ]
here too opposition from the advocates of nature helped to define the civi-
lized norms. Zeno and Chrysippus taught that one should be prepared to
sleep with ones mother or daughter, should circumstances demand it, and
also to eat the limbs of ones dead parents. (Ibid., 236)
The human body in particular, and human status versus animal status in gen-
eral thus become of crucial significance for corporate order. Cannibalism, in-
cest, bestiality, eating food raw, nudity, the treatment of corpses, murder and
the shedding of blood, and especially parricide and matricide, take on a quality
which is inexplicable from the purely utilitarian point of view or with respect
to justice and benevolence.
It seems therefore that dirt is not simply disorder, matter out of place, but
derives its most powerful image from the much more specific source of the
Order and Life 235

human body, and more generally, from the relations between human status
and animality. Some examples of Konso ideas about purity and pollution give
a good idea of the range of these ideas. The nearest word to pure is gulguloda,
which in ordinary conversation generally means clean. A virgin is inanda gul-
guloda, a pure girl, a sacred mora is mora gulguloda, and a man who has at-
tended a burial or even gone to a bereaved homestead will say today I am not
clean, and will not visit the house of a priest or an Apa Timba. Similarly the
word jareda, to wash can be used not only in the sense of washing ones hands
but of ritual purification as well. They are very uneasy about burying corpses
in the earth, the source of life, and say that when God lived close to man He
came down in the form of a mist and carried away the dead. So, too, the earth
is polluted by human blood, and must be purified by sacrifice after a battle.
The land in a more general sense of where people live together, is also pol-
luted by sin, in the sense of wrongdoing, and we shall consider this type of
pollution further in section 4. When a craftsman has performed the circumci-
sion ceremony at Gaho, the sacred stone on which he stands during this opera-
tion is cleansed with the blood of a goat. People ritually purify their homes
when evil medicines are found in them, and when the descendants of a mur-
derer and his victim are reconciled there is also a ceremony of purification.
While the Konso did not explicitly refer to the purity of the regional priest, in
view of their general ideas on purity especially of sacred places it is reasonable
to infer that this explains why the great priests are not to supposed to receive
food or beer from the hands of anyone not of their own family, and these must
be made from the produce of their own fields. The rules that if a regional priest
sleeps in another mans house no one else may touch that house without pay-
ing a fine, and that no priest may have anything to do with death also seem
clear testimony to the importance of concepts of purification in relation to their
priests. In the Konso case, the body is central to the notion of the purity of a
virgin, and to the pollution by a corpse of a priest, of the earth, of a sacred
mora, and of the kin; to the pollution of human blood for the slayer and for the
earth, and it appears also in the significance of food, so that regional priests are
not supposed to receive food from anyone not of their family and grown on
their own land. Commensality is therefore one of the many ways in which pol-
lution beliefs extend more widely in social relations, and we find that the
Konso farmers traditionally would not eat with the craftsmen, who are re-
garded as to some extent outside society, and as having a harmful influence on
social order. The significance of food in the relations between Hindu castes is,
of course, so well known that it needs only to be mentioned in this context, but
we find the theme of food sharing as an indication of relative purity and impu-
rity in many other societies, serving as a symbolic boundary marker between
different components of the total social order. The control of sexual relations
and marriage by rules of exogamy and incest also has a similar function linking
the body with social order. In the case of the Kaguru moral pollution extends
far beyond sexuality to include all unjust and selfish conduct toward kin, but
the sexual image informs these other spheres (Beidelman 1986: 123).
Since corporate order is inherently static, and dependent on clear and fixed
boundaries between categories, it follows that transitions from one state or
category to another are potentially a threat to order, and van Genneps cele-
236 Corporate Order
brated The Rites of Passage (1960) is a classic demonstration of the importance of
imposing symbolic constraints on transitions for societies of corporate order.
Since some of the most important rites of passage, such as birth and death, in-
volve the physical state of the body, we can see why they should be so fre-
quently regarded as polluting, but as Parker points out,
Not all crucial transitions pollute, however. It is not enough to say that mar-
riage is too joyful an occasion to be polluting, because birth is joyful too. The
real difference seems to be that marriage is a controlled event, birth and
death intrude in human life at their pleasure. They are an irresistible irrup-
tion of the biological into social life Marriage, by contrast, is not an intru-
sion that requires sealing off, but is itself a harness set upon the rebellious
body. (Parker 1983: 63)
Much the same can be said about initiation, which is another crucial rite of pas-
sage in societies of corporate order. While the initiands are in a transitional or
marginal state they are seldom, if ever (to my knowledge) regarded as impure
simply by reason of their status, since their condition is not the result of their
biological state but of a social decision.
Pollution does not seem to be important in atomistic societies, and now that
we have examined its significance in relation to corporate order we can see that
until societies have developed a clearly defined set of groups and statuses there
is little to act as a foundation upon which the category of pollution could de-
velop.
d. Honour and masculinity
We have seen that order is threatened by the intrusion of the biological factors
of birth, death, sexuality, eating, and excretion, yet one of the primary aims of
order is to sustain biological well-being. But if sexuality and birth disturb or-
der, they are also one of its basic goods. In the same way, success in battle and
the defence of ones own group against its enemies are other basic goods, yet
warfare is the paradigm of disorder (c.f. OHG werra, confusion, discord, strife,
from which war is derived, OED) and in many societies bloodshed and kill-
ing, like birth, are polluting. So, too, the strong man, the great warrior is natu-
rally admired, but he is precisely the man who is the greatest potential threat to
order. This ambiguity appears even in atomistic societies like the Tauade,
where the Big Men have the contradictory roles of peace-maker and war-
leader. With the development of corporate order there is often some differen-
tiation of function, so that we find, as in Polynesia, sacred chiefs and war
chiefs, or that in egalitarian societies warfare is the function of young men,
while political and religious duties are a preserve of the elders. But this divi-
sion of function does not resolve the conflict between the martial and the pa-
cific elements in the fabric of the total order of society.
The Konso are a good illustration of this. Waqa is the god of peace and rain-
fall, who desires that men should live in harmony with one another. He is
closely associated with the elders, who are said to be Gods deputies, and their
function is blessing and the settlement of disputes. The earth is associated with
women, who take no part in warfare of course, and it is said that human blood
pollutes the earth. Yet, on the other hand, the Konso are a warlike people who
Order and Life 237

have erected stones of manhood in their sacred places to commemorate victo-
ries in battle, and the prime function of Hrela grade was to fight in defence of
their towns. In traditional times men cut off the penises of the enemies they
killed in battle and wore them on their wrists as bracelets, and the Waqa statues
invariably include emasculated images of enemies slain in battle. The mens
club houses seem to have originated as watch towers on the town walls, and
the men hung their shields in them. Women and sexuality are seen as weaken-
ing men, not only for physical labour but by making them soft and unfit for
war, so that it is said that good warriors were unmarried. Warfare is thus pro-
foundly ambiguous in the social order. So it was, too, in the order of the Indo-
Europeans. Whereas the primary gods of this order, Mitra and Varuna, were
inherently sinless Indra, the war god, could and did sin:
How could Mitra, Varuna, and the other Aditya sin? They form one body
with the rta, the moral as well as the cosmic and ritual order which they cre-
ated, which they uphold and which they enforce Indra and his warriors
have been given a very different cosmic and social position. They cannot ig-
nore order, since their function is to guard it against the thousand and one
demonic or hostile endeavours that oppose it. But in order to assume their
office they must first possess and entertain qualities of their own which bear
a strong resemblance to the blemishes of their adversaries And so they
are transfigured, made strangers in the society they protect The revolts of
generals and military coups dtat, the massacres and pillages by the undisci-
plined soldiery and by its leaders, all these are older than history. And that
is why Indra is the sinner among the gods. (Dumzil 1970: 1057)
The concept of honour is of course closely associated with masculinity and
the defence of ones reputation as a man, but the Konso have not developed a
culture in which honour is at all important at the individual level. They are not
personally assertive in defence of their reputation as brave, hot men, even
though the towns were clearly quite prepared to fight in response to fairly in-
significant provocations. To explore the moral explanations of honour, which is
so closely linked with fighting, we must therefore look to other societies, and
Adkins has given us an illuminating analysis of the problems which were faced
by Greek society as it tried to synthesize its admiration for the honour of the
warrior with the quiet virtues of co-operation. In the Homeric world agathos,
good, did not have the connotations of virtue or justice, but rather those of so-
cial effectiveness: To be agathos, one must be brave, skilful and successful in
war and peace; and one must possess the wealth and (in peace) the leisure
which are at once the necessary conditions for the development of these skills
and the natural reward of their successful employment (Adkins 1960: 33). A
number of consequences follow from this very common situation. First of all, a
sharp division is made between the male and female virtues. Men must be
brave, assertive, and successful against their enemies, while in the case of
women, The qualities demanded are beauty, skill in weaving and housekeep-
ing, chastity and faithfulness (ibid., 35). These Homeric values are found very
widely, so that the female counterparts of male honour are, in particular, chas-
tity, fidelity, tenderness, and self-sacrifice. Secondly, honour is an especially
aristocratic virtue:
238 Corporate Order
In war, the failure of one man may well contribute to the failure of his
friends; a failure which, in the Homeric world may well result in slavery or
annihilation. Success is so imperative that only results have any value: inten-
tions are unimportant. Similarly, and for similar reasons, it is aischron
[shameful] to fail in time of peace to protect ones family and guests what-
ever ones intentions. If the head of the family cannot protect them, there is
no one else to do so. (Ibid., 35)
So it is understandable that if honour is closely linked with success of this
type, it must be inextricably bound up with the military virtues and hence with
aristocratic status. Thirdly, it is concerned with success in the public arena and
failure here leads to ridicule and shame, regardless of intention or private vir-
tues or justice: To do kaka, to do harm, is not to be kakos [bad]; to be kakos is to
be the sort of person to whom kaka may be done with impunity, since he cannot
defend himself, and it is this condition which is aischron, shameful (ibid., 42).
In societies of corporate order honour is the possession of kin groups, not
just of individuals or nuclear families, and in many societies the honour of the
clan or tribe is therefore fundamental, irrespective of any claims of justice. In
the case of the Nagas, the kin group avenges the injuries suffered by its
members without regard to the general principles of justice (von Frer-
Haimendorf 1967: 105). So, too, for the Arabs particularly in the pre-Islamic
period, hasab, ancestral honour, was (and remains) a fundamental guide to
conduct:
Every noble family has its own hasab to boast of. Hasab is the final yardstick
by which the value of the tribe, and consequently the personal excellence of
every member of the tribe, is measured. Viewed from a different standpoint
the hasab may be said to represent the only possible guide to moral conduct
in the tribal pattern of society. For every individual member of the tribe sees
in the glorious hasab left by his father a body of the highest ideals, a perfect
model of behaviour to be imitated in all circumstances of life. (Izutsu 1966:
63) [Physical violence and pride are the essential features of this type of
honour, which] was mainly based on and kept unsullied by heroism and
valour, which, again were maintained by the spirit of iba meaning literally
refusal, that is, more concretely, refusal to bow before any authority, be it
human or divine. It was, in short, a spirit of independence, abhorrence of
being dominated, haughtiness and pride standing on the consciousness of
ones power and courage. (Ibid., 64)
Dishonour and defilement are also easily linked together, and Pitt Rivers
draws attention to the notion, common in all the languages of Europe, that
honour is susceptible of defilement or stain of which it requires to be puri-
fied (Pitt Rivers 1965: 35). Societies which lay great stress on honour therefore
have considerable problems in reconciling what Adkins calls the quiet virtues
such as prudence, forbearance, moderation, and justice with those required by
honour. With reference to this Peristiany says that
Whoever is measured by [honours] standards and is not found wanting
may, without falling from grace, break a number of rules considered minor
in relation to honour. Thus, in a number of instances, one may take another
persons property, life and even honour, while retaining his own honour.
The reverse is also true. The man who never endangers the property, limb
The individual as moral agent 239

and honour of his fellows may neither be considered as having honour of his
own nor gain honour through his passive acquiescence to social regulation.
(Peristiany 1965: 10)
Honour, being essentially combative and self-assertive, is found very fre-
quently in atomistic societies, as we saw in the case of the Tauade who, while
they have no explicit term for it, can be said to grade people from big man to
rubbish man in terms of their honour. Campbells description of the role of
honour among the Sarakatsani shepherds of Greece would apply equally well
to the Tauade: There is no more conclusive way of showing you are stronger
than by taking away the other mans life. Conversely all forms of weakness are
shameful. The weak, the humble, the modest, even the merely goodhearted
and cooperative are not virtuous (Campbell 1965: 152).
The cult of honour, also, as we have seen, places extreme emphasis on acts,
rather than intentions, and hence shame is essentially a public sanction: Hon-
our is only irretrievably committed by attitudes expressed in the presence of
witnesses, the representatives of public opinion Public opinion forms there-
fore a tribunal before which the claims to honour are brought, the court of
reputation as it has been called, and against its judgments there is no redress
(Pitt Rivers 1965: 23). Honour is therefore a powerful reinforcement of that em-
phasis on acts rather than intentions, of shame rather than guilt which we shall
consider in more detail later in the chapter.
3. The individual as moral agent
In Chapter IV, when discussing the idea of the self, we noted that in societies of
corporate order as well as atomistic society the inner life of the individual is
not explored in any articulate manner; there is no thinking about thinking,
and little attempt to express private sensibilities and feelings as the explana-
tions for ones actions, or to use them in explaining the actions of others. The
rich development of self-awareness in complex societies generates a sense of
the self as standing above the institutions which it creates and uses, the self as
a spiritual entity, as something distinct from the social medium in which it is
involved (Read 1955: 249). Jacksons summary of Kuranko assumptions about
the self is generally valid for societies of corporate order: The most fundamen-
tal postulate in the Kuranko world view is that persons exist only in relation to
one another. The notion of morgoge [personhood] reflects the ontological prior-
ity of social relationships, not of personal identity (Jackson 1982: 16). In his
masterly analysis of the moral ideas implicit in Kuranko folktales, Jackson
gives close attention to their idea of self and personhood in relation to the so-
cial order: The person is not an autonomous moral entity (ibid., 274), and
because the Kuranko emphasise that persons are agents of actions rather
than fixed entities, they do not think of the individual as the repository of
private memories or possessed of an idiosyncratic unconscious. In the narra-
tives we find no evidence of memory mixing with desire, or private compul-
sions reflecting unique biographies. Whereas the European fairy tale is, as
Bettelheim observes, a vehicle for the discovery of personal identity, the
Kuranko tilei is concerned wholly with the creation of the community. The
240 Corporate Order
fantasies entertained by European tales winning riches, becoming re-
nowned, marrying into the aristocracy contrast dramatically with the em-
phasis in Kuranko narratives on creating an equitable distribution of scarce
resources, on ensuring that exceptional gifts are used for the good of all, on
ensuring that people are equal to the offices they hold, on redressing injus-
tices, righting wrongs, and reconciling divergent interests A balanced
complementarity is sought between men and women, elder and younger,
chief and commoner, community and wilderness. But the transformations
and the narratives which bring about this harmony are not consequences of
this heroic ambition. Nor are individual emotions such as greed, lust, and
revenge the motivating forces between narrative actions. By Western stan-
dards Kuranko narrative figures seem passionless and flat, and if they set
the world to right they do so not because of personal reasons or visions but
because they are the active agencies through which such changes take place.
In other words they do not make a new world; they alter the balance of the
world that already exists. (Ibid., 266267)
Some of this emphasis on the community at the expense of the individual is
certainly cultural, but there is also a clear cognitive factor at work here as well.
Identity is, in a sense, diffused among all the social statuses that a person
occupies, and while members of such societies are well aware that people make
choices, and have intentions, there seems to be little sense of individuality as
something distinct from the social manifestations of those choices and inten-
tions. This must clearly have important consequences first for ideas about
status and personal worth, particularly where significant distinctions of rank
develop: The individual is not set apart from his social milieu and given an
intrinsic moral value which is shared by all mankind. There is no notion that all
men are equal in the sight of God (ibid., 25). An example from Tonga at the
beginning of the nineteenth century is a good illustration of this:
[King] Finow, observing one of the natives busily employed cutting out the
iron fid from the maintop gallant-mast, and as he was a low fellow, whom
he did not choose should take such a liberty, he was resolved to put a stop to
his work. Calling to a Sandwich islander, who was amusing himself on deck
by firing off his musket, he ordered him to bring that man down from aloft.
Without the least hesitation, the Sandwich islander levelled his piece, and
instantly brought him down dead; upon which Finow laughed heartily, and
seemed mightily pleased at the facility with which his order had been
obeyed. The shot entered his body, and the fall broke both thighs and frac-
tured his skull. Afterwards, when Mr Mariner understood the language, he
asked the king how he could be so cruel as to kill the poor man for so trifling
a fault. His majesty replied, that he was only a low, vulgar fellow (a cook);
and that neither his life nor death was of any consequence to society. (Martin
1827 I: 68)
Part of the point of this story is that Finow was not in fact the bloodthirsty
tyrant that the incident suggests, but in many ways a kindly and decent man. It
is nevertheless clear from contemporary accounts by Mariner and others that
those at the bottom of society were regarded as of inherently little moral value
The lower orders are thought to have no souls, and a cook is considered the
most vulgar profession among them (ibid., 68). The idea that the righteous

ruler makes a special point of protecting the weak is a later development that
we shall explore in the societies studied in the next chapter.
The domination of personal identity by status also has important conse-
quences for ideas of responsibility and retribution, and there are a number of
related aspects of corporate order which help to explain why responsibility is
predominantly objective, and why all harmful acts must be punished in some
way. The first of these is the prime importance of status as the basis of social
order, which necessarily leads to an emphasis on acts, because it is by acts that
one performs or fails to perform the requirements of ones various roles. Cor-
porate order is inherently a public order, while the inner private world is close
to the secret, the illegitimate, and the anti-social. Secondly, order is sacred, in
so far as it is closely linked with the natural world and with life in particular, so
that violations of order, whatever their intentions, endanger life in all its as-
pects. Thirdly, the order is corporate, and therefore involves relations between
groups, and so has a political quality in which, again, intentions are inevitably
a secondary consideration. The societies we are considering are also typically
uncentralized, with no king who can administer law and justice, so that venge-
ance has a significance which it loses in societies which are organized in states,
and vengeance has a quality of its own which, especially in the context of
group relations, tends to generate an ethos of strict liability.
a. Law, punishment, and social healing
We should begin by noting the great importance of the development of judicial
and mediatory institutions in forming general community standards of con-
duct, and in the idea of retributive punishment for offences against the social
order, as distinct from private injuries and revenge. One of the most important
factors in the articulation of a general moral code has clearly been the devel-
opment of mediatory and judicial bodies which encourage the discussion of
general principles of conduct which should guide the community. Every meet-
ing of a Gond panch [village council] tends to elucidate, reiterate and interpret
the unwritten law of the tribe, and there are instances when the assembled men
spend far more time on discussing the principles involved than on investigat-
ing the rights and wrongs of the specific dispute to be settled (von Frer-
Haimendorf 1967: 122). At this level of social organization it is now much eas-
ier not only to develop the idea of offences against the social order as well as
injuries to individuals and groups, but also to punish as opposed to taking
vengeance, because the necessary social institutions for doing so have now de-
veloped. The concept of crime as an immoral and illegal act offending against
society and not merely against the interest of an individual is found in the
highly structured society of the Apa Tanis, but not among the much less ad-
vanced tribal societies where no distinction is made between crimes concerning
the whole society and torts affecting only individuals (ibid., 211). While witch-
craft and incest may be offences against the community in less developed so-
cieties, and punished by death or expulsion, von Frer-Haimendorf seems to
be quite correct in regarding the regular institution of punishment for crime as
a feature of societies with authoritative legal institutions. Among the Apa
Tanis, if a man is caught stealing, not only the owner of the stolen property, but
242 Corporate Order
also the clan representatives of the village will concern themselves with pun-
ishment and the buliang may even order execution for persistent thieves. But
torts are settled in a quite different manner: when men are of equal status, the
wronged man would not appeal to the buliang but tries to retrieve his honour
or loss by direct retaliation (ibid., 75).
Among the Konso those guilty of theft if caught would, in the traditional
society, be brought before the village or town council, and might be ordered to
be whipped by the warriors, but I was told that persistent thieves were liable to
be executed. At an annual ceremony in one town, the Xora Dehamta, assembly
and discussion, those judged guilty of being quarrelsome are fined, and expul-
sion from the town is also a recognized punishment. Their system of private
law is well developed, and damages, adanda, are clearly distinguished in their
law from fines, hora. A special type of damages, maza, is paid to a husband for
the seduction or enticement of his wife. In the case of rape the culprit would
not only be liable to a beating from the husband and perhaps close members of
his lineage also, or damages, but also have to pay a fine to the town officers.
But in these societies without a centralized system of justice presided over by a
king or by strong chiefs we may expect to find a balance between the demands
of retribution and fairness and those of political reality. Referring to the Kip-
sigis of Kenya, Harkness et al. say
The main goal of dispute settlements in communities such as Kokwet is not
to uphold an abstract principle of justice but rather to bring the disputants
into social equilibrium with each other and thereby reestablish peace in the
community. For this reason, the principle of fairness is mitigated by other
factors such as the relative status of the disputants and a sense of realism
about what kind of reparations the two parties will be willing to offer or re-
ceive. (Harkness et al. 1981b: 597)
With regard to the Konyak Nagas in villages without chiefs, von Frer-
Haimendorf says:
where guilt and innocence are beyond doubt the judges often evince re-
markable impartiality, but when the balance of rights and wrongs is unclear
[social position may be decisive]. For a judgement which disgruntles a
large and powerful group does not contribute to village harmony, and it is
this harmony more than an abstract notion of justice which the judges con-
sider is the principle aim of their endeavours. (Ibid., 92)
Disputes, therefore, are seen as an injury to the social fabric, the body politic, so
that images of healing are very frequent in accounts of dispute settlement in
societies of corporate order. The maintenance or restoration of the social equi-
librium of the community pervades the whole fabric of African law (Elias
1956: 130). The purpose of dispute settlement is therefore not primarily to sat-
isfy claims based on individual rights and abstract justice, and one of its most
important considerations even in advanced societies such as that of the Barotse
kingdom is to restore social harmony between groups:
Many writers have discussed the process of law in tribal societies in such
phrases as restoring the social balance or equilibrium, securing the agree-
ment of both parties to a compromise judgement and, above all, reconciling
the parties. This is the main aim of Barotse judges in all cases that arise be-

tween kin, for it is a dominant value of the society that villages should not
break up and kin should remain united. (Gluckman 1967: 9)
Or again we find from Nigeria, that
[judges] were concerned not merely with giving equitable decisions but
with putting an end to disputes which would upset the harmony of the
community. The native tribunals were commonly courts of arbitration rather
than courts of law, and the judges not so much magistrates as chairmen
voicing the opinion of a public assembly. (Meek 1937: 342)
Among the Navaho
An important and perhaps the most interesting part of Navaho moral dis-
course concerns the rectification of wrongs or evils, which the Navaho inter-
preter calls straightening out. This fact suggests that there are analogies be-
tween sickness and disputes, and that the procedures for getting rid of them
are analogous. Actually, if we examine the theory of curing disease, we
shall see that some of the main elements to be found in it, also appear in the
theory of settling disputes. (Ladd 1957: 249)
The idea of healing and dispute settlement or restoration of social order is
also found in the vocabulary of Indo-Europeans:
in historical times the root *med designated a great variety of different
things: govern, think, care for, measure. The primary meaning cannot
be determined by reducing all these to a vague common denominator nor by
a confused agglomeration of the historically attested senses. It can be de-
fined as measure, not measurement, but moderation (Lat. modus, modes-
tus), designed to restore order in a sick body (Lat. medeor, care for, medicus),
in the universe (Hom. Zeus (Idethen) medeon Zeus the moderator), in human
affairs, including the most serious like war, or everyday things like a meal.
Finally, the man who knows the medea (Hom. medea eidos) is not a thinker, a
philosopher, he is one of those chiefs and moderators (Hom. hegetores ede
medontes) who in every circumstance know how to take the tried and tested
measures which are necessary. *Med-, therefore, belongs to the same register
of terms as ius and dike: it is the established rule, not of justice but of order,
which it is the function of the magistrate to formulate (Benveniste 1973:
399)
The range of meanings covered by measure, moderation, moderator, and
medicine is highly instructive when considered in relation to that organic sense
of order which is basic to tribal life. As judicial and political authority becomes
more centralized and secure, the easier it is likely to be for the administration
of law and justice to become independent of sectional interest. So in villages of
the Konyak Nagas ruled by chiefs, according to von Frer-Haimendorf
In all these cases [of executions] the chief and village council acted as the
impartial upholders of the tribal sense of justice, and not as parties injured
by the conduct of the offenders. Though they were instrumental in doing
them to death, they did not become liable to retribution at the hand of the
victims kinsmen, and the latter were absolved of any obligation of retalia-
tion because the killing had been the outcome of a judicial process. (von
Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 93)
244 Corporate Order
b. Responsibility and intention
Many scholars have noted that in assessing responsibility, primitive societies
give much greater weight to actions than to intentions, and that responsibility
is often corporate, rather than purely individual. These impressions are sup-
ported by a great deal of evidence which it is not my intention to depreciate,
but we must be careful to avoid caricature in this matter. It is obvious to chil-
dren that some acts are accidental, without malicious intention, and awareness
of intention is certainly universal in human society. With regard to the assess-
ment of intentions in general we should note that ill-wishing is very commonly
feared, in atomistic societies as well as in those of corporate order, and often
has to be purged by public confession to a shaman or comparable person. The
reason for this, however, is not because ill-wishing is thought to be bad for the
agent, but because it is bad for other people, and for social harmony in general.
The witch is the paradigm of malevolence, and is the category of person most
commonly subject to public sanctions in even the simplest societies. In societies
of corporate order where generalized reciprocity prevails, it seems likely that
benevolent intentions (except between open enemies or hostile groups or to-
wards outsiders) are the norm.
I encountered an instance of this among the Konso when I was asked by a
man whom I did not know to give him some medicine for his little baby, which
had diarrhoea. It was not possible for me to visit the child, so I said to some
men sitting around This is very difficult for me. You know that babies die very
easily. If I give the father medicine and his baby dies you will all be angry with
me and say I killed it. No, they replied, if you give the baby medicine and it
dies, that is Gods will, but if you refuse to give medicine, that shows you do
not care if the baby dies or not. This seemed very reasonable; I gave the man
the medicine he asked for and his baby was cured. We see here a very different
attitude from that described by Read among the Gahuku-Gama. In that case,
quoted in the previous chapter, it will be recalled that despite Reads obvious
good intentions towards the wife of his best friend, the people were prepared
to judge only in terms of the effects of his actions and if she had died Read
would have had to leave.
Again, certain categories of person, notably children, are not held fully re-
sponsible for crimes, and this immunity is often extended to lunatics. The
Konyak Nagas recognize diminished responsibility and if a man known to be
insane sets fire to a house he is neither punished nor banished. Similarly chil-
dren who have caused a fire are not punished, but a fine is expected from their
father (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 91). Foreigners may also be treated as not
fully responsible especially when homicide is not involved. For example,
Mariner describes the theft of gnatoo (unprinted bark cloth) from a temple in
Tonga by two adolescents who were foreigners:
Two boys, about fourteen years of age, viz. Thomas Eversfield, an English-
man and John Roberts, a black native of Tortola (both belonging to the [ship]
Port-au-Prince), were detected stealing a bale of gnatoo from a consecrated
house. If they had been natives, they would instantly have been punished
with death: but the chiefs and matabooles took the matter into consideration,
and resolved, that, as they were foreigners, and so young and thoughtless,

the offence, this time, should be overlooked. Nevertheless, to appease the
anger of the god, to whom the house was consecrated, it was thought neces-
sary to address him humbly upon the subject. Accordingly, his priest, fol-
lowed by chiefs and matabooles, dressed in mats, with leaves of the Ifi tree
round their necks, in token of humility and sorrow, went in solemn proces-
sion to the house: they sat down before it and the priest addressed the divin-
ity to the following purpose: Here you see the chiefs and matabooles that
have come to thee, hoping that thou wilt be merciful; the boys are young,
and being foreigners, are not so well acquainted with our customs, and did
not reflect upon the greatness of the crime; we pray thee, therefore, not to
punish the people for the sins of these thoughtless youths: we have spared
them and hope that thou wilt be merciful and spare us. The priest then rose
up and they all returned in the same way they came. The chiefs, and particu-
larly Finow, most severely reprimanded the boys, and endeavoured strongly
to impress upon their minds the enormity of the offence, and that they owed
their lives solely to their presumed ignorance of the extent of their crime.
(Martin 1827 (1): 163)
It will be noted, however, that reparation for the act had still to be made to pro-
tect the people, albeit innocent, from the assumed consequences of the boys
offence.
Elias states that the Kavirondo of Kenya punish intentional wrongs by the
imposition of double the compensation normally payable for unintentional
wrongs, and even in the case of the Nuer who have no formal tribunals for dis-
pute settlement, Howell notes the relevance of intention in the assessment of
blood money: Theoretically, the question of intention does not enter into the
assessment of compensation because the principal object of the payment is to
restore the balance which has been disturbed, but Nuer do in fact take it into
consideration in the case of unintentional killing the indignation of the dead
mans kin will be less than in cases of intentional homicide and a compromise
more likely (Howell 1954: 41). Thung gwacka is the term for the compensation
paid for unintentional killing (ibid., 43) which is paid on a reduce scaled (ibid.,
54). Among the Konso accidental killing, tarsha, is distinguished from deliber-
ate homicide, and compensation will be accepted by the victims kin, whereas
blood vengeance is taken for murder.
Distinctions between acts in terms of intent are likely to become more
clearly drawn as legal systems become more highly developed. A good illustra-
tion of this is provided by the Ifugao of the Philippines who, despite the sim-
plicity of their political organization, have a sophisticated legal system. Gulad,
or intent, is probably the greatest factor in determining personal responsibility.
Thus, a deed committed without intent and without carelessness, is excused.
One has not, usually, even to make restitution (Barton 1919: 5859). The Ifugao
law clearly recognizes several grades of homicide:
1. The taking of life when there is an entire absence of both intent and
carelessness.
2. The taking of life when there is clearly the absence of intent but a de-
gree of carelessness, one third to two thirds of the full fine for homi-
cide.
246 Corporate Order
3. Intentional taking of the life of another, under the impression that he
is an enemy when in reality he is a co-villager, or a companion. Full
fine.
4. The taking of life by a person in a brawl or by an intoxicated or an in-
sane person. Full fine, or killed by unrelated co-villagers, especially if
the culprit is from another district.
Even here it will be observed that some compensation is still payable in all
cases except 1.
In many instances, of course, it is possible to infer at least certain standard-
ized types of motive from actions. Among the Lozi,
The judges, as always, speak in terms of doing wrong and doing right:
they concern themselves, even when they state the laws rules, with internal
moral states but these internal moral states and motivations are inferred
from the actions of parties. Motives follow logically from the actions of the
parties Guilt and innocence of motive are determined from the facts. In
this respect judicial psychology is an ethical psychology. It is not concerned
with an objective assessment of why people act as they do. It judges their ac-
tions and presumed motivations in comparison with legal and moral norms.
Here the judges work with both a legalistic and ethical psychology of a gen-
erally reasonable person, who has a general ethical psychology, and with a
set of psyches specified for the various categories of persons who come be-
fore them fathers, children, husbands, wives, and so forth. (Gluckman
1965: 230)
But the application of these standards of assessment to actions is not diffi-
cult or sophisticated, and there is no doubt that, as von-Frer Haimendorf says
of the Konyak Nagas, The result of an action is considered more important
than intention, and carelessness may be punished if it results in damage to the
community or the individual (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 90). So despite
these various qualifications to the thesis that in primitive society intentions are
irrelevant, intention is nevertheless assessed in terms of social stereotypes of
people and of acts, and one would agree with Gluckmans view that It appar-
ently takes a long period of development before, theoretically at least, intention
in the form of malice aforethought, mens rea, is assessed independently of a
particular context of social relations, and the nature of most offences becomes
the focus of legal investigations outside the pre-established status relations be-
tween the wrong and wrong doer (Gluckman 1965: 217).
Another factor of great importance in assessing responsibility in the uncen-
tralized societies we are considering is the cultural factor that the kin or resi-
dential group is the basis of individual security, and therefore injuries to the
individual automatically involve the group which supports him. Among the
Nuer In the relationship of individuals there is also the prevailing principle of
collective responsibility, so that in fact there is rarely an isolated individual
wrong or an isolated right. The strength of the right, or the extent of the wrong,
is qualified by the relationship of the parties concerned (Howell 1954: 23).
There is therefore an inevitable tendency for relationships in which groups are
involved, especially when physical hostilities occur, to take on a political qual-
ity in which responsibility is collective. We ourselves are familiar with this in

the context of war between states: State A bombs a town of State B, so B retali-
ates by bombing a town of A, whose members may have had nothing to do
with the bombing of Bs town. It should then be easy for us to see how the logic
of group relations on the much smaller scale of tribal society will also lead to
collective responsibility. Group survival demands retaliation: the simple notion
of reciprocal justice supports the return of evil for evil as well as good for good,
and vengeance for homicide is also a means of restoring the balance of num-
bers between groups. We must further remember that, since injuries cause re-
sentment which is believed to operate by mystical means to damage the com-
munity, retaliation or payment of compensation offer means of removing this
resentment. Moore suggests that strict liability can be interpreted as a means
of assuaging the resentment of those who have been injured or damaged in a
social situation in which injurer and injured must go on in a continuing social
relationship (Moore 1978: 94).
Homicide, too, is a special type of injury since the kin of a victim often have
a positive duty to avenge him: we find this in societies such as ancient Greece,
where the kin of the victim had the duty of prosecuting his killer (MacDowell
1963: 8), and even in early states the victims kin are frequently required to take
blood vengeance, or to demand compensation, without restraint by the king.
This was the case in Anglo-Saxon England, Abyssinia, and among the Barotse:
Stirke, one of the early administrators in Barotseland, wrote that there was no
fixed penalty for homicide before the arrival of the British, and no difference
was made between murder and manslaughter. The kin of the victim had the
penalty in their own hands, and could kill the offender, or fine him, or take him
as a slave, or let the matter drop (Gluckman 1965: 211). We recall that among
the Konso homicide was the only offence in which the kin had the sole respon-
sibility of action, and the duty of killing the murderer.
In Wales galanas [wergild] was payable for any death, including, said Mait-
land, [1911: 230] deaths which a modern jury would be inclined to refer
to misadventure, or to the act of God. This was the compensating payment,
to balance the debt of blood, as tribal peoples put it. The Welsh had an addi-
tional payment, saared, payable only for injuries wilfully inflicted. It was not
paid, as galanas were, where the slayer was an idiot or an infant. (Gluckman
1965: 211)
Homicide not only has a unique relationship to the kin group, by depriving
them of a member, but is frequently polluting, and here too, questions of inten-
tion cannot be decisive, since the pollution must be cleansed. The Konso be-
lieve that battle and the ensuing bloodshed pollute the earth, which must be
sacrificially purified by one of the regional priests, and we find it an extremely
widespread belief that homicide creates pollution. Ibo society, before the arri-
val of the white man, provides another example of strict liability even in cases
of accidental homicide. Gluckman quotes a case from the Nigerian novelist
Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart. The man Okonkwo fired his gun at the fu-
neral of Ezeuda, of his patrilineal clan. The gun exploded, and a piece of metal
killed a son of the deceased man.
The only course open to Okonkwo was to flee from the clan. It was a crime
against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it
248 Corporate Order
must flee from the land. The crime was of two kinds, male and female. Ok-
onkwo had committed the female, because it had been inadvertent. He could
return to the clan after seven years.
[That night Okonkwo fled with his family and his most valuable goods to the
family of his mothers clan.]
As soon as the day broke, a large crowd of men from Ezeudas quarter
stormed Okonkwos compound, dressed in garbs of war. They set fire to his
houses, demolished his red walls, killed his animals and destroyed his barn.
It was the justice of the earth goddess and they were merely her messengers.
They had no hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo. His greatest friend,
Obierika, was among them. They were merely cleansing the land which Ok-
onkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman. (Gluckman 1965: 210)
Even in the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, while an unintentional killer was
not subject to financial or physical penalties, he was nevertheless permanently
exiled, unless the victims family pardoned him, at their own discretion. If al-
lowed to return, the exile had still to be purified of his pollution (MacDowell
1963: 25). It seems likely that those who committed lawful homicide did not
require purification, but even this is not certain (ibid., 29).
But while the feud may produce a disregard for individual responsibility,
groups may be unwilling to risk their security for the sake of irresponsible
members, and such persons may be handed over for vengeance or expelled. So
for the Tale, Fortes points out that not all Tale jural relations are based on
the concept of collective responsibility. On the contrary, jural responsibility is
precisely fixed on particular individuals or exactly defined corporate units.
This is graphically summed up in many Tale maxims. Thus they say A pipe
sounds best in its owners mouth that is, an action should be answered for
by the person directly responsible for it (Fortes 1945: 230). In societies where
group membership is of paramount importance, we may therefore expect to
find that a mans kin are involved in the process of reparation, but where com-
pensation (rather than revenge killing) is concerned,
the paying group, where the group pays at all, is rarely larger than the
family or occasionally the extended family of the offender; it never embraces
all the hundreds or thousands with more or less tenuous blood relationships
to the wrong-doer. In all these cases of so-called group responsibility, the le-
gal liability is without question that of the offending individual alone, but
the discharge of that liability is very often the concern of all those close rela-
tives of his whom local opinion regards as morally bound to succour him.
(Elias 1956: 88).
When reparation is not in cash or kind but involves capital or corporal pun-
ishment, it is generally agreed that, as far as African states were concerned,
the first and only person subject to the particular punishment is the
criminal himself. Only if he is unavailable either because his kin are hiding
him and will not surrender him on demand, or because they have helped
him to escape or again because the offender is party to a conspiracy for the
commission of the crime alleged, is someone else, believed to be actively as-
sociated with the criminal or the crime, seized and punished instead. (Ibid.,
90)

We should not assume, moreover, that retaliation or demands for compen-
sation are the response to every injury in all primitive societies, for this would
ignore the basic distinction between us and them, between kin and non-kin,
so that wrongs done within the support group are either not avenged at all, as
in the case of homicide, or are subject to sanctions of a different kind from
those employed against outsiders, sanctions which are of the nature of moral
persuasion and the pressure of group opinion, in which force is used only as a
last resort against the recalcitrant wrong-doer (see Fortes 1949: 346, Moore
1978: 123).
Despite these qualifications, in assessing the nature of responsibility in so-
cieties of corporate order we must nevertheless recognize the overwhelming
importance of what we may call legalism, the insistence that all harm is harm,
and must be paid for. This is based on personal resentments and desire for re-
venge, on corporate responsibility, on extreme emphasis on the public aspect of
order and the pollution engendered by killing, and on the general inability to
probe the inner motives and intentions of others. This tendency carries over
even into early states, and will be considered in the next chapter.
c. Sin and supernatural retribution
We noted in Chapter III that according to Piaget the idea of sin is derived from
our experience of parental authority, what he calls the The filial origin of the
religious sense (1932: 88, 380): Disobedience the principle of all sin is a
breach of the moral relations between parent and child: some reparation is
therefore necessary. The pain inflicted thus seems to re-establish the relations
that had been interrupted, and in this way the idea of expiation becomes incor-
porated in the value of authority (ibid., 332). This, obviously, is strongly remi-
niscent of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but, equally obviously, that is a late
and culturally specific tradition. In fact we should be very cautious in suppos-
ing that the idea of sin in our own religious tradition is necessarily relevant to
other traditions, and especially to the religions of atomistic societies or those of
corporate order, other than in the trivial sense of acts which are punished by
supernatural beings. Syn in Old English simply meant wrong-doing in gen-
eral, and originally had no specifically religious connotation. According to
Reichard, The nearest Navaho approach to the concept of sin is being out of
order, lacking control (Reichard 1963: 124), and Needham remarks that
in the Christian tradition we have hypostatized sin in a way unknown to
the Hebrews, and we have thereby departed from a view of religious fault
which remains characteristic of other religions. In Austronesian languages,
for example, there is an extensive family of words related to *salaq and ex-
presses most generally the idea of an error or mistake Ordinarily the
response of alien religions to the question What ought I to do? is not shun
sin but avoid mistakes. (R. Needham 1981: 82)
Piaget claims that The morals and wishes of primitive deities are singularly
like the prevailing customs and rules of the community in question (1932: 385),
but this is simply not true. We noted in the previous chapter that supernatural
beings in atomistic societies are typically of great power, inscrutable, unpre-
dictable, often malevolent, and not much interested, for the most part, in the
250 Corporate Order
morality of human actions. In so far as such deities are concerned with order, it
is with the cosmic order, not society. But in all these respects they are therefore
quite different from human beings and, in particular, no parents in a hunter-
gatherer society would ever treat their children in the way that the gods are
supposed to treat men. So, too, with regard to the deities of societies of corpo-
rate order, von Frer-Haimendorf says, Many tribal gods are themselves of a
very ambiguous nature, and the conduct attributed to them is often far from
being morally exemplary. They may be cruel, deceitful, jealous and grasping
(von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 217). I can therefore see no reason whatever for
believing that the conception of deity has any connection with human experi-
ence of parental relations, and in particular I think that to use the word sin as
though it referred to some universal feature of religious thought, especially one
based upon parent-child relations, is likely to be thoroughly misleading.
So Evans-Pritchard translates the Nuer word nueer as sin, but the literal
meaning of nueer is given as to destroy or kill (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 183). I
was told that nueer is a sickness of the whole body which generally begins with
violent vomiting, but probably any serious sickness following the breach of a
thek taboo will be described as nueer (ibid., 102). The concept of respect, thek, is
central to what Evans-Pritchard calls sin. Thek involves a sense of deference,
constraint, modesty or shyness, or a mixture of these attitudes a feeling of
embarrassment (ibid., 180). In social relations it is expressed to in-laws by a
man covering his genitals in their presence, by a variety of rules on incest and
adultery, food and drinking taboos, burial, milking taboos, the prohibition on
sexual relations with a wife who is menstruating or suckling, and respect for
totems. Failure to show respect where there is a thek relationship is more than
a breach of decorum. It entails, to a greater or lesser extent, religious sanctions
(ibid., 180), that is nueer.
One of the most significant aspects of thek is that its consequences fall upon
the innocent, and Evans-Pritchard also concedes that From our point of view
the ethical content of what the Nuer regard as grave faults may appear to be
highly variable, and even altogether absent (ibid., 188). One must therefore
agree with de Heusch when he says that
The western concept of sin is inapplicable to Nuer thought. The nueer condi-
tion is specifically a disorder in the social body which manifests itself in an
attack on the integrity of a physical body either of the guilty person or of his
close kin (de Heusch 1985: 8) The category thek functions like an operator,
selecting a certain number of relations of symbolic incompatibility. As a
classificatory system it constitutes, along with kinship rules, the symbolic
foundation of all social structure. The intervention of the religious factor
comes later, as a sanction that strikes the person who transgresses the rule,
deliberately or not. (Ibid., 8) The rules of respect (thek) keep men and
things that should be separated well apart: in the global system, the celestial
divinity and the spirits of the air, or the ancestors, are separated from men.
Every one is in his own place when all goes well, but when an offence has
been committed, deliberately or accidentally, this symbolic order is threat-
ened at a precise point. The sacrificial debt must then be paid to put the sys-
tem back in place God or spirits in the sky; men, defined by the rituals of
prohibition, on earth. (Ibid., 1314)

Symbolic order, and its associated notions of purity and pollution in par-
ticular, is therefore essentially concerned with acts, and not with intentions at
all, and acts moreover, which are associated with the primary categories of life
and death, human and animal, biological and social, Gods and men, and the
proper relationships that should obtain between these categories. This sense of
order, embracing both the cosmic and social is, in the words of Gluckman,
typical of
a small scale society which sees the working of the universe as closely
involved in the particularities of its own social system and the personal rela-
tionships this contains This particularity is expressed in the specific con-
ventions and rules that are established to differentiate roles. It is therefore
characteristic of these societies that their rituals and ceremonies demand that
individuals act their prescribed and specific roles, perhaps directly, or in in-
verted patterns or by special symbolic actions, in order that they may receive
the good things of life. The demonstration of the moral elements in social re-
lationships affects the material world, as we think of it, for social and natural
relationships are inextricably intertwined. (Gluckman 1965: 237)
Gluckmans words are identical to Piagets conception of immanent justice,
which is in fact much closer to the sort of fact we are trying to explain here than
his idea of sin as disobedience to parental authority, since one of the features of
moral realism is the lack of distinction between the social and natural realms.
As Piaget said
In short, the universe is permeated with moral rules; physical regularity is
not dissociated from moral obligation and social rule What, then, do in-
tentions matter? The problem of responsibility is simply to know whether a
law has been respected or violated. Just as if we trip, independently of any
carelessness, we fall to the ground by the law of gravity, so tampering with
the truth, even unwittingly, will be called a lie and incur punishment. If the
fault remains unnoticed, things themselves will take charge of punishing us.
(Piaget 1952: 429)
Therefore, quite apart from the retributive punishments of God, the Konso
also believe that some acts automatically produce dangerous consequences,
and that anti-social acts in particular have a polluting quality which spoils the
land, and so requires periodic cleansing. In one region, Takadi, in the first year
of the new cycle of the age-system, the Timba Tula (the travelling of the drums)
takes place. At this time a turtle is killed, and its shell is filled with earth from a
dead mans grave. This is given to a man from another part of Konso, who
travels slowly through all of Takadi, taking about three months, to purify the
land. (Hallpike 1972: 199200).
Among the Barotse who, like the Konso, believe in divine retribution for
wrong-doing, There are also breaches of ritual rules which are believed to
bring down automatic punishment, even if the breach is apparently inadver-
tent. I did not ask the people whether they ascribe [guilty intentions] to the
wrong doer in this circumstance. They spoke of the defaulter as doing
wrong, and they did not seem to show any concern with the motivations that
lay behind the wrong doings (Gluckman 1965: 222). According to Jackson, the
252 Corporate Order
Kuranko notion of hake (possibly a borrowing from Arabic haqyqun, conse-
quence),
is a form of retributive justice according to which ill befalls a person who
does ill to those who do him good. It is believed, for instance, that if you do
wrong to some innocent person then the offence will hit back at you. The
other persons hake will come out in you that is to say, the hake of the of-
fended person will cause you to fall ill or have bad luck. Hake thus mediates
a restoration of the moral balance. It does so in ways which cannot be fully
explained, but it is clear that the offended person does not need to know that
he has been wronged or slighted. Hake operates independently of mans
knowledge or will. (Jackson 1982: 29)
There is widespread evidence, therefore, that offences against order, some
involving personal wrongs and some of purely ritual nature, cause mystical
damage which must be put right, either by human or supernatural means. But
as community standards of conduct become more clearly defined the gods do
seem to become regarded as upholders of these standards, and as punishing
those who violate them. As von Frer-Haimendorf says of the Konyak Nagas:
The belief in a supernatural guardian of human conduct seems to coincide
with the emergence of a sense of public concern with the doings of individ-
ual members of the community. While in the chaotic conditions of a society
in permanent flux such as that of the Daflas, individuals can go their own
way without being controlled and disciplined by public opinion, the Konyak
is very much bound by a code of behaviour enforced by the members of his
own in-group. And the recognition that the representatives of the commu-
nity and not only those personally wronged are entitled to restrain law-
breakers finds an expression in the idea of a divine figure punishing trans-
gressions of the accepted order. Such a belief is still far removed from the
concept of a total moral order within which every act either increases or di-
minishes a persons store of merit, but it is a considerable departure from the
idea of social expediency and conformity. (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 91)
The Konyak believe that Gawang can see and hear everything. He not only
upholds taboos forbidding nobles and commoners eating from the same dish,
but punishes liars, thieves, the violent, perjury, and the killing and selling of
slaves. While in the past the Konyak bought slaves for sacrifice, Gawang is
supposed to disapprove. He is also said to be angry if young people behave
like dogs or monkeys by sleeping today with one and tomorrow with another
girl (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 95). He is guardian of the oath (ibid., 100) and
withholds sons from men and women indulging in adultery (ibid., 92).
The Tongan gods were believed to exercise a general supervision of human
conduct in this life:
They believe that there is a power and intelligence superior to all that is hu-
man, which is able to control their actions, and which discovers all their
most secrets thoughts. (Martin 1827(1): 140) They firmly believe that the
gods approve of virtue and are displeased with vice; that every man has his
tutelar deity, who will protect him as long as he conducts himself as he
ought to do; but, if he does not, will leave him to the approaches of misfor-
tune, disease and death. (Ibid., 141)

The Konso believe that the sky God, Waqa, although remote, is nevertheless
concerned with the deeds of men, and is thought to withhold the rain from
towns where there is too much quarrelling. One text says A man may say, I
am tough, who cares what God says?, and he kills people and robs them, and
beats children on the road, and brings quarrels and accusations into the ward,
and has no fear of God. While this person is behaving like this, killing and rob-
bing, God is watching him and his evil. He begets little and his children die,
and he has no son, the evil-doer. Everyone says of him, the sinner is dead,
God in truth has killed him. This person sinned and God killed him. This is a
mark, which I interpret to mean in this context, a mark of Gods action among
men.
But one of the striking features of the societies which we are considering is
that, while in every case the soul is believed to survive death, yet even where
the gods are believed to exercise some moral supervision over the living there
is very little that can be said to constitute a system of rewards and punishments
in the next life for peoples deeds here on earth. The Konso have no idea of
Waqas punishments and rewards in the next life according to peoples actions
in this, and Kluckhohn and Leighton record of the Navaho that they have no
sense whatsoever that this life is a preparation for another existence. Indeed,
except for the (by no means universally accepted) view that witches and sui-
cides live apart in the after world, there is no belief that the way one lives on
this earth has anything to do with his fate after death (Kluckhohn & Leighton
1974: 314). (Brandt however notes that Older Hopi tradition limited punish-
ment after death to a small number of offences, such as murder, witchcraft,
adultery and a first marriage to a previously married person (Brandt 1954:
73).) Mariner says that the Tongans believed that punishments are visited upon
wrong-doers only in this life: the natives believe in no future place of reward,
but what a man would equally possess, whether he lives virtuously or not, and
they have no idea of a future state of punishment of any kind or degree what-
soever (Martin 1827 (I): 139).
One factor which may inhibit the idea of punishment in the next world is
that the life of the spirits is quite different from the social life of the living, and
one also receives the general impression from ethnographies is that people do
not claim to know very much about the next life. In so far as the ghosts are no
longer within the corporate order of the living it is expectable that they would
also be outside its rules. A further consideration which is likely to be important
is that only when there develop strong concerns with motives and intentions as
an essential aspect of morality can acts be linked closely with the fate of the
soul. It is because the soul becomes associated in this way with the inner life of
morality that it then becomes possible and meaningful to represent it as being
punished or rewarded after death. This is also related to the question of shame
and guilt, which we shall consider in the next section.
254 Corporate Order
4. Moral Thinking
a. Dilemmas
In corporate societies a persons obligations are usually fairly clearly deter-
mined by his social roles, and in these societies dominated by status the indi-
vidual is not usually in much doubt therefore about what he should do in the
ordinary circumstances of daily life, and general expectations are defined by
traditional norms. In other words, the social order itself provides the frame-
work of moral ideas, and so it is essentially impossible for people to transcend
that order by developing more abstract criteria of human relations. Dilemmas
in such societies can therefore only be resolved within the context of the actual
social structure. Legal issues, such as the ownership of property or claims over
a woman in marriage, are the typical dilemmas and a number of precepts and
norms will be available for settling such disputes, which are won by whoever
can satisfy the mediators that his claim is best supported by one of these prin-
ciples, such as priority of occupation, or seniority of birth. In the courts of the
Kpelle of Liberia, The primary technique for winning a court case seems to be
to produce an argument demonstrating conformity to tradition that the other
party cannot answer (Gay and Cole 1967: 24). Their discussion of traditional
folk-problems shows the same characteristic:
One problem involved three men in the forest, a trap-maker, a palm-wine
producer, and a weaver they attempted to capture a woman whose foot-
prints the trapper had spotted. They tried to take her by force, but could not.
So the trap-maker offered her meat, which she refused. But when the weaver
offered her cloth, she accepted and went with the men. The question is to
which man did she belong? Basically, the argument in favor of the trap-
maker was that he had been first in the forest, had brought the other two
men to the site for the village, and thus had primary rights over the produce
of the area, including the woman. As evidence in his favor it was claimed
that the first hunter to see an animal owns it, even though another hunter
may actually kill it. It was pointed out by the trap-makers advocates that he
had first found the womans footprint, and had tracked her down [When
it came to the weaver] Someone suggested the analogy of a rice farm. The
supporters of the trap-maker said that the man who cleared the farm should
claim the rice. Supporters of the weaver said that the man who harvests the
rice owns it. At this point the argument began to center on one of the possi-
ble traditional values, and several persons were of the opinion that even if
the palm-wine producer alone had captured the woman, he should give her
to the weaver, who had customary rights. It was at approximately this point
that the discussion ended, with the decision of the group given by a village
elder in favor of the trap-maker, on the basis of traditional privilege. (Ibid.,
26)
African dilemmas often spring from riddles in which one has to decide who
or what is the stronger. In many cases the question is left open, while in others
solutions are proposed. For example, One day God picked up a man and tied
him to a star by a cord. The mans first son had sharp eyes and saw his father.
The second threw his baton, breaking the cord. The third caught his father
Moral Thinking 255

when he fell (Tale 6: 1, Bascom 1975: 28). Such stories often end with a ques-
tion like Who did the most?, or Whose medicine was strongest?, but there is
also the possibility, as in this case, of asking Which of his sons should the fa-
ther thank?, and so of introducing a moral element:
Three brothers heard of a beautiful woman who refused all her suitors. The
eldest brother asked his father for money for bride-wealth so that he could
try to marry her. The second also asked for money so that he could try if his
elder brother failed. And the third asked for money so that he could try if
both his brothers failed. The father gave each 1,000 rings, and they set out
together and parted at a crossroads. Each found a magic object a charm to
live, a charm to disappear, and a charm to see from a distance and they
met again. One used his charm and saw that the woman was near death; an-
other made them disappear and reach her immediately; the third cured the
woman of her illness. Her father gave her to the three young men, but when
they returned home they began to fight over her. Their father asked the
woman which brother she wished for a husband, but she did not know. The
father asked other people to settle the dispute. Which of these three young
men is the owner of the woman? Answer: the eldest, who conceived the
idea, but he should compensate his brothers for their co-operation. (Tale 36:
26, Bascom 1975: 50)
In variants of this, three brothers save their sister, and their father only has a
single valuable ring with which to reward them, and it is held that it should go
to the eldest son, as his fathers heir. In most solutions it seems to be assumed
that there is a single true owner, and the issue of compensation is not raised.
The moral problems which confront people in these stories do not therefore
require a search for general rules to solve personal ethical dilemmas; the di-
lemmas are really reflections on causality, ownership, co-operation, and con-
tradictions within the social order. The theme of co-operation is explored in
stories such as these: The stomach told the foot that it wanted all the food for
itself. The foot did not argue, and the stomach ate up all the food. Afterwards a
man wounded an elephant. The foot told the stomach to go and eat it, but the
stomach could not. The elders heard the case and gave their verdict in favor of
the foot (73: 1, ibid., 89).
The pitfall claimed that it had killed an animal that had fallen into it. Its
spikes did not argue but went away. Then a wild boar fell into the pit, but it
climbed out and ran away. The spikes returned and told the pitfall, You say
you kill all the animals, but you did not kill that one, did you? The pitfall
admitted that it was not successful alone, and they agreed to work together.
(63: 1, Ibid., 85)
A further theme in these stories is that of chains of causality, and the prob-
lem is to decide who was to blame or who owns the thing or person involved:
A man cleared the undergrowth for a garden but abandoned it. A second
man saw the unfinished garden, felled the large trees, did part of the burn-
ing, and then abandoned it. A third man finished the burning, raked, took
away the tree stumps, and planted fruit. When they were ripe, he guarded
them and sold them. The first and second men claimed that the fruit was
theirs, and the elders intervened. How will the palaver be settled? Answer:
256 Corporate Order
the one who began the garden owns the fruit because without him the others
would not have thought of continuing. (119: 1, Ibid., 126)
There are also many folk-tales which are not in the dilemma genre, and
where individuals are not faced with choices about how they should act. On
the contrary, the protagonists in these stories do things which are unambigu-
ously bad according to the accepted moral code of their society such as be-
having selfishly, treacherously, or ungratefully, and certain unpleasant conse-
quences follow from this. The stories do not therefore involve problems of in-
dividual choice but are imaginative explorations of contradictions in the social
order, often involving status. Often no explicit moral is drawn but if it is it is
likely to be strongly prudential, in such forms as This is what happens to bad
people, or your sins will find you out, so be careful how you treat others.
With reference to Kuranko folk tales Jackson says, It is often the case that a
young boy has more sense than his elders, or a woman has greater courage and
perseverance than a man (Jackson 1982: 2526). The contrast between personal
qualities and status expectations is therefore an important theme in many folk
tales, and a further theme is the contrast between appetite and duty: Rice
shortages drive people to shamefully anti-social behaviour: lying about their
real resources, concealing rice reserves, using trickery to avoid having to share
rice with needy kin or neighbors. Hunger is regarded as inimical to the social
and moral order as well as to physical well being (ibid., 74). In one Kaguru folk
tale Beidelman records that during a famine a young man observes an elder
secretly eating some food which he has concealed, and confronts him with this
discovery. Here, the ambiguity is between the ideal of elderhood and the actual
behaviour of an elder (Beidelman 1986: 164). In another story a young man
marries and boasts to his wifes kin that in his own home he only eats meat and
milk, not peas and other vegetables, which is a lie. One day he goes home to
visit his kin, and eats his normal meal of peas. On his way back to his wifes
home he defecates in the bush, and his faeces, which are mainly peas, become
animated and follow him to the house of his in-laws, so that his lie is discov-
ered and he is greatly shamed. (ibid., 166) It is implied here that the boy should
become more like a kinsmen to his affines if he wants a proper marriage. But
this is impossible: affines become like kin, but, because one copulates with
them they are never complete kin; that is why there may not entirely trusted.
Because of the sexual connection there is said always to be some shame in the
relations between affines and this, in turn, inhibits truly candid expressions of
what one wants and thinks (ibid., 166). Another story explores
the central dilemma of Kaguru society: how can one retain the essential
loyalties of both men and women in a matrilineage if one allows either to
depart to settle elsewhere with a spouse? Furthermore, while people seek
marriage and say this is good, after women bear children it may be to their
advantage to promote ties with their brothers at the cost of those towards
their own husbands The story offers no solution; none exists, and the
Kaguru know that. (Ibid., 173)
There is no doubt that by the use of riddles and imaginative story telling in
which animals, in particular, take on human form and the action occurs in the
bush outside the bounds of conventional society, it is possible to develop alle-
Moral Thinking 257

gorical commentaries upon social relations that transcend the particularities of
status obligations within societies. The creative imagination, and the genre of
the story in particular, have been of the first importance in the development of
moral understanding, and we shall find that they retain this importance in the
emergence of principled morality in the great religious traditions of the world.
But the creation of imaginary relationships in stories is not really the same
as hypothetical thought, as Beidelman maintains (1986: 183 n.3). Hypothetical
thought, in the sense that I am using it, is formal operational thought that in-
volves for example the ability to conceptualize ones whole society in the man-
ner described by Connell (1971), and to think about social relations in an articu-
late, explicit, and analytic fashion. This is extremely difficult in the context of
corporate order, where institutions have a traditional form that has not been
consciously imposed by anyone, and which is deeply imbued with symbolic
values, and where there are no specialist thinkers. If this type of society has
presented so many analytical problems to anthropologists, it is hardly surpris-
ing that the people themselves should not be able to understand the working of
their own society. Jackson remarks that the Kuranko do not usually verbalize
the meanings contained within the narratives (Jackson 1982: 52), and in Bei-
delmans study of Kaguru stories one of the most obvious features is the lack of
articulate analysis of their meaning by the people themselves. However disin-
clined Kaguru are to explain their stories, these serve expressive purposes,
even though they are only vaguely realized by Kaguru themselves (Beidelman
1986: 161). After providing us with six myths and a commentary upon their
meaning, Beidelman says The interpretations which I present for these tales
are debatable. No one can be sure what these stories really mean. I believe that
my interpretations are valid even if not exhaustive. Support from my argu-
ments does not rest on points raised only in this chapter but on the larger set of
interpretations repeated through all the chapters in this volume (ibid., 181 n.1).
Beidelman is a very acute and scholarly ethnographer, and his interpreta-
tions in fact carry a good deal of conviction. My point, however, is that he is
bringing to the interpretation of the Kaguru stories and general culture a set of
cognitive skills which the Kaguru themselves do not possess in particular, the
ability to conceptualize the whole of Kaguru culture, and to use a range of ab-
stract sociological concepts in its analysis. In the same way Evans-Pritchards
analysis of Azande ideas on witchcraft, oracles and magic provide us with an
articulate analysis of the whole system of their thought which the Azande
themselves could not have produced.
But stories of this type can be understood at a number of different cognitive
levels, and we must not assume that all members of Kaguru or Kuranko society
understand them in the same way. For example, Jackson maintains that one
feature of Kuranko stories is the transcendence of status relations by the imagi-
nation of contrasts between personal attributes in social roles. But some indi-
viduals are much more aware of this than others. One of his informants was
the very intelligent man Keti Ferenke, who spoke as follows:
Even if a person is a child, but behaves like an elder, then he is an elder. If he
thinks like an elder then he is an elder. Even if a person is old and senior, if
he behaves like a child then he is a child. Therefore, this matter of seniority
258 Corporate Order
comes not only from the fact that one is born first, or from the fact that one is
big and strong; it also concerns the manner in which a person behaves and
does things. For example, you will see some old men who have nothing;
they are not called big men (morgo ba, elders). But some young men have
wealth; because of that they are called morga ba. Therefore, whatever God
has put in your head, that would make you what you are. I am speaking
now, but some of these words of wisdom (kuma kore) which I am explaining
to you are not known by everyone. (Jackson 1982: 110)
Indeed, Keti Ferenkes discernment does not seemed to have been generally
shared. Other informants tend to play down such attributes as cleverness, pre-
ferring a fairly doctrinaire definition of fisa mantiye [status superior-
ity/inferiority], which emphasizes birth order position alone (ibid., 111). The
evidence therefore indicates that for most people in such societies moral
thought is still thoroughly embedded in the categories of social status and ob-
ligation.
b. Moral concepts
In these societies moral thought is dominated by images of the traditional so-
cial order the nine clans, the sacred drums, the poqallas [lineage heads], the
generational hierarchy, and so on: The Nandi have a word karuret, for which
the nearest English word is custom; this word is perhaps derived from the
verb rur, become mature, indicating something that has grown and become
accepted by all as a standard of behaviour. karuret does not mean law in the
sense of an ordinance (Huntingford 1953: 100). What people should and
should not do in such a traditional scheme of social order is prescribed in terms
of status, and we saw in the last section that typical dilemmas deal with con-
tradictions between status obligations and personal qualities, or deciding
which traditional rule is relevant in a particular instance. But in these tradi-
tional societies, dominated by corporate obligations, there is little or no scope
for exercising authority in ways that are clearly anti-social or dishonest, and so
a whole range of dilemmas with which we are familiar in our kind of society
can scarcely occur at all.
For example, in the modern Konso capital of Karat a young Christian Konso
was employed as a government store-keeper. One day, he was asked to sign a
receipt for some barrels of food-oil that had not in fact been delivered to the
store, but had been stolen before they had arrived. He told the missionary that
he had wrestled the whole night with God, and quoted to him a biblical text
about things which could be a benefit for a time, but which then proved to be a
curse. He finally refused to sign the receipt and lost his job. In this new type of
urban, politically centralized society it is possible for the authorities to act in
dishonest ways that create severe moral dilemmas for the virtuous individual.
But is it hard to imagine a comparable type of dilemma in traditional Konso
society because no one would have had the power to dismiss someone from a
job, and there were no paid jobs anyway, and resources were not distributed
by a central agency. It is therefore not surprising that the analysis of duty and
virtue in ways that are called for in this example is not of much relevance in the
traditional type of society, and for this reason we do not find such distinctively
Moral Thinking 259

ethical terms as duty, moral obligation, justice, or virtue in the Konso language,
and Mariner did not find any of them in the Tongan language, either:
we discover no words essentially expressive of some of the higher quali-
ties of human merit, as virtue, justice, humanity, nor of the contrary, as vice,
injustice, cruelty, etc. They have indeed expressions for these ideas, but they
are equally applicable to other things. To express a virtuous or good man,
they would say tangata lille, or tangato loto lille, a man with a good mind; but
the word lille, good (unlike our word virtuous), is equally applicable to an
axe, canoe, or anything else: again, they have no word to express humanity,
mercy, etc. but hofo, which rather means friendship, and is a word of cordial
salutation: neither have they any word expressive of chastity, except nofo
mow, remaining fixed or faithful, and which in this sense is only applied to a
married woman, to signify her fidelity to her husband; but in another sense
it is applicable to a warrior, to signify his loyalty and attachment to a chief.
(Martin 1827(1): 140)
In Konsinya good, paxaara, is the most general commendation, and it can
be applied to people, animals, things, and so on. aneeqa, bad, is likewise the
most general term of condemnation, and is equally broad a bad man, a bad
path, etc.. So these terms have no specifically moral connotation, any more than
good or bad in English. Thus inanta paxaara means a beautiful girl rather
than a virtuous one. The word afaya can be used in some contexts rather than
paxaara. So the translation of Gospel is ototase afaya, glad tidings or news, and
Joseph when referred to in Mt. 1.19 as a just man for not repudiating Mary is
called in Konsinya namafaya, a nice person. But they can also refer to a good
idea as dikatafaya, or a good story-teller as torampytafaya. One would say that
paxaara is emotionally neutral, whereas afaya is warmer in connotation: perhaps
the Americanism great, as in a great guy, a great idea comes closest to its
meaning.
Despite diligent inquiries during my second visit to the Konso, I could not
discover any term for justice, just, or fair. There is a word orissa, meaning
an answer, response, or repayment of some kind, which would be close to
Tauade kakit (though the Konso have another word for revenge), but orissa
does not have a comparable importance in Konso culture. There is no tradi-
tional word for judgement, because poqallas did not issue judgements, and
the modern term firata is from the Amharic firt. Nor are there words for to
owe, debt, or promise. The words for straight, qajeele, and upright, irixata,
can be used only in a physical and not in a moral sense. Interestingly, the word
for right or correct, liketa, is from the Amharic likk. If there had been a word
for right in the traditional Konso language it is hard to see why it should have
been supplanted by an Amharic loan-word.
This not of course to say that they do not recognise many of the implications
of justice and injustice. So if someone is driving a hard and unfair bargain, the
person at the receiving end may say You are eating me, i.e. You are exploit-
ing me, and under the general heading of orissa they would consider it appro-
priate to repay good for good, but these have nor been combined in any gen-
eral conception of the idea of justice.
In relation to Homeric society, Havelock says
260 Corporate Order
I suggested that if justice be identified as the central principle of modern
morality, conceptually defined, oral societies could get on very well without
it. What they did rely on for cohesion as does any society was a set of
proprieties, of general rules of behaviour which in sum total constitute what
is right. We may now be forced to admit that these rules are not abstracted
from what is done that is, they occur incidentally and they need not add
up to a system which can be consistently formulated. (Havelock 1978: 53)
This applies very well to societies like the Konso. They would entirely agree
with the statement that
The man who is dikaios [just] refuses to break the conventions (in the higher
sense of that word) out of self-interest or for any other purpose. He is under
obligations to his fellows which he acknowledges and fulfils. This is a pat-
tern of thought from which, if it be not itself accorded the name ethical, an
ethical approach can emerge. It is not arbitrary; it acknowledges in some
sense that righteous action is social action and that relationship is the basis
of morality; and it bears within itself the seeds of fruitful development. (Fer-
guson 1958: 18)
So, as Havelock says, Those who are unjust are those who behave wan-
tonly, recklessly, in disregard of the rules (Havelock 1978: 183).
In Greek and Roman history, the concept of justice slowly evolved from
specific legal roots of a much more concrete and restricted nature than the phi-
losophical term in its full development. As Benveniste says
Latin dico and Greek dike together imply the idea of a formulated law which
lays down what is to be done in every particular situation. The judge Hom.
dikas-polos is the one who keeps the formulary and pronounces (dicit) au-
thoritatively the appropriate sentence. (Benveniste 1973: 385) But the ethi-
cal notion of justice, such as we understand it, is not included in dike. This
has gradually evolved from the circumstances in which dike was invoked to
put an end to abuses. This traditional legal formula becomes the expression
for justice itself when dike intervenes to put an end to the power of bia, vio-
lence. (Ibid., 338)
In Konso society, however, the legal system is not as highly developed as it
was in ancient Greece and Rome, and there were no judges or formal judge-
ments.
In the same way, there is no word in the Konso language which can be
translated as virtue. Xalpeeta means character or behaviour, much like thika
or mores, but it has not been developed to mean anything like general excel-
lence as a human being, or morally good, that could be used in ethical argu-
ment, or be the subject of such a question as What is virtue? They can, of
course, give lists of virtues socially desirable attributes such as good temper,
generosity, or bravery and their opposites: a soft man, afraid of hard work; a
coward; a brave man; a liar, and so on. Brandt, for example, gives the following
list of Hopi virtues: a good family man, agreeable in social relations polite
and kind; not dangerous, peaceable; cooperative; generous; honest; modest;
cheerful; manly and brave; a good worker. (Brandt 1934: 138) Ladd says that
among the Navaho
Moral Thinking 261

A good man everybody likes. In general he is rich, honest, kind, generous,
and cares for himself, for his livestock and for others. A bad man nobody
likes. Everybody laughs at him, and he would be poor and have raggy
clothes. A bad man is one who puts you in trouble, and, even worse is a
mean man who would hit you or steal from you, and so on. (Ladd 1952:
214)
According to Kluckhohn and Leighton, also writing of the Navaho,
The positive behaviors which are advocated centre on affectionate duty to
relatives, pleasant manners to all, generosity, self-control. It has already been
pointed out that the widest ideal of human conduct for the people is to act
to everybody as if they were your own relatives In short, one must keep
ones temper; one must warmly and cheerfully do ones part in the system of
reciprocal rights and obligations, notably those which prevail between kins-
folk. (Kluckhohn and Leighton 1974: 298) In sum, the Navaho concept of
goodness stresses productiveness, ability to get along with people, de-
pendability and helpfulness, generosity in giving and spending. Badness
mean stinginess, laziness, being cruel to others, being destructive. The con-
cept of values stresses possessions and their care, health, skills which are
practically useful. Concerning all these topics the people are fully articulate.
(Ibid., 303)
Again, For Apa Tanis, social prestige and merit are acquired by working
within their system, and by benefiting ones clansmen and co-villagers. The
man of integrity, energy and wisdom in discussion is chosen to represent his
clan on the village council, and rich men are expected to live up to their wealth
by sacrificing cattle and distributing the meat (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967:
80). Similar lists of virtues could be paralleled from innumerable ethno-
graphies, and they all point to the same conclusion, which is that in such socie-
ties virtue and social success are essentially indistinguishable. The good na-
tured, hard working, honest man, who nevertheless asserts himself in defence
of his kin group and is heroic in battle will be rich, admired, and full of honour.
The Konso groups of wooden statues to commemorate an important man as-
sert the basic identification of virtue with the socially desirable: the hero stands
in the centre flanked by his wives and his emasculated enemies, while at his
feet are the stones representing the fields he has bought as the reward of his
hard work, and perhaps also the figure of a lion or leopard he has killed in the
hunt.
But there is no attempt to integrate these lists of good qualities into a coher-
ent conception of excellence as a human being as such. Referring to pre-Islamic
tribal society, Izutsu says, There were, as we have seen, a number of recog-
nized moral virtues. But these were just there as membra disjecta, without any
underlying principle to support them (Izutsu 1966: 106).
Nor do the Konso have a term that could accurately be translated as duty
or moral obligation. kota, work or job, is similar to the Latin officium. Like
officium, kota could, in a modern Christian context, perhaps be given a more
generalised significance: What is the kota of man?: To obey the Ten Com-
mandments, but traditionally it is not used in this way. Our notions of duty
and moral obligation assume the situation of an individual moral agent who is
262 Corporate Order
trying to decide which of a number of conflicting alternatives he should choose
in the light of some general ethical rule. But for the Konso, like the Kuranko
and the Kaguru, this is not a typical situation at all. They know quite well what
they are expected to do, and the only problem is living up to conventional re-
quirements.
Perhaps the best example of a general ethical principle when we are consid-
ering our duty is the Golden Rule, but one does not find any explicit formula-
tion of the Golden Rule in these societies. Indeed, Ladd says of the Navaho that
One characteristic form of argument occurring in our own ethical discourse is
completely absent, namely the appeal to the listener to be disinterested or
sympathetic: if you were in his place how would you like it? or look at it
from the others point of view(Ladd 1957: 272). The Konso have encountered
the Golden Rule as the result of Christianity, and it is very instructive to see
how they construe it. The following is a commentary by an educated Konso
Christian, Ato Korra Gara, on Mt. 7.12, Do to others what you want them to do
to you:
Do not wish the harm that you dont want for yourself to happen to others.
What you wish a man to do to you, do the same for him. That means, for ex-
ample, if you have a problem, and want someone to help you with that
problem, you help him in the same way. As you have a problem, and ask for
help about it, dont forget that everyone who has a problem needs help like
you.
It will be seen that the basic emphasis here is not the individual who is search-
ing for a general rule of how to behave to others, and who thus mentally
changes places with them. On the contrary, the exposition (which was enthusi-
astically agreed with by those Konso to whom I read it) is firmly based on the
realities of social life and the need for mutual assistance in a small, face-to-face
community, and is essentially prudential in spirit.
Rather than thinking in terms of abstract rules of duty, they think in terms
of the general way of life, in which everyone does what is conventionally ex-
pected of them. God is seen as maintaining the moral as well as the physical
order, so that if people do well they will prosper: I heard the elders of long
ago. They said, Let people listen to one another. If they listen, God will send
rain, and ripen the sorghum, and people will be born They bring back a
woman from another lineage, and when she has settled in she obeys her hus-
band and tills the family fields, and brings fodder for the cattle , and so on.
Such common expressions as porra koteeta, the way to behave, akama achaato,
how you should live, or aaka tampeeta, ancestral custom (from the Amharic
damb, custom) are essentially appeals to peoples knowledge of this conven-
tional order in which the way to behave does not need detailed individual
calculations with reference to abstract criteria. Since the responsibilities [to
different categories of kin] are accepted without question, many ethical prob-
lems, which in our society are settled by individual moral judgment, hardly
arise. With us, questions of parental authority, support of the incompetent, dis-
tribution of wealth (including generosity and hospitality) have constantly to be
solved anew. The Navaho can depend upon his social code to settle most of
them; individual judgment plays a small role (Reichard 1963: 124). We must
Moral Thinking 263

remember that our words duty, obligation, ought, and should began their
philosophical careers by denoting very specific social relations between indi-
viduals in status-dominated societies.
So, among the Hopi,
Ayawat has been listed as equivalent to duty, but some informants held that
it applies only to traditional responsibilities of a chief. Hence one could not
say that it was a womans ayawat to go and care for her sick mother It is
clear, however, that even if Hopi have no specific phrase which corresponds
to your duty is, there are various expressions which can function similarly
in a particular situation, such as it is ka-anta [wrong] not to. (Brandt 1954:
90)
The Konso, too, would certainly say that failure to care for a sick mother
was bad, and that the person who was guilty of this was an alimalita, one who
does not fulfil his or her obligations, to a parent in particular, but this notion of
alimalita cannot be generalized, any more than ayawat, to moral obligation of all
kinds.
The most important word of general ethical significance among the Konso is
dukaata, truth, true, and it has many of the connotations of duty and jus-
tice. Apart from meaning a statement that is factually correct, dukaata implies
the opposite of the lie, and therefore connotes honesty, and uprightness in gen-
eral. The Konso are thoroughly typical of societies of corporate order and early
states in the great importance they ascribe to this moral concept. Truth, as we
noted earlier, is one of the essential facets of order: when all tell the truth har-
mony is possible, whereas the lie is one of the main roots of disorder and con-
fusion; the true is also the predictable, the reliable, that which makes co-
operation possible, and impersonal conduct connotes sincerity and absence of
self-seeking. The relation of truth to morality is brought out very well by Jack-
son in his account of Kuranko moral thought:
Like other Mande-speaking peoples, the Kuranko sometimes define them-
selves linguistically as speakers of the true/pure language (kan gbe). The
word gbe (white, clear, pure, true) is also used in expressions which refer to
openness and integrity in human relations. The hearts of those who live to-
gether should be open, say the Kuranko. A person whose heart is pure (i.e.
whose actions and words are without ulterior motive) is happy. People say
of an honest person, This is a true person and one may declare ones
trust in a friend with the words I open myself for you. Enemies and
aliens are called morgo fiennu (lit. black person), and if a neighbour behaves
in an underhand way one might comment Do you see? His way of doing
things is the way of aliens. Alternatively, an honest person may be de-
scribed as straight up and down (morgo telne), by contrast with a devious
person (morgo dugune) whose words are crooked The epithet latelan
means straightforwardness. It implies a fidelity between intention and ac-
tion In ritual practice whiteness and straightness imply harmony between
man and man, and between man and ancestors. (Jackson 1982: 28)
For the Tongan language Mariner provides the following related terms:
Tonoo or totonoo: manifest, clear, distinct, direct, even, in a row, upright, candid,
264 Corporate Order
open, sincere, precise, punctual. Tonooia: guiltless, in the right. (Martin 1827(II):
lxxxix-xc)
In the Konso language dehamta, discussion, links the concept of truth to that
of peace, nakayta, when all speak with one voice, and which implies not only
social harmony but general prosperity, so that to have peace implies to be
well.
The lack of such abstract ethical terms as duty, moral obligation, justice, and
virtue in the vocabulary of the Konso and the other societies we have been con-
sidering does not of course show that they have no idea of morality. This
would be an absurd conclusion. The point of this excursion into language has
simply been to show that their moral ideas are either based on such concepts of
order as truth, peace, or custom, or diffused among a number of fairly specific,
concrete terms, such as generous, cheerful, brave, etc., and that it would there-
fore be extremely difficult to use the Konso language, for example, as it is at
present, in any form of discussion about ethical questions, or to resolve the
moral dilemmas within the social order, as, for example, the conflicting values
of bravery and peace, between generalized and balanced reciprocity, self-
seeking and duty to neighbours, or the status of outsiders.
Terms like justice, duty, obligation and virtue are only necessary when we
are thinking at a higher order of abstraction, and there is a parallel here with
other types of abstract words which are also lacking in societies of this level of
development. I have in mind the general absence of words for the dimensions,
such as height, length, breadth, and weight in primitive languages, and cer-
tainly the absence of any word for dimension itself. While we find that there
are words for long, tall, short, wide, narrow, light, and heavy, the dimensions
themselves are not named for the good reason that members of such cultures
do not have to solve problems involving the abstraction and the comparison of
objects in terms of the relations in different dimensions. They do not have to
say This is twice as long as that, but only half the width, because they have no
units with which to express these differences, and no understanding of how to
compute volume or area.
So, too, it is only when we are considering abstract questions about what it
is to be a human being as such independent of status that we need to assess the
nature of virtue, or the relative importance of justice, duty, and utility in a sys-
tem of ethics. All these ethical concepts, then, are mutually dependent in the
context of discussion about the principles of human conduct, and it is precisely
this sort of discussion which has no means of developing in the context of cor-
porate order, permeated by symbolism, and with no specialist thinkers.
The Navahos do not need to orient themselves in terms of principles of ab-
stract morality. They get their orientation from face-to-face contacts with the
same small group of people with whom they deal from birth to death. In a
large, complex society like modern America where people come and go and
where business and other dealings must be carried on by people who never
see each other, it is functionally necessary to have abstract standards which
transcend an immediate concrete situation in which two or more persons are
interacting. (Kluckhohn and Leighton1974: 314)
Moral Thinking 265

In these societies morality is therefore the same as the corporate order itself,
which cannot be assessed by more abstract criteria independently of that order:
The traditional way of life is hence taken for granted and there is no critical
assessment of the validity or usefulness of customary practices and beliefs
(von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 208). From within the corporate order itself there
is therefore no independent intellectual ground on which to base any abstract
criticism of the order as unjust or otherwise immoral. This has to await a more
complex organization of society, the state, or at least a breakdown of corporate
order, in which traditional obligations are weakened by commerce and trade,
close contact with those of different cultures, the corruption and oppression of
rulers, and social disorder in general.
But the existence of a corporate order in which moral values are embedded
gives people a sense that the spoiling of the social order is wrong or bad in a
deeper sense than that of simply being unconventional, or the cause of per-
sonal resentment. We recall that the Tauade were fundamentally ambivalent
towards two strong patrol officers: they resented them because they had taken
their pigs and burnt their houses, and beaten them, but they admired them and
would have liked to have been able to behave as they did. Might and right
cannot really be distinguished in Tauade moral ideas because there is no well
developed corporate order. But the Konso attitude to their Amhara conquerors
is very different: The Amhara came and are eating the wealth of the people.
Our ancestors never seized money; people gave money but never took it by
force. Now people have become bad, not listening to one another. There is only
quarrelling. Eating as we have noted, is a metaphor expressing exploitation,
and refers to the taxation which has been imposed on the Konso after their
military subjection to the Ethiopian government. They also resent the effects of
increased trade, which has led farmers to take up weaving, and encouraged
people to sell commodities, such as thatching grass, butter, and honey, etc. to
the Amhara, instead of using them for their families and other traditional pur-
poses. The Konso word piita can mean soil or earth, but can also mean land
or country. In this sense it is said of the Amhara that they spoilt the land,
piita nyapalishe, not because they rendered it infertile or poisoned the wells, but
in the sense that they disrupted the proper order of society by exploitation and
arbitrary violence.
Corporate order thus serves as a foreshadowing of later notions of natural
law, a moral imperative which is part of the cosmic order. This emerges very
clearly in the response of a Hopi informant to Brandts suggestion that x is ka-
anta [wrong] = I do not like x. Hopi themselves react very unfavorably to this
proposal Informant A evinced considerable shock; in fact, the writer feared
to have put himself in a bad light merely by raising the question. A said No.
Right and wrong have nothing to do with that. There are rooted in the nature
of things. Dont you know that? (Brandt 1954: 97). Brandt also observes that,
as far as his informants were concerned, Hopi are in the habit of applying
terms like true, knowledge, and right answer to ethical questions (ibid., 82).
The Tongans of the early nineteenth century, too, responded to Mariners
questions on the ultimate reason for acting rightly in a manner which sug-
gested that they, like the Navaho, regarded morality as part of being human:
266 Corporate Order
Many of the chiefs, on being asked what motives they had for conducting
themselves with propriety, beside the fear of misfortune in this life, replied, the
agreeable and happy feeling which a man experiences within himself when he
does any good action, or conducts himself nobly and generously, as a man
ought to do: and this question they answered as if they wondered that such a
question should be asked. (Martin 1827(1): 141).
But until moral principles become clearly separated from expediency, law,
custom and divine commands, it is very difficult to appeal to them as norma-
tive principles by which conduct should be judged and regulated, and so there
is an inevitable tendency towards a prudential morality, in which shame rather
than guilt is emphasised.
c. Guilt and shame
The distinction between shame and guilt cultures
1
was made famous in an-
thropology by Ruth Benedict, who wrote
True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as
true guilt cultures do, on an internal conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to
other peoples criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed
and rejected or by fantasizing to himself that he has been made ridiculous.
In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a
mans fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where honour
means living up to ones own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilt
though no man knows of his misdeed and a mans feeling of guilt may actu-
ally be relieved by confessing his sin. (Benedict 1967: 156157)
My only qualification to this thesis is that it is not so much a matter of differ-
ent cultures, as a matter of cultural evolution. We do not find in reality that,
say, in New Guinea shame cultures and guilt cultures coexist side by side. In
these societies there are typically no appeals to the normative force of moral
principles as such: That would be unethical, Virtue is its own reward, or
even, Put yourself in the other persons position, or What if everyone did
that?, and so on. But if it is very difficult to use abstract moral concepts to con-
vince others to carry out their obligations, or to say why a certain type of act is
right or wrong in principle, people must inevitably fall back on more practical
arguments, notably the authority of tradition, and custom, and also the practi-

1
Piers and Singer attempt to distinguish between shame and guilt on Freudian princi-
ples, e.g. Whereas guilt is generated when a boundary (set by the superego) is touched
or transgressed, shame occurs when a goal (presented by the ego ideal) is not being
reached. It thus indicates a real shortcoming. Guilt anxiety accompanies transgres-
sion; shame, failure. And, The unconscious, irrational threat implied in shame anxiety
is abandonment, and not mutilation (castration) as in guilt (Piers and Singer 1971: 24).
This seems a much less useful approach to shame and guilt than that of Benedict, which
links these categories very clearly both to culture and to cognitive development. It is
also obvious that failure may appropriately produce a sense of guilt, as well as shame,
while the suggestion that feelings of moral guilt are derived from anxiety about castra-
tion is preposterous.
Moral Thinking 267

cal consequences of wrong-doing, and this is why the structure of moral
thought is one of shame rather than guilt.
The Navahos make virtues of truth and honesty, much as white people do.
In the advice fathers give their children, in the harangues of headmen at
large gatherings, these two ideals never fail to be extolled. The difference in
the presentations of these ideals by whites and Navahos lies in the reasons
advanced. The Navaho never appeals to abstract morality or to adherence to
divine principles. He stresses mainly the practical considerations: If you
dont tell the truth, your fellows wont trust you and you will shame your
relatives. And youll never get along in the world that way. Truth is never
praised merely on the grounds that it is good in a purely abstract sense, nor
do exhortations ever take the form that the Holy People [ancestors] have
forbidden cheating or stealing. The Navahos do most definitely believe
that acts have consequences, but the nature of the consequences is not
wrapped up any intrinsic rightness or wrongness of the act itself. In the
matter of truth and honesty, the only appeal to the sentiments (other than
those of practicality and getting along with relatives and neighbors) which
the Navaho moralists permit themselves is that of loyalty to tradition. The
old Navaho way was not to lie, to cheat, or to steal. The prevalence of such
vices today, they say, is due to white corruption (Kluckhohn and Leighton
1974: 297)
It may be questioned whether minimally acculturated Navahos ever feel
guilt in the sense of anxiety or self-punishment for undetected acts which
are, however, known to bring disapproval or punishment if observed by
others. Shame as opposed to guilt is a striking Navaho configuration.
Conscience is hardly an important deterrent of action for Navahos only
anticipation of active overt punishment. Punishment most often takes the
form of ridicule or verbal abuse. (Kluckhohn 1943: 225)
Reichard confirms this: Children are taught not to steal because they may
be caught. Young men, when questioned, said We are told not to steal, not
because it is sinful, but because if someone saw it, the thief would get a bad
reputation in the community (Reichard 1963: 131). While the sense of sin and
repentance is rare in tribal societies, the sense of shame is everywhere, and a
very powerful motivation. To be thought miserly, weak, and untrustworthy or
easily tricked produces a sense of acute shame and many of the more con-
spicuous efforts to gain social merit are intended to counteract or neutralize the
danger of being shamed (von Frer-Haimendorf 1967: 217). Though the strug-
gle for social merit is common to many societies on very different levels of so-
phistication, the concept of merit in a sense of spiritual achievement attainable
only by those with certain moral qualifications is confined to some of the more
advanced societies found in the orbit of such religions as Hinduism and Bud-
dhism (ibid., 221).
Jacksons conclusion about Kuranko ideas of conscience support von Frer-
Haimendorf, Benedict and Gluckman:
When Kuranko people asked me what prevented me from wronging others,
I would endeavour to explain that my conscience and scruples did so. I
would say that a kind of voice inside me spoke out against my bad
thoughts (miriye yugume). Such a view was regarded as downright ridicu-
268 Corporate Order
lous, and I would be assured that it was the fear of the other persons hakai
which made me do right, not the inner voice. I espoused the European view
that there is some abstract moral principle, such as the Kantian categorical
imperative, centred within the self. Guilt is a consequence of violating that
principle. Kuranko people took a different view. They stressed a practical
morality based on mutuality: respect for rules, honouring contracts, keeping
promises, and fulfilling the obligations of ones role. Hake is a consequence
of a failure of mutuality. For Europeans, confession is usually regarded as a
way of restoring harmony between self and God. It salves ones inner con-
science. For the Kuranko, confession and begging are seen as ways of restor-
ing harmony to immediate social relations. The notion of personal redemp-
tion is of little significance to them. (Jackson 1982: 2930)
The prudential nature of Kuranko ethics is well illustrated by the morals
drawn at the conclusion of their stories: It is very bad to be covetous. That
which you covet you will seldom get (ibid., 103). It is not good that people get
things by deceit. Whatever does not belong to you, dont lay claim to it. It may
take a long time, but one day you will suffer for it (ibid., 108). No matter how
much you love a woman, never let her know your secrets. If she gets to know
your secrets you are done for (ibid., 172), and so on.
5. Open and closed societies
It will have not have escaped attention that the description of corporate order
in this chapter corresponds in certain respects with what Sir Karl Popper has
called the closed society: the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be
called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted
with personal decisions, the open society. (Popper 1945: 152) For Popper, the
closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which slavery, class
and class-rule are natural in the sense of being unquestionable (ibid., 154),
and which is dominated by taboo and a magical attitude to life:
There is one distinguishing feature which is common to most, if not all, of
these tribal societies. I mean a magical or irrational attitude towards the cus-
toms of social life, and the corresponding rigidity of these customs. The
comparatively infrequent changes have the character of religious conver-
sions, or the introduction of new magical taboos. They are not based on
upon a fully rational attempt to improve social conditions. There are few
problems in this form of life, and nothing really equivalent to moral prob-
lems. I do not mean that it does not sometimes need much heroism for a
member of a tribe to act in accordance with the taboos. What I mean is that
he will never find himself in the position of doubting how he ought to act.
The right way is always defined, though difficulties must be overcome in
following it. It is defined by taboos, by magical tribal institutions which can
never become objects of critical consideration Based upon the collective
tribal tradition, institutions leave no room for personal responsibility. The
taboos that establish some form of group responsibility may be the forerun-
ners of what we call personal responsibility, but they are fundamentally dif-
ferent from it. They are not based on a principle of reasonable accountability,
but upon a major idea of appeasing the powers of fate. (Ibid., 151152)
Open and closed societies 269

So, therefore, in a closed society the tribe is everything and the individual
nothing (ibid., 166). This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of
morality: good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe, or my state
(ibid., 93) The open society, by contrast, is based on reason, and freedom and
the brotherhood of all men: all institutions must be subject to critical evalua-
tion, and such a society would be egalitarian, and democratic, and place its
emphasis on the value of the individual rather than of the social order.
We shall see in the next chapter that in the major literate civilizations of the
ancient world a number of significant changes occurred in the relation between
individual and society which to a certain extent correspond with Poppers
model of the open society. But his characterization of tribal society, while in
some respects accurate and discerning, is in other important ways something
of a caricature. In the first place, while taboos are certainly plentiful, espe-
cially in association with ritual purity, it is a gross exaggeration to claim that
there are the chief basis of personal obligations. As a philosopher, Popper was
not sufficiently familiar with the ethnographic literature to realise that obliga-
tions mainly derive from the demands of ascriptive status, especially kinship,
birth order, relative age, and gender, and while the discharge of these obliga-
tions may be supported to a greater or lesser degree by beliefs in supernatural
sanctions, it entirely misrepresents the nature of tribal society to claim that
duty is primarily based on taboo. It is certainly true that in societies with cor-
porate order the institutions are closely linked with cosmological beliefs, and
these are not subject to the kind of rational, articulate analysis provided by phi-
losophers. But it is not just the cosmological significance of institutions that
inhibits their articulate analysis. This is also made extremely difficult by the
multi-functional nature of institutions, and the lack of that rationalization
which is one consequence of uncentralized government in small scale societies.
The type of order, therefore, which we find in tribal society is not rational in
the way that a table of administration in a modern government ministry or
business organization is rational, but it provides an orderly classification of
experience in terms of which people can live their lives. To this extent it is quite
different from the taboos of a magical nature. Our discussion of fundamental
moral concepts earlier in the section, particularly that of truth, must have made
it quite obvious that the moral ideas of societies of corporate order make per-
fectly good sense. Again, it is also true that the morality of the corporate order
emphasises the duties and obligations of individuals rather than their rights,
and there is corporate responsibility and the pressure of public opinion, but it
does not follow in any way that for such societies the group is everything and
the individual is nothing. This might be an apt description of the status of a
private soldier in the Prussian army of Frederick the Great, or the Soviet citizen
under Stalin, but it is a thoroughly anachronistic view of tribal societies, be-
cause in such societies no one can exercise that kind of power over the individ-
ual. Despots have certainly arisen in societies of corporate order and King Fi-
now of Tonga could have a cook or a tiresome and unimportant old woman
killed out of hand, but in the absence of the apparatus of state power this arbi-
trary treatment could not have been extended very widely without provoking
resistance and revolts. The most we can say is that in societies of corporate or-
270 Corporate Order
der merit, that is the value of the individual, is dependent on status, and indi-
viduals of very low status may be treated as of no value, and also that outsid-
ers typically are not owed any moral concern. But this is very different from
saying that the individual as such in this type of society is as nothing. Corpo-
rate order is a world away from the bureaucratic levelling of the modern dicta-
torship, in which individuals are entirely expendable at the whim of the gov-
ernment, but when no one has access to centralized political power supported
by armed force it is quite misleading to talk of totalitarianism.
The tribal or closed society of Poppers model also fails to qualify as totali-
tarian for a further reason. This is that societies of corporate order are not con-
cerned with the inner mental life of the individual, with beliefs, and therefore
with heresy and its prevention. Only when the thoughts of the individual are
brought into the light of public scrutiny, when it is possible to advocate differ-
ent opinions on significant matters about ethics, politics, or religion, is it even
possible in principle to contemplate thought control, and this is one of the es-
sential functions of totalitarian government which is also entirely lacking in
tribal society.
one should remember that the phenomenon [of totalitarianism] is con-
tained within modern ideology. The hypothesis is that totalitarianism results
from the attempt, in a society where individualism is deeply rooted and predomi-
nant, to subordinate it to the primacy of the society as a whole. It combines, un-
knowingly, conflicting values. The contradiction that we encounter is internal
to it. Hence its inordinate, ferocious stress on the social whole; hence its vio-
lence and worship of violence. (Dumont 1977: 12)
Finally, it is also misleading to attribute the belief that good is what is in
the interest of my group or my tribe to societies of corporate order; because no
one in such societies can formulate ideas of the good in such a way. It would be
more accurate to say that because such an order is necessarily socially
bounded, it cannot therefore be universalistic; it is a map for living with strict
boundaries and no one from outside those boundaries has a moral existence,
but it is not based on any ideology of the good. The Republic, which Popper
takes as the archetypal blueprint of the closed society, does indeed treat society
as an organism, and defines justice as requiring that each citizen performs the
functions proper to his station, but Plato was a philosopher thinking in a very
different cultural milieu from that of tribal society, a milieu that we shall study
in the next chapter.

VII. Transcendence

1. Ideas of law, justice, and order in early states
The subject of this chapter is the manner in which the corporate order is tran-
scended by the development of a moral order that goes beyond the bounds of a
specific society. Transcendence, whether it takes the form of divine revela-
tion or theoretical cosmology, implies a search for authority outside the institu-
tionalized offices and structures of the seekers society (Humphreys 1975: 92).
In historical terms, I am referring to that revolution in thought which occurred
in Greece, India, China and Israel in the middle of the first millennium B.C.
(Jaspers Axial Age) and later in Christianity, Islam and medieval Europe.
The data on moral thought which I shall be using in this chapter are de-
rived, of course, from the literate civilizations of antiquity, and I am only too
well aware of my scholarly deficiencies in attempting even this thumb-nail
sketch of ancient ethics. My only excuse for embarking on such a vast enter-
prise is that it needs to be done, and that no one else, to my knowledge, has so
far attempted it. Most of the chapter will focus, however, on three main areas
Greece, India, and China and is concerned only with certain aspects of moral
thought in these cultural traditions. Within these necessary limitations it is
possible, I believe, even for someone who has no expert knowledge of any of
them to draw certain comparative conclusions which are relevant to the themes
of this book.
But this advance in moral thought occurred slowly and cannot be equated
in any simple way with the emergence of the state itself. In China, for example,
centralized government had existed for more than a thousand years before the
time of Confucius, while in Egypt the development of a transcendent ethics
was much weaker and slower than in China, and in Mesopotamia can scarcely
be claimed to have occurred at all. It must be emphasized, therefore, that many
features of the corporate order can and do survive for a long time in the new
social organization of the state: the ruler, typically, is a member of a royal clan,
with essential religious functions, supported by an organized priesthood, and
the social hierarchy is represented as divinely ordained and therefore as part of
the cosmic structure. Where the technology remains relatively simple, and
trade and commerce are undeveloped, and the experience of other cultures is
limited, it is therefore possible for states to be not much more than large and
complex forms of corporate order. We shall examine the social changes associ-
ated with the Axial Age, and the corresponding changes in moral understand-
ing that this involved, in the next section. But for the time being it is necessary
to examine in some detail one very important feature of the early state as this
272 Transcendence
affects moral understanding, and this is the notions of law and order which are
inevitably fostered by political centralization. These seem to provide an essen-
tial foundation for the later development of moral ideas because they are ex-
plicit expressions of normative concepts that have potentially universal appli-
cations, and by which society itself can be evaluated.
Moral ideas of truth, justice, and righteousness are clarified around the ju-
dicial functions of the king, and the old metaphors of the straight, balanced,
and upright take on a special importance in all these societies as representing
justice and truth. In such societies there has therefore developed a core of gen-
eral moral ideas denoting what we may call righteousness, by which the ac-
tions of all classes in society, including the rulers, can be judged, standards to
which they should conform. But there is little evidence of any kind of philoso-
phical reflection on ethics, human nature, or the inner life of the individual,
and social values remain, as in tribal societies, those of material well-being and
prosperity in this life. These are strongly ranked societies, and everywhere we
find the same qualitative distinctions between classes of people, so that lack of
social status is essentially the same as lack of worth as a human being: the rich
man does indeed, so to speak, enter the kingdom of heaven in front of the poor
man. Here, too, there is a significant continuity with tribal society.
There is a strong resemblance between the social and ethical perspectives of
the early states and Kohlbergs Stage 4 of moral development. We recall that
Kohlbergs Stage 3 is a conception of society based on status, on socially de-
fined relationships between individuals, but that this does not involve any con-
ceptualization of society as a total system. With the development of the state,
and of centralized judicial, bureaucratic, and military institutions, the ruling
class almost of necessity has to think in terms of society as a whole, as a total
system, and law, in particular, becomes of crucial significance in moral think-
ing, through the centralization of the judicial function.
Stage 4. What is right: fulfilling the actual duties to which you have agreed.
Laws are to be upheld except in extreme cases when they conflict with other
fixed social duties. Right is also contributing to society, the group or institu-
tions.
Reasons for doing right: to keep the institution going as a whole, to avoid the
breakdown in the system, if everyone did it, or the imperative of con-
science to meet ones defined obligations.
Social perspective of the stage: differentiates societal point of view from inter-
personal agreement or motives. Takes the point of view of the system that
defines roles and rules. Considers individual relations in terms of place in
the system. (Kohlberg 1984: 175)
Edwards expands on the significance of the transition from stage 3 to stage
4 in the following terms:
A face-to-face society, such as a tribal group, and a state or national system
differ in their institutions and processes of social control Simply to per-
form the functions of maintaining public order and resolving civil disputes,
a state system requires more elaborate and formal legal institutions than
does a tribal society.
Ideas of law, justice, and order in early states 273

At the level of tribal society, most disputes or trouble cases can be settled
with justice and dispatch by conference between the disputants, aided by re-
spected clan or tribal elders who mediate the case (Gluckman 1955, Bohan-
nan 1957, Gulliver 1963). The mediators judge according to cultural norms
that represent a flexible set of guidelines rather than a formal body of laws.
The mediators job involves more than simply weighing evidence and decid-
ing in favor of one side in the dispute or the other. The mediators must give
justice where justice is due and at the same time create a workable compro-
mise that will be tolerated by both parties. They must take care to re-
establish harmony in the community as well as uphold the social norms
(Snell 1954, Saltman 1971), since no central authority exists to enforce the
mediators decision.
A national state requires more formal and elaborate legal mechanisms be-
cause of those social control problems inherent in urbanization and the ex-
pansion of the social unit to a much larger scale (Hoebel 1954: 327329). (C.P.
Edwards 1975: 52021) Where the responsibility for controlling the indi-
vidual shifts from the face-to-face community to the state, the sanctioning
agents for wrong doing change from being the people in the community to
institutionalized legal authorities. This transition can be linked to differences
between stage 3 and 4 concepts of punishments and of rules and laws (ibid.,
522) Stage 3: Rules and laws are guides to social or good end seeking.
They are guides to being good. Stage 4: Rules and laws are a fixed system
of general rules to be followed always, a system designed to prevent social
disorder and chaos. Rules and laws define right and wrong, categorically.
(Ibid., 523)
The most obvious moral feature of early states is therefore the central role of
the king as the fountain and dispenser of justice, in the sense of settling dis-
putes and restraining the excesses of the powerful, and so meaning order or
righteousness. To take a very simple example, on the island of Ontong Java in
the Pacific, As the king became more and more powerful a change came about:
the idea of the Kings peace was created (Hogbin 1934: 225). This did not get
far at first, but
in the reign of Keulaho the predecessor of Uila, the change had progressed
so far that we hear of persons laying complaints against offenders before
him and asking for his help to secure compensation or revenge. The impor-
tant groups still kept matters in their own hands and settled their quarrels
without assistance, but Keulaho on two or three occasions seems to have ar-
ranged matters so that a wronged husband had the right of retaliation on his
wifes lover without any fear of a counter attack from his relatives. This king
also kept his own relatives in check so that they did not take advantage of
their relationship. (Ibid., 225)
A similar development is recounted by Mariner in the case of Tonga when
King Finow was succeeded by his son, a young man of exceptional intelligence:
He was of a most humane and benevolent disposition, but far, very far, from
being weak in this respect, for he was a lover of justice. The people readily
referred to him for a decision in their private quarrels, and on these occa-
sions he was never thought to have judged rashly. If he could not immedi-
ately decide, he adjourned the cause till the next day, and in the mean time
274 Transcendence
took the trouble to inquire further particulars from those who knew more of
the matter. If he was severe with any body, it was with his own servants, for
he used to say that his father was too partial to them, by which means they
had become assuming, taking upon themselves the character of chiefs, and
oppressing others of the lower orders; but now he would make them know
their proper places. If they did any thing wrong, they trembled in his pres-
ence. (Martin 1827 II: 56)
This illustrates the potential conflict between the growing ideal of justice and
the ranking of individuals by class and status, a conflict which becomes a per-
ennial feature of civilization. We shall see that increased awareness of the indi-
vidual as such, independent of social status, and the ability to distinguish more
clearly between moral principles and law or custom are closely related to the
conceptual resolution of this conflict.
In the Mesopotamian code of Hammurabi (or Hammurapi) (dating from
179252 B.C. if we use the middle chronology) the king describes himself as
called to rule the Babylonian people with justice as a servant of the supreme
god Anu: Then Anu and Bel delighted the flesh of mankind by calling me, the
renowned prince, the god-fearing Hammurabi, to establish justice in the earth,
to destroy the base and the wicked, and to hold back the strong from oppress-
ing the feeble: to shine like the sun god upon the black-haired men [the peo-
ple], and to illuminate the land. Hammurabi, the elect shepherd of Bel, am I,
dispenser of riches and abundance (C. Edwards 1904: 23).
In ancient Egypt the Pharaoh was the god Horus. As the god who alone
possessed and directed the state, the king of Egypt had certain divine attributes
of rule. The most common are two, hu and sia, or sometimes three, hu, sia, and
maat.
We shall translate hu as authoritative command, sia as perception, and
maat as justice; in other words, hu, the divine ability to create or re-create a
situation by speech, sia, the divine recognition and understanding of situa-
tions, and maat, the maintenance of a divine order within society The first
two, the ability to see and know a situation and the ability to meet that situa-
tion by command, are divine attributes which by themselves might work for
good or evil; the third, justice or order-truth, is an attribute which imposes
responsibilities upon the king, since it involves conformance with principles
of the universe which come down from the creation or it involves right deal-
ing among humans. This maat is the most important of the divine attributes
of the king (Wilson 1954: 2)
Despite the fact that there is no evidence that Egypt ever had a written law
code such as that of Hammurabi (ibid., 5), it seems clear both from the nature of
maat, and from the Pharaohs dependence on an elaborate system of officials to
administer law, that justice in Egypt was not in any sense arbitrary: Over and
over again in the ancient monuments maat is the thing that the Pharaoh per-
sonifies and enforces, as against anarchy, injustice, and deceit practised by his
rivals for the throne, who afflict the people with disorganization(Breasted
1935: 144).
In ancient Israel the association between the king and justice was equally
important:

If the nation is to prosper, the king must act as the embodiment of right-
eousness. That is to say, it is first and foremost his concern to see that the
behaviour of society at large is thoroughly righteous, and that, to this end,
the sanctions of the group, particularly the nations laws, are uniformly ob-
served throughout the different strata of society; for it is only in this way,
when the individual is restrained from doing what is right in his own eyes,
that the well-being of the nation, in fact its life or vitality, can be assured.
Thus the king is the supreme ruler or judge, to whom one may go in any
matter of dispute for a final ruling or judgement which, ideally at least,
will also be an act of justice. (Johnson 1967: 4) [I]t is only as the earthly
king ensures a sound moral order by means of his righteous rule that one
can be sure of a corresponding stability in the realm of nature with all that
this implies for the economic well-being of the people (Ibid., 8)
Royal law is therefore generally believed to bring more than the resolution
of disputes and feuds: just as the well-ordered tribal society enjoys the benefits
of life, health, and prosperity, so we find the ubiquitous belief that a just or
righteous king confers these benefits on his people too. According to Whitelam,
a number of features in the relationship of the king to justice can be discerned
throughout the ancient Near East:
1. The acceptance that justice formed part of the underlying world har-
mony which was realized at the time of creation.
2. It was the kings primary duty to guarantee the true administration of
justice throughout the land.
3. By so doing, this governed not only right social relationships, as ex-
pressed in the kings concern for the underprivileged, but also guar-
anteed prosperity and fertility for the nation as whole. (Whitelam
1979: 37)
Dumont (1962: 6061) refers to the persistent association in India of the
righteous king with the earth, even as being married to the earth, and with rain
and with plenty; and this was general to the Indo-European peoples.
In the Homeric conception of kingship there survive certain ideas which re-
cur in some guise in other Indo-European societies. Of especial importance
is the idea of the king as the author and guarantor of the prosperity of his
people, if he follows the rules of justice and divine commandments. We read
in the Odyssey (19, 110 ff.) the following eulogy of the king: a good king
(basileus) who respects the gods, who lives according to justice, who reigns
over numerous and valiant men, for him the black earth bears wheat and
barley, the trees are laden with fruit, the flocks increase unceasingly, the sea
yields fish, thanks to his good government; the people prosper beneath his
rule. (Benveniste 1973: 321)
(See also Binchy 1970: 10 for Ireland and Chaney 1970 for German and Scandi-
navian societies.).
Early Chinese kings of the Shang dynasty were responsible for ensuring the
prosperity of their people by performing the correct rites and sacrifices, and it
is also clear from the records of the Western Chou who succeeded the Shang,
that another central function of the king was the dispensation of justice:
276 Transcendence
the Western Chou rulers tell us, again and again, that their objective is
justice. In the Announcement to Kang, King Wu begins by saying that his
father, King Wen, was careful about punishments. He repeatedly empha-
sizes the necessity of proceeding with the utmost caution, to avoid miscar-
riages of justice. Having tried a case, deliberate on it for five or six days, or
as much as ten days or a season before deciding Take for punishments
and verdicts the norms of the Yin [Shang]. Use their just punishments and
just killings (Creel 1970: 1734). [While specific laws were not ascribed to
divine origins], since the Chou kings believed that they ruled by virtue of
the Mandate of Heaven, they also believed that Heaven was intimately con-
cerned with the meting out of justice [King] Wu also takes upon himself
the responsibility for the proper administration of justice throughout his
realm, and he says, if there is any fault, Heaven will punish and kill me, and
I shall not resent it. (Ibid., 167)
Having surveyed the typical responsibilities of the king in early states, we
may now examine in more detail the implications of the terms which are trans-
lated by such words as justice, truth, and righteousness. We must bear in
mind at the outset that, especially before the development of philosophical re-
flection, these concepts are frequently not clearly differentiated. So what we
may call righteousness, the maintenance of the social and cosmic order by
obedience to rules, also has close affinities to our terms truth, justice, and
duty. But all these societies share a common sense of a social order which is
linked with cosmic order, and in which the images of order are the straight, the
upright, and the true, and the idea of balance which is frequently expressed in
the image of the scales.
Mesopotamian ideas of law and society were based on the two general
terms kittum and mesarum which may be roughly rendered truth and jus-
tice (Speiser 1954: 12) mesarum (miarum) denotes literally anything that is
straight, such as a straight street, and which is applied metaphorically to what
is right, being thus commonly used for justice, just law or the like
(Driver and Miles 1952: 21). miarum in poetical language is more or less
equivalent to justice or law, while truth and justice (Bab. kittum u miarum)
will correspond to something like law and order (ibid., 23).
In Egypt, maat was a crucial concept, as we have seen: Truth (maat) is al-
ways the same word which the Egyptian uses for right, righteousness, jus-
tice, according to the connections in which it is used (Breasted 1935: 191n).
The earliest hieroglyph for it ( ) probably represents the socle of the phar-
aohs throne (Morenz 1973: 113), but the idea of straightness and levelness are
also clearly conveyed:
[Maat] is probably a physical term, levelness, evenness, straightness, cor-
rectness, in a sense of regularity or order. From that it can be used in the
metaphorical sense of uprightness, righteousness, truth, justice. There was
a real emphasis on this maat in the Middle Kingdom in the sense of social
justice, righteous dealing with ones fellow men. (Wilson 1954: 6)
It is of great interest that Gluckman translates the Lozi tukelo as truth
(1965: 206) and as justice or the right (ibid., 170). Tukelo is a noun derived
from the verb kuluka, to be straight, which we have already met as the root of

the adjective in mutu yalukile, the upright man. Tukelo, like swanelo, means duty
as well as right, and refers to general rights and duties, as is evidenced by its
wider meanings of justice and equity (ibid., 168).
The basic Hebrew words are emeth, truth; yashar, upright; and (t)sedeq or
zedek justice (Young 1977), both of which are also translated as righteous-
ness. The most important word was zedek; justice is in scripture essentially
identical with righteousness (Banks 1899: 825). The original implications of the
root zadak are involved in doubt. To be hard, even, and straight (said of
roads, for instance) has been suggested as the primitive physical idea. More
acceptable is the explanation that the root notion conveyed is that a thing, man,
or even god is what it, or he, should be, that is, normal, fit. That conception
may, without much difficulty, be recovered from some of the applications of
the term in the Bible. Weights and measures are called zedek (just or right;
Deut. 25, 15; Lev. 19, 36; Job 31, 6; Ezek. 14, 10). Paths are zedek, that is, as they
should be, easy to travel (Ps. 23, 3). So with offerings, when brought in the
proper manner and at the right time (Deut. 33, 19; Ps. 4, 6 [Av. 5] 51, 21 [Av.
19]), when a king or judge is as he should be he is just (Lev. 19.15; Deut. 1, 16;
Prov. 31, 9). When speech is as it should be it is truthful (comp. Ps. 52).
(Hirsch 1905: 420)
The Indo-European languages often express this link between the right, the
fitting, the true, the straight, the just and the legal, by the words right, rectus,
recht, droit, and orthos, but these are more specific and later in development
than the ancient rta, whose linking of order and truth we must consider in a
little detail before we examine some more distinctively legal concepts. In Ben-
venistes analysis of the ancient Indo-European concept of rta, it designated
order as a harmonious arrangement of the parts of a whole and stood for the
order which governs the orderliness of the universe, the movement of the
stars, the regularity of the seasons and the years, and further the relations of
gods and men, and finally the relations of men to one another (Benveniste
1973: 379380). So, in the Vedas, the dawn follows the path of rta, the right
path, as if she knew them before. She never oversteps the regions. The sun fol-
lows the path of rta (RV. 1.24.8) (Koller 1972: 135). In the Vedas, the mark of a
truthful man is consistency. Such a man can be depended upon to act with re-
sponsible predictability because he follows the unswerving pathway of rta.
Everything he does is true and ordered. The ideal embodiment of consistency
is Varuna. As the upholder of rta, Varuna can always be relied upon to act with
justice and compassion. He is therefore known as dhrtavrata one whose ways
are unchanging. (Crawford 1974: 13)
Rta however did not give rise to any specific juridical term in any of the
Indo-European languages, despite the obvious conceptual continuities of the
term. The Sanskrit term dharma is equivalent to law, but the proper sense is
what is maintained, held fast (from dhr to hold), and according to the con-
text custom, rule, usage (Benveniste 1973: 381). Zaehner expands on this as
follows, Etymologically the word dharma derives from a root dhr meaning
to hold, have or maintain the same root from which are derived the Latin
firmus, firm, and forma, form. Dharma is, then, the form of things as they
are and the power that keeps them as they are and not otherwise. And just as it
278 Transcendence
maintains the whole universe in being in accordance with eternal law (sanatana
dharma), so, in the moral sphere, does it maintain the human race by eternal
moral law (Zaehner 1962: 2).
For the Greeks, dike was the master concept and according to Benveniste
was derived from the root deik, meaning to show what must be, a pro-
nouncement which may take the form of a court judgement, and so too, the
whole history of the Latin dicere highlights a medium of authority: only the
judge can dicere ius (Benveniste 1973: 387).
Dike is a formula. To give a justice is not an intellectual operation which re-
quires meditation or discussion. Formulas have been transmitted which are
appropriate to given cases, and the role of the judge is to possess and apply
them. [Such formulas then become imperative rules, the norm of a certain
category of beings.] Hence this formula which determines ones lot and allo-
cation becomes in Greek the word of justice itself. But the ethical notion of
justice, such as we understand it, is not included in dike. This has gradually
evolved from the circumstances in which dike was invoked to put an end to
abuses. This traditional legal formula became the expression for justice itself,
when dike intervenes to put an end to the power of bia, violence. Then dike
is identified with the virtue of justice and he who has dike for him is dikaios,
just. (Ibid., 388)
Latin ius, law, justice derives from I-E *yous, a state of regularity, of the
normality required by the rules of ritual (ibid., 391) There is then some-
thing to be done, a situation as in iustus nuptiae lawful marriage, and there
is also a formula of normality, as implied in the expression ius dicere,
prescribing what must be conformed to. Such is the foundation of the idea of
law in Rome.
By restoring ius to its full value, which is indicated both by its etymological
correspondences and the Latin derivations, we reach back beyond law. The
word derives its value from a concept which is not merely moral but primar-
ily religious: this is the I-E notion of conformity to a rule, of conditions
which have to be fulfilled before the object (whether thing or person) can be
approved, can perform the duties of his office, and be fully effective. (Ibid.,
395396)
In Sanskrit there seem to have been at least two words for justice. In the
sense of a lawsuit, legal proceeding, judicial sentence, judgement it was nyaya,
but the root of this concept is the idea of a universal rule or model, what is
proper, original type, standard, rule, especially a general or universal rule, a
model, plan, right or fit manner or way, propriety (Monier-Williams Sankrit-
English Dictionary, nyaya). This is similar to the idea behind Chinese fa, the
law as model or pattern. But there was another word much closer to dike and
dikaiosune, adl, and tsedeq which was sama: even, smooth, flat, plane, level;
same, equal, like, equivalent to; constant, unchanged, fair, impartial towards;
having the right measure, regular, normal, right, straight; just, upright, good,
honest (Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, sama). It is significant,
however that this very rich concept does not seem to have been developed at
the level of philosophical and religious speculation. Neither Crawford (1974)
nor Dasgupta (1965) in their studies of the history of Indian moral philosophy
refers to sama, or to nyaya, and I have found no reference to these words in

Dasgupta (1922, 1932, 1940), Radhakrishnan (1929), or Hiriyanna (1932). The
whole emphasis in Indian moral thinking seems to have been on the various
types of dharma.
In Islam the concept of justice, adl, developed a legal and moral significance
comparable to that in Graeco-Roman and Jewish culture. Adl, the substantive,
means justice; as an adjective it means rectilinear, just, well-balanced (Tyan
1960: 215). Among the modern Bedouin the word adl as level, even or well-
balanced applies to the proper position of the saddle-bags on each side of the
camel, and the use of the word to tilt as meaning to wrong or to be unjust
is heard in everyday Bedouin conversation (Bailey 1970: 133). Equality is obvi-
ously an essential part of its meaning, stressed by Hourani: The basic meaning
of the adjective adl is equal, especially in weight or bulk, and there is a noun,
idl, meaning an object equal to another in weight (Hourani 1985: 32). The
conclusion from all the evidence must be that adl originated as an intelligible
physical concept of even balance and was developed into a no less intelligible
concept of the equitable, the balance of natural justice (ibid., 33). The image of
balance is already quite familiar to us in a cross-cultural context and there is
nothing surprising in the development of the imagery of adl to become justice,
a central concept in Muslim religion, theology, philosophy and law.
The word zalama, to transgress, is one of the opposites of adl, and further
illuminates its meaning:
The primary meaning of zlm is, in the opinion of many of the authoritative
lexicographers, that of putting in a wrong place. In the sphere of ethics it
seems to mean primarily to act in such a way as to transgress the proper
limit and encroach upon the right of some other person. Briefly and gener-
ally speaking, zulm is to do injustice in the sense of going beyond ones own
bounds and doing what one has no right to. (Izutsu 1966: 1645)
Early Chinese concepts of the right, proper, and just were based on ideas of
order as expressed in symbols of the straight and level, the model, and ritual,
as shown in Table 8. (Modern forms of the graphs are given first, followed in
most cases by the ancient forms.)
Table 8: Chinese moral concepts
chih

Straight, right (Karlgren 1957: 919a). Graph has eye and
straight line.
chu

Rule, law (Karlgren 1957: 95cd). Graphs for man and
carpenters square.
ping

Level, even; a plain; equalize; to be just; regulate;
peace (Karlgren 1957: 825ab). Was the graph the draw-
ing of a scraper, a rake or a plane?
kung

Prince; public; impartial; just (Karlgren 1957: 1173af).
chung

Middle; observing the middle way, proper, right
(Karlgren 1957: 1007ae).
280 Transcendence
cheng

Straight; correct, right; regulator, model; principal,
chief, ruler; just, exactly (Karlgren 1957: 833jn). The
radical is a foot, and the idea may be state punishment by
military force.
(y)i
a

Sacrifice to the deity of the soil; loan for id. right,
proper, beseem (Karlgren 1957: 21ag). The graph
shows the sacred (phallic) pole of the sh altar to the soil,
behung with slices of meat.
(y)i
b

Righteous, righteousness; true sense, meaning
(Karlgren 1957: 2rt). Appropriate, fitting, just (Creel
1970: 174).
li

Propriety, ceremony, ritual; (Karlgren 1957: 597d. The
character has as its left-hand element spirit; its right-
hand component is a pictograph of a sacrificial vessel con-
taining an offering (Creel 1970: 335).

The concepts of i
a
and li always have more importance in Chinese thought
than that of fa, written law. The basic meaning of li is rites, ceremonials, and
was extended to mean rules of civilized behaviour and traditional norms,
while i has the original meaning of good order, harmony. Schwartz (1985: 50)
notes the great importance of ritual order for early Chinese conceptions of soci-
ety which parallel the Indian emphasis on sacrifice and ritual order.
While, as we have seen, one of the essential functions of early Chinese kings
was the administration of justice, judicial procedure as such did not have the
central normative significance which it possessed in most of the other societies
we are considering, comparable to the Greek dikaiosune or Islamic adl. Chinese
philosophers do not have an underlying or primitive concept that plays the
role in their political theories that justice does in western thought (Hansen
1985b: 363). Royal justice was essentially penal, and was particularly concerned
with ensuring that the punishment fitted the crime. In the passage about King
Wu and his earnest concern with the justice of punishments quoted earlier,
When Wu spoke of just punishment and just killings, the character trans-
lated as just is in both cases i
b
. It has the sense of what is appropriate in all
the circumstances, fitting, just; occasionally it is used in the sense of justice
(Creel 1970: 174). The business of law was to maintain social order and har-
mony, which was violated by all acts of moral or ritual impropriety, or criminal
violence; The restoration of social harmony required that the law be used to
exact retribution from their doer (Bodde 1981:171), and it was essential that the
punishment be exactly proportional to the offence. It has the sense of what is
appropriate in all the circumstances, fitting, just; occasionally it is used in the
sense of justice (Creel 1970: 174). The business of law was to maintain social
order and harmony, which was violated by all acts of moral or ritual impropri-
ety, or criminal violence; The restoration of social harmony required that the
law be used to exact retribution from their doer (Bodde 1981: 171), and it was
essential that the punishment be exactly proportional to the offence.
Social change and the Axial Age 281

The various other aspects of justice are expressed by a number of different
terms: ping , level, even, plain, equalize; kung , impartial, and pao .
The Chinese word pao as a verb has a wide range of meanings, to respond,
to repay, to retaliate, and to retribute. The centre of this area of mean-
ings is response or return, which has served as one basis for social rela-
tions in China (Yang 1957: 291). The Chinese do not seem to have associated
the scales with justice (as was so common elsewhere in the ancient world), but
to have assimilated them to the more general category of weights and meas-
ures, which express clear standards for the people to follow:
The former kings hung up balances with standard weights and fixed the
length of the foot and the inch. Still today these are followed as models (fa)
because the divisions are clear. No (practical) merchant would proceed by
dismissing the standard scales and then deciding about the weights (of
things), nor would he abolish feet and inches and then form opinions about
the length (of things). Such (conclusions) would have no force Turning
ones back on models and measures depending upon private conviction
takes away all force and certainty. (Passage from the Legalist Shang chn
shu, quoted by Needham 1956: 211, and see also ibid., 131).
The common notion of justice in these different civilizations is therefore the
defence of order, both cosmic and social, and expresses that which is proper,
what is appropriate, fitting or right to be done in different circumstances, and
is inherently linked to retributive punishment and the restraint of crime, vio-
lence, and disorder.
2. Social change and the Axial Age
This ideal of social order and law was, however, increasingly threatened in
early states by disruptive forces, especially those of war and anarchy, techno-
logical change, commercial development and class conflict, and by contact with
other societies. This process can be seen in Egypt during the First and Second
Intermediate Periods, and in China after the fall of the Western Chou during
the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods (Hsu 1965; Munro
1969; Kroll 19857). In Israel the social order established by David and Solo-
mon became severely disrupted by political oppression and economic devel-
opment, and resulting class conflict, and by the threat and ultimate reality of
foreign conquest (Martin 1989; Halpern 1991; Whitelam 1979; Ackroyd 1968).
The traditional clan structure was eroded by increasing state centralization,
urbanization, and the growth of commerce. India of the sixth century B.C. was
marked by major social change resulting from increased trade, urbanization,
and the rise of the powerful states of Maghada and Kosala (Gomez 1987; Misra
1972; Thapar 1975; Rhys Davids 1955). At the same period in Greece increased
trade, urbanization, the questioning of aristocratic values, and warfare were
closely involved in major social unrest (Forrest 1966; Andrewes 1965). Christi-
anity emerged in the complex society of Roman Palestine, and, much later, the
rise of Islam occurred in the context of the clash of the urban and mercantile
values of Mecca with the traditional tribal values of the desert (Serjeant & Ghul
1983; Watt 1953; Izutsu 1982). Later still, in medieval Europe from the eleventh
282 Transcendence
century to the thirteenth century, we find many aspects of the same process
repeated yet again. We noted in Chapter V that the rise of agriculture severely
disrupted the social order of hunter-gatherer society, until a new corporate
moral order eventually developed. This order, again, was disrupted by politi-
cal collapse and social disorganization, increased wealth and its associated
temptations to luxury and vice, the growth of a class of the poor and destitute,
the challenge to the claims of birth by men of wealth, and the disruptions pro-
duced by warfare. For the first time, the social order itself is reflected upon as a
whole and its values questioned, and men have to formulate more articulate
moral principles, and to reflect more deeply on human nature, virtue, and
upon their own thought processes themselves. A new class of specialist
thinkers develops and takes the lead in trying to solve these problems.
Karl Jaspers recognized that from about 800200 B.C., especially around 500
B.C., in China, India, Iran, Palestine, and Greece a new consciousness of the
human predicament developed in what he calls the Axial Age.
[Man] experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He
asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and
redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest
goals all this took place in reflection. Consciousness became newly con-
scious of itself, thinking became its own object. Spiritual conflicts arose, ac-
companied by attempts to convince others through the communication of
thoughts, reasons and experience. The most contradictory possibilities were
essayed. Discussion, the function of parties and the division of the spiritual
realm into opposites which nonetheless remained related to one another,
created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos (Jaspers
1953: 2) For the first time philosophers appeared. Human beings dared to
rely on themselves as individuals. Hermits and wandering thinkers in
China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece and prophets in Israel all be-
long together, however much they may differ from each other in their be-
liefs, the contents of their thought and their inner dispositions. Man proved
himself capable of contrasting himself inwardly with the entire universe. He
discerned within himself the origin from which to raise himself above his
own self (Ibid., 3). [As one aspect of this development of thought we find
a general desire to remodel society:] Men see themselves faced by catastro-
phe, and feel the desire to help, through insight, education, and reforms. The
endeavour is made to dominate the course of events by planning, right con-
ditions are to be re-established or brought about for the first time
Thought is devoted to the manner in which human beings may best live to-
gether, may best be governed and administered. Practical activity is domi-
nated by ideas of reform. Philosophers travel from state to state, become ad-
visors and teachers, are scorned or sought after, enter into discussion and
compete with each other (Ibid., 4)
(It will, I think, be helpful to note here the conventional dates of the major reli-
gious and ethical thinkers of this period: Buddha
1
[c.563483 B.C.], Socrates

1
While, strictly speaking, one should refer to the Buddha, since the name is a title
meaning the Enlightened One, so too, strictly speaking, one should refer to the Christ,


[469399], Confucius [551479], Zoroaster [630553],
1
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and
Deutero-Isaiah [c. 625580].)
Momigliano notes that these civilizations had a number of social and intel-
lectual similarities:
All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization com-
bining central government and local authority, elaborate town planning, ad-
vanced metal technology, and the practice of international diplomacy. In all
these civilizations there is a profound tension between political powers and
intellectual movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce
greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal ex-
planation of things. New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically
or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative
to, the prevailing models. We are in the age of criticism (Momigliano
1975: 89)
Despite some great differences in the manner in which these new insights
were expressed, the similarities in the progression of thought are striking, and I
have found it useful to borrow Professor Schwartzs term Transcendence as a
label for this general process: The word Transcendence is a word heavy with
accumulated meanings, some of them very technical in the philosophic sense.
What I refer to here is something close to the etymological meaning of the
word a kind of standing back and looking beyond a kind of critical, reflec-
tive questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond (Schwartz
1975: 3).
The societies which will be given most of our attention are Greece, India,
and China. While Israel is also part of the Axial Age, and some reference will
be made to it, the history of its social institutions is still very obscure and dis-
puted by scholars, and the lack of a philosophical tradition until the third cen-
tury B.C., when Aristobulus and Philo began the assimilation of Greek Phi-
losophy into Jewish thought, means that the precise articulation of ideas is
hard for the comparativist to establish. Considerable development of moral

since that is also a title, the Anointed One. I have therefore chosen to speak of Buddha
throughout.
1
The case of Zoroaster is dubious, however, and I shall not consider him in this chapter.
The traditional date for the birth of Zoroaster, on the authority of Herodotus, is 630 B.C.,
and his conversion of King Vishtaspa is 588 B.C. (Zaehner 1956: 10011) so that, since
he is traditionally supposed to have been murdered at the age of 77, his death would
have occurred in 553 B.C. This chronology would, if correct, place Zoroaster squarely
within Jaspers Axial Age Axial Age, but Professor Zaehner emphasises that the matter
is not a proven case and, indeed, Professor Mary Boyce strongly disputes this dating
on the basis of the archaic language of the Gathas (the hymns of Zoroaster) and the
socio-economic references contained in them, and she therefore concludes that he can-
not have lived later than 1000 B.C. (Boyce 1975: 3, 190). In addition, it is extremely diffi-
cult to form any clear idea of the social circumstances in which Zoroaster lived, though
from Boyce, op. cit. 15517, 192, it can be inferred that they were somewhat similar to
those of Buddha. I have therefore, reluctantly, excluded Zoroastrianism from considera-
tion.
284 Transcendence
thought occurred in Egypt (Breasted 1935) but the domination of Egyptian so-
ciety by the organized priesthood until its absorption into the Hellenic world
seems to have inhibited the full development of Transcendence, and Mesopo-
tamia, too, does not seem to have participated in this process (Oppenheim 1975
and Garelli 1975). I have said relatively little about Christianity because, even
today, the central facts of its origins and the teachings of Jesus are likely to be
familiar to most of my readers. While Islam was a much later development that
falls outside the Axial Age, we find many similar social factors present there
and I shall make some reference to these and to the more important Islamic
moral ideas. A comparable development of moral thought also occurs in me-
dieval Europe, but it would be impossible within the limits of this chapter to
take any detailed account of this period. I have also excluded, for reasons of
space, any reference to Meso-America and the Incas, but I hope that specialists
in those societies may find it useful to apply to them the conclusions reached in
this chapter.
a. Social factors
In Chapter IV we briefly surveyed the main social factors responsible for the
transition from corporate order to transcendence, and this is the appropriate
point to consider these in more detail. The gradual weakening of kinship struc-
tures and values at least at the upper levels of society is one of the well-
established consequences of the rise of the state. The ties of kinship and the
hereditary claims of descent to ministerial office become an increasing nuisance
to rulers as the state increases in size and complexity. The growing number of
administrative functions and the increasing demands for a high level of indi-
vidual competence create an irresistible pressure for the selection of adminis-
trators on the basis of their personal abilities rather than on their descent alone
(Tuden and Marshall 1972: 45456; Hallpike 1986: 270272). The blood feud is
yet another aspect of kin groups that is gradually supplanted by centralized
systems of state justice. Rulers also discover that the elevation to high office of
intelligent strangers, slaves, and others with no claims of birth provides them
with able servants who are dependent on them alone. Kinship and the obliga-
tions of status are also weakened by other processes in the development of the
state, and one of the most important of these is warfare.
The conquest of one society by another is likely to disrupt the relations be-
tween descent groups and their land, as traditional overlords are disinherited
by those installed by the conquerors, and soldiers are rewarded by grants of
land in the territory of defeated enemies. Warfare is also liable to produce large
numbers of refugees, seeking asylum in neighbouring societies, and large
numbers of captives may also be taken. These may or may not be enslaved, but
the end result of large scale warfare between states is the presence of signifi-
cant numbers of strangers in the victorious society. This cultural heterogeneity
will also be increased by the inclusion of conquered groups, and the conse-
quent necessity of accommodating to these differences in customs and values.
All these factors tend towards the creation of a hierarchy based on social class
rather than on birth alone, as is typical of chiefdoms and early states. As mili-
tary organization increases in scale and complexity it becomes increasingly

specialized, and, as in other areas of administration, there is a corresponding
pressure to select war leaders on the basis of personal ability rather than on
birth. For example, in China.
By the fifth century B.C. a number of states, having defeated their weaker
neighbours, were consolidating their rule and seeking the means to build
strength and stability within their boundaries. In these circumstances, new
opportunities for advancement became open to the low born. Talent brought
its own reward, and one of the important places where it was rewarded was
the battlefield. (Munro 1969: 8).
Trade and associated improvements in technology and communications
also have very important consequences for the transformation of the social or-
der of early states. Traditional obligations derived from status are increasingly
displaced by those based on trade and commercial transactions, especially
when money becomes a significant aspect of social life. Money is far more eas-
ily borrowed than stock, or land, or produce, and relations between creditors
and debtors may become of great social significance, leading to debt slavery
and the emergence of a landless and impoverished class. Economic oppression
and the exploitation of the poor and weak thus become predominant features
of these societies, which are now judged corrupt and perverted by the stan-
dards of righteousness and justice, and class disparities are increased by the
states monopoly of armed force, whereby it can prevent the poor from rebel-
ling.
Wealth which is produced by trade clearly has more individualistic implica-
tions than wealth under corporate order, where it is primarily concerned with
customary prestations in kind. The hereditary status of the nobility is also
brought into question by these new social conditions, especially by commercial
values, and where, as in Greece and Arabia, nobility was strongly associated
with military prowess and honour, the conflict between new and traditional
values is likely to be acute. Adkins (1960), for example, shows in great detail
the problems that the Greeks had in adapting the aggressive values of the no-
bility to the more co-operative values of the city state, and Muhammad experi-
enced similar difficulties with regard to traditional Arab notions of aristocratic
honour. In the desert hinterland of Mecca the dominant value was muruwah,
manliness, but in Mecca diplomacy and commercial shrewdness were the ba-
sis of success:
The fact that the leading men in Mecca, those who had the greatest political
power, were not conspicuous examples of muruwah, must have raised intel-
lectual doubts in thoughtful men doubts about the ultimacy of muruwah as
an ideal and also doubts about the influence of heredity in transmitting mu-
ruwah or at least the capacity for a high degree of it. Thoughts of the latter
kind would undermine the theoretical basis of tribal solidarity and encour-
age the development of individualism. (Watt 1953: 77)
These simple virtues of physical courage, generosity, and dignity are inade-
quate for the businessman, for the administrators of large provinces, and the
generals of professional armies. In all the societies that we shall consider we
shall find that the questioning of the value of birth alone is universal, and the
rise of commerce has a great deal to do with this.
286 Transcendence
Long distance trade also promotes contact with other cultures, and from the
awareness of the differences between their values and those of ones own cul-
ture arose a new climate of relativism, particulary in Greece. Here by the fifth
century B.C. trade had led to a greatly increased geographic and ethnographic
knowledge encompassing the Black Sea, North Africa, the mouth of the Rhone
and the coast of Spain, Asia as far as Susa, and Egypt. Knowledge of many
different peoples, each with their own ways and customs (nomoi), led naturally
to the conclusion that custom, regarded in each locality as fixed and absolute,
is in fact variable from place to place. The thought is expressed several times by
Pindar: Custom is king of all, he says, and Different peoples have different
customs, and each praise what is right (dike) as they see it (Baldry 1965: 19).
Opportunities for trade also stimulate the division of labour and the emer-
gence of craft specialization on a large scale, which is closely associated with
urbanization. While we may find quite large residential groupings in tribal so-
cieties and in some early states these, as in the Konso case, are socially homo-
geneous, in the sense that they are composed of individuals whose mode of life
and values are essentially similar to those of their neighbours. The urbaniza-
tion with which we are concerned here is very different, and has extremely im-
portant consequences:
In the first place, urbanization breaks down the organization based upon
kinship and personal ties which is characteristic of tribal society. It thereby
frees the individual from the control of his kinsmen and sets him among
large groups of strangers. New mechanisms must be devised to take over
the work of the kinship network. Allegiance to the state and the law must be
forged out of loyalty and obedience to the clan. In the second place, when
urban centres arise in multicultural societies, they function to bring together
masses of people who have different backgrounds and also different values,
goals and lifestyles. Value diversity proliferates in cities and brings with it a
whole new series of social problems. Legal and moral conceptions must be
developed to guide individuals in this complex situation. Both of these fac-
tors the loss by the individual of the face-to-face community, and the het-
erogeneity of values encountered in the city can be linked to the difference
between stages 3 and 4 of moral judgement. (Edwards 1975: 521)
A new range of dilemmas thus appears:
Should a son always obey his father? Even if the father is a fool? Status no
longer seemed enough to define duty. Comedy had already begun to occupy
itself with these questions in the fifth century: Aristophanes Clouds and
Wasps play with the relation between son and father, the Lysistrata and Eccle-
siazusae with the relation between men and women. By the time of
Menander the conflict between individual inclinations and the rights and
obligations attached to kinship status is a stock theme, with the obligatory
marriage of the heiress to her next-of-kin singled out as especially ludicrous.
(Humphreys 1975: 107)
Quite apart from diversity of values and the necessity of interacting with
non-relatives and strangers, the urban society based on trade is marked by in-
creased opportunities for choice in career and mode of life.

Increased spatial and social mobility in any society tends to weaken status-
based obligations, such as those attached to particular positions in a kinship
system, and replace them with more flexible ties based on similarity of inter-
est and compatibility of personality. Kinship becomes optional. Such a
change will evidently lead to increased interest in the personal content of re-
lationships, encourage the idea that marriage should be based on personal
selection, and give friendship a new importance as the model of a personal
relationship founded entirely on choice. (Humphreys 1975: 108)
Colin Morris has a similar evaluation of the moral consequences of the di-
versified economy of medieval Europe in the twelfth century:
Twelfth century society was thus disturbed by the rapid emergence of a
whole series of new groups or classes, all of them requiring an ideal on
which to model themselves and an ethic to guide them. They thus created a
conflict of values, and faced the individual with choices which in the year
A.D. 1000 would have been unimaginable. Such men as Abelard or St. Ber-
nard had to choose whether to be a knight, a monk, or a secular clerk. If the
latter, they had to choose according to their dominant intellectual interest
(classics, logic, law, theology) and their hopes for a career (teaching, ad-
vancement in church or state). It was a vigorous, mobile society which gen-
erated, like our own age, both optimism and anxiety. (Morris 1972: 47)
We can therefore understand why urbanization was of particular impor-
tance in Greece, India, China, Israel, Islam, and Christianity:
1
The notion of the
peasant as truly religious is a fairly modern idea. On the contrary it was the
townsman who was much more likely to be numbered among the devout, and
Max Weber has pointed out the great fecundity of the urban middle strata in
religious innovations throughout the several great historical traditions (Bellah
1970: 35).
Contact between different cultures was promoted not only by trade but by
conquest warfare; and ancient empires, combining a number of different cul-
tures under the same political authority, were obviously fertile ground for the
kind of intellectual breakthrough represented by transcendence. Alexanders
empire, for example, was undoubtedly influential in the development of mens
ability to transcend the mental horizons of their own society:
In the later period of Greek History, which began with the conquests of
Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception of the whole inhab-
ited world as a unity and totality, the idea of the whole human race as one.
We may conveniently call it the ecumenical idea the principal of the ecu-
mene or inhabited world, as opposed to the polis or city. Promoted by the
vast extension of the geographical limits of the Greek world resulting from
Alexanders conquests, and by his policy of breaking down the barriers be-
tween Greek and barbarian, the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that

1
So the word pagan, from paganus, villager, rustic, as used by the early Fathers, indi-
cated that the ancient idolatry lingered in the rural villages and hamlets after Christian-
ity had been generally accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire (OED
pagan).
288 Transcendence
all men are brothers, and that a mans true country is not his own particular
city, but the ecumene. (Bury 1932: 23)
1

But one must demur from Weils extreme claim that transcendence in gen-
eral could only have happened in multi-national groupings, and that empires
were the only possible, the only conceivable condition for their birth (Weil
1975: 31). The Roman and Islamic empires besides that of Alexander were cer-
tainly associated with transcendence, but the Greeks of the city states and the
Jews were not imperial conquerors, while the Chinese empire was culturally
far more homogeneous than any of the others, and in any case was only estab-
lished at the end of the major period of philosophical speculation. It would be
more in accordance with the facts to recognize that empire is simply one of the
historical factors associated with transcendence.
Developments in trade and technology, urbanization, and conquest warfare
also led to a vast increase in the possibility of luxury and material self-
indulgence:
The material development of all the higher civilizations had enormously in-
creased the opportunities at least for certain strata for aggrandizement of
power, increase of luxury, and pursuit of status and prestige Civilization
had, at least for some, vastly expanded the horizon of the libidinous imagina-
tion. It is precisely in the moral orientations of the creative minorities of the
first millennium that we find a resounding no to certain characteristic modes
of human self-affirmation which had emerged with the progress of civiliza-
tion. For them the divine no longer dwelt in the manifestation of power,
wealth, and external glory the [Chinese] description of those evil tenden-
cies which impede the achievement of the good is strikingly similar to the
diagnoses made by prophets, wise men, and philosophers in all the high

1
The significance of Alexander and his conquests in generating an awareness of hu-
manity has been much debated. Estimates of him have ranged from the soldier con-
cerned with practical policies for particular ends, to the dreamer who envisaged a world
of universal brotherhood, and so must be regarded as the creator and earliest champion
of the idea of humanity (Baldry 1965: 113). W. W. Tarn (1948) in his biography of Alex-
ander was one of those who placed him in the second category, and Tarn attributed to
him a great revolution in Greek thought by which all men were brothers and ought to
live together in unity and concord (ibid., 100). The arguments of Baldry (1965: 1133
127) against this extreme view seem compelling. While it does appear that Alexanders
policy of treating Persians as the social equals of the Macedonians in his empire was of
great symbolic as well as practical importance, ideas about the unity of mankind had
broader and deeper antecedents in Greek thought. (For a discussion of Alexanders in-
fluence on Stoic ideas about human brotherhood see also Erskine 1990: 3435). Baldry
observes that Racial exclusiveness was not part of the Macedonian outlook: absorption
of other peoples had been a feature of Macedonian development, and fusion with a rul-
ing class so similar as the Persian was to that of Macedon might seem reasonable to a
Macedonian, though outrageous to a Greek (Baldry 1965: 127). He also quotes
Hammonds assessment that the equal association of Macedonians and Iranians in gov-
ernment, marriage, and warfare was designed for the purpose of administration and
conquest and not for any philosophical or religious ends. In consequence it was at-
tempted only at the higher social levels of the Indo-European peoples (ibid., 127).

civilizations of this period. The unbridled pursuit of wealth, power, fame,
sensual passion, arrogance and pride these themes figure centrally as the
source of the difficulty. (Schwartz 1985: 83)
The shift from a social order based on hereditary values to one based on
achievement, growing opportunities for individual advancement in different
careers, conflicts of different and competing moral standards, growing aware-
ness of other cultures, and also much greater opportunity for oppression and
injustice by the powerful, all contributed to a crisis in the relations between
individual and society. This inevitably produced a new range of moral prob-
lems. How are social inequalities and kingship to be justified? What are the
characteristics of the truly noble or virtuous man? If other societies have differ-
ent customs from ours, why do we think ours are the best and most natural?
Must we always obey the commands of our rulers, or are these themselves to
be judged by some higher law? Which is the more reliable guide to how we
should act, traditional custom or some higher standard of conduct? More gen-
erally, there was frequently a sense of despair and bewilderment and a search
for more enduring guides to how one should live. The moral issues in these
very different cultures therefore have a striking similarity, and Confucian
scholars, Buddhist sages, Greek philosophers, and Muslim theologians in a
sense spoke the same conceptual language.
b. Debate and philosophy
So far, we have been considering various kinds of social change that seem to
have been involved in the emergence of Transcendence. But this new way of
thinking about moral, philosophical, and religious issues required real people
to do the thinking, and we must now ask who they were.
In the first place, they need not necessarily have belonged, at least in the
early stages of development, to a leisured class. The absence of a professional
group of thinkers in primitive societies is not primarily due to lack of leisure.
Anyone who has lived in such a society knows that adult men, in particular,
and especially older men have abundant leisure for much of the year. In such
communities, however, only a small proportion of men are interested in phi-
losophical and religious speculation, and their problem is that they are iso-
lated. Among the Konso I found men in each of the towns who were potential
philosophers but they had no one to talk to because their kin and neighbours
were not interested in such matters, and there was no common meeting place.
Mobility therefore seems to be an essential condition for the development of
professional discussion, so that those with a special interest in philosophical
and religious thought may have the opportunity of meeting one another and
engaging in debate outside the traditional restraints of kinship and residence.
But besides mobility there must be problems to discuss, and large scale ur-
banization and trade will not only provide problems but also excellent condi-
tions for this mobility and meeting of different minds, freed from the restric-
tions of traditional kin-based society and small scale residential units, and pro-
ducing opportunities of income which are not dependent on agriculture to
support these scholars far from home.
290 Transcendence
In Greece, Israel, India, and China and later in Arabia the thinkers were able
to meet and communicate in a new way, and form groups of masters and dis-
ciples so that new ideas could be perpetuated as schools of thought. Fifth and
fourth century Athens was the meeting place of thinkers from all over the
Greek-speaking world: Aristotle, by birth an Ionian, had grown up in Mace-
donia; Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was from Cyprus; Diogenes the Cynic
was from Sinope; and Epicurus was from Samos, and these philosophers were
a part of a culture in which public debate was normal in the law courts and the
assembly. G.E.R. Lloyd also refers to the uncontroversial general conclusion
that there was a rapid expansion in both the practice and the theory of public
speaking in the fifth and fourth centuries It is evidently no mere coincidence
that the period which sees the rise of professionalism in the art of speaking is
also a period of radical criticism of certain aspects, at least, of Greek traditional
beliefs (Lloyd 1979: 85).
Lloyd here refers to a second aspect of the development of philosophy,
which is specialization. Real excellence can only be attained in any sphere of
human endeavour by devoting a great deal of time to it, since it is necessary to
study what others have discovered rather than trying to re-invent it all oneself.
Just as primitive society is the home of the amateur, the jack-of-all-trades, so
the ancient civilizations were increasingly the home of the professional, and the
increasing power of their thought was due in no small degree to its increasing
professionalism.
In the society of Northern India, during what has been called the second
urbanization, and into which Buddha was born, there were different schools of
hermits leading an ascetic life, and men could leave one and join another, and
there were also the Wanderers (paribbajaka), celibate but not ascetics, laymen
(and sometimes women) rather than priests:
They were teachers, or sophists, who spent eight or nine months of every
year wandering about precisely with the object of engaging in conversa-
tional discussion on matters of ethics and philosophy, nature lore and mysti-
cism. Like the sophists among the Greeks, they differed very much in intelli-
gence, in earnestness, and in honesty. Some are described as eel wrigglers,
hair splitters, and not without reason if we may fairly judge from the
specimens of their lucubrations preserved by their opponents. But there
must have been many of a very different character, or the high reputations
they enjoyed, as a body, would scarcely have been maintained. We hear of
halls put up for their accommodation, for discussion by them of their sys-
tems of belief The wanderers are often represented as meeting one an-
other at such places, or at the rest houses (chowltries) which it was a preva-
lent custom for villages to put up on the roadside for the common uses of
travellers. And they were in the habit, on their journeys, of calling on other
wanderers, or on the learned Brahmins, or on the hermits, resident in the
neighbourhood of the places where they stopped The residents also, both
to testify respect and to listen to their talk, used to call on the Wanderers
when the latter stayed in or near a village evidence both of the popularity
of the Wanderers, and of the frequent interchange of opinion. (Rhys Davids
1955: 7172)

Philosophy as such was of no interest to the Jews of the Old Testament, but
we find nevertheless that the prophets were to some extent the followers of a
specialized calling. While according to Wilson there is very little biblical evi-
dence on which to base a study of the social aspects of Israelite prophecy
(1980: 14), some facts are known about the social status of prophets. There
were in ancient times different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, groups
of prophets: coenobitic prophets, sanctuary prophets, free prophets, and
prophets of a mixed type (Lindblom 1962: 83). What we do know is that the
prophets often lived together in monasteries or coenobia just like the Arabian
dervishes in their takiyyah. There they had their common meals and were
trained in ecstatic practices under the direction of an especially gifted and ec-
static leader (ibid., 1962: 801). Membership of prophetic groups is implied by
the term sons of the prophets; such groups who lived together and shared
common rules were governed by a leader with a title of father, and at death
this was given to a successor (Wilson 1980: 141).
It has been suggested by some scholars that the wisdom literature (Prov-
erbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes) of the Old Testament was the product of specific
schools of wise men, but there is no textual or other evidence for any such
institution (Whybray 1973: 4950, 54). While some of the ideas in the wisdom
literature were certainly part of Israels shared heritage with other ancient Near
Eastern societies,
The internal evidence of these three books suggests that in the course of a
long period in Israels history there existed an educated class, albeit a small
one, of well-to-do citizens who were accustomed to read for edification and
for pleasure, and that among them arose from time to time men of literary
ability and occasionally of genius who provided the literature which satis-
fied their demand. (Ibid., 69)
In China we find the same phenomenon, at the end of the Spring and Au-
tumn period, of teachers and their disciples who were part of that whole new
intelligentsia that wanders about from state to state offering its wisdom and
expertise to the princes of the time. As in the case of Confucius and his own
disciples, members of this group may have been drawn in large part from the
older political stratum of shih but also from declass upper nobility or even from
below (Schwartz 1985: 135).
The Warring States, Chin, and Han periods witnessed a remarkable growth
in the influence of the arts of disputation and rhetoric on the lives of the an-
cient Chinese. Disputation affected the form and content of philosophical
arguments, provided common forms for communication between various
thinkers and schools of thought, and, mainly during the Han dynasty, con-
tributed to the processes of ideological synthesis Debate and argumenta-
tion came to play a central role in how the society and government of the
time resolved difficulties and determined proper policy. (Kroll 198587: 118)
During the Warring States period, debates were held in the houses of lords,
who might also assemble a group of thinkers to collaborate on a joint book, and
the tradition of court debates survived into the Han dynasty (ibid., 121, 122).
This was the period of the hundred schools (c. 500 B.C. Chin unification of
221 B.C.) and some princes became patrons of learning, the best known exam-
292 Transcendence
ple being the Chi-hsia academy. In the fourth and early third century, this par-
ticular institution seems to have played a central role in the intellectual life of
the times, and one of its most notable figures was Tsou Yen, who developed an
elaborate set of criteria for the regulation of debate which were very influential:
Tsou Yen argued that making ones style elaborate and adorning ones
phrases for the sake of deluding and confusing an opponent, manipulating
ones subtle comparisons and citations from an opponents speech in order
to make him shift his ground and prevent him from getting back to his own
ideas, as well as competition in having the last word, are all incompatible
with the Great Way and the behavior of a chn-tzu. (Kroll 198587: 11920)
Litigation became more frequent as the result of economic change and the
development of private property, and the techniques of legal argument became
linked with sophistry. The Tsung Heng school gave instruction to envoys in the
arts of diplomatic rhetoric because from the Warring States period eloquent
persons good at disputation and able to answer questions unassisted were
chosen as ambassadors between the states, and members of this school had an
important philosophical influence (ibid., 124).
Cultural diversity was an obvious social factor stimulating debate in Greece
and India, and debate itself was an integral part of the development of formal
logic in China, Greece, and India. The doctrinal differences between the hun-
dred schools were also in part the result of cultural differences within China
itself.
The State of Lu was often depicted as the heartland of the old Chou classi-
cal tradition. The northern seaboard areas of Yen and Chi were the home-
land of magical and shamanistic modes of thought. Chou [Chu] was the
homeland of an extravagantly exuberant religious fantasy (and according to
some of Taoism), while the simple and tough inhabitants of the semi-
barbarian state of Chin in the Northwest, we are told, provided an ideal
mass basis for legalist modes of thought. There is, in the texts, an acute
consciousness of the cultural differences between the older established states
of the central plain and the new semi-barbarian states on the northern,
western, and southern peripheries. (Schwartz 1985: 1718)
Class differences were also significant: the Mohists, for example, were
closely associated with the urban artisans, whereas the Confucians were
mainly drawn from the ranks of the gentry. The existence of vassal kings, with
their independent courts that were frequented by wandering scholars, was also
an essential aspect of the pluralistic character of Chinese society during the
period of the hundred schools, and Kroll notes that at the end of the second
century B.C., With the loss of independence by vassal kings, the main social
and political base of the hundred schools disappeared (Kroll 198587: 133).
While the Confucian tradition was particularly hostile to argument and dis-
putation, its advocates had no alternative when faced by hostile arguments
from other schools of thought:
[the Confucian] school does not enter into rational debate until it begins to
be challenged by other schools, first of all by the Mohists. The early Mohists
are ignorant men, excluded from the best culture of their time, but com-
pelled to give reasons for their tenets, because they are new. Each of the ten

triads of chapters defending their ten doctrines is a laboriously assembled
collection of arguments to convince doubters. Some of the argumentation is
very crude nevertheless this is the start of rational discourse in China.
Within a century or so the Mohists will have developed into the most so-
phisticated of all the ancient Chinese thinkers. (Graham 1978: 15)
Logic was of special importance in Mohist ethics because they believed that
it produced a clear basis for understanding moral principles:
Disputation, which is the art of description and in the sciences establishes
what is known a priori (hsien chih), in ethics determines what is desired or
disliked a priori for the sake of men. This is the most important function of
disputation and The purpose of disputation is by clarifying the divisions of
is this and is not to establish the principles between order and misrule.
What is desirable a priori follows of necessity from the ching of moral con-
cepts, the essentials laid down in their definition. (Ibid., 47)
One of the most significant aspects of Mohist thought, therefore, was formal
logic, and the same development of logic also occurred in Greece and India for
similar reasons.
Since logic is not simply valid argument but the reflection upon principles of
validity, it will arise naturally only when there is already a considerable
body of inferential or argumentative material to hand. Not every type of dis-
course provokes logical inquiry. Pure story-telling, or literary discourse,
does not provide a sufficient amount of argumentative material. It is those
types of discourse or inquiry in which proof is sought or demanded that
naturally give rise to logical investigation; for to prove a proposition is to in-
fer it validly from true premisses. (Kneale and Kneale 1962: 1)
The Greeks were unusual in that, for them, geometry was a very important
source of the concept of proof, but they resembled the rest of the ancient world
in the significance of debate for developing the idea of formal logic. The first
technical Greek term for logic was in fact dialectic, from the verb dialegesthai
meaning to discuss (ibid., 7).
Dasgupta has this to say about philosophical debate between the different
schools in India:
As a system passed on it had to meet unexpected opponents and trouble-
some criticisms for which it was not in the least prepared. Its adherents had
therefore to use all their ingenuity and subtlety in support of their own posi-
tions, and to discover the defects of the rival schools that attacked them. A
system as it was originally formulated in the Sutras had probably but few
problems to solve, but as it fought its way in the teeth of opposition of other
schools, it had to offer consistent opinions on other problems in which the
original views were more or less involved but to which no attention had
been given before. (Dasgupta 1922: 64)
Epistemological and logical issues had not been neglected in Buddhist
thought. Within the Abhidharma circle such questions had indeed been dis-
cussed. Nagarjuma, Asanga, and Vasubandhu all dealt with logic and
treated the questions of the valid means of knowing (Yoshinori and Keenan
1987: 545).
294 Transcendence
The association of disputation with logic also appears in later Judaism and
in the Islamic world. While Muhammad did not resort to argument or disputa-
tion, this is reflected in the very meaning of the word kalam, theology:
The term kalam means speech or conversation it is based upon the idea
that truth is found via a question and answer process. Someone proposes a
thesis, and somebody else questions it, this form of disputation being appar-
ent in the grammatical structure of the works of kalam themselves. This tech-
nique for solving dogmatic problems accurately represents the fact that from
the beginning Muslim theology had to think very much in terms of defence
and attack. (Leaman 1985: 8)
When the Muslims became acquainted with Greek Philosophy they greatly
admired Aristotles work on logic, which they adopted despite the great cul-
tural differences between Greece and Islam. The rationalism of the Islamic
Mutazilite school was a natural development of the debates between rival
schools of thought such as those at the Abbasid Court of Baghdad in the ninth
and tenth centuries. Here debate was fostered by the Barmarkid viziers who
were the patrons of the Mutazilites, and by the Caliph al-Mamun who estab-
lished his House of Wisdom in 832.
1
The Barmakids and Caliph al-Mamun
were not so much interested in theology itself as in listening to disputation:
they liked to have representatives of different religions and confessions ar-
gue against each other. This predilection may have been stimulated by a
non-Iraqi environment: the Barmakids originally came from Balkh, and al-
Mamun first resided in Merv; in Transoxiana where both towns were situ-
ated, Islam co-existed with Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Ju-
daism. However, the main stimulus came from the intellectual atmosphere
of the capital itself. Islam was no longer the religion of a minority, as in the
time of Wasil, but a creed which had rapidly expanded at the expense of
other religions. The conversion to Islam had been prompted mostly by social
considerations, but theology had to furnish a posteriori justification: thus the
outlook of the new theology was strongly apologetic and its style predomi-
nantly dialectical. (van Ess 1987: 221222)
The rationalism of the Mutazilites followed quite naturally from this situa-
tion: Beyond the particular sphere of ethics, rationalistic methods are normal
in inter-religious controversy, because if the adversaries are to be able to dis-
cuss religion at all they must find common ground and not presume the truth
of their own faith. This is an idea that recurs constantly in the history of relig-
ions (Hourani 1985: 95). So, too, Aquinas said of debate with pagans and Mus-
lims We must, therefore, have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are
forced to give their assent (ibid., 96). As Susan Humphreys has aptly remarked,
What we call rational discourse is not a cultural speciality of the West but a
necessity for any complex and mobile society (Humphreys 1975: 91), and ra-
tionality has been an essential means for transcending the limitations of ones
own culture.

1
The Moghul Emperor Akbar (155661605) had a House of Worship in which repre-
sentatives of all the religions of India were invited to take part in debate (Zaehner 1962:
180).

It should be noted, however, that the thinkers in all these societies were not
part of the institutionalized apparatus of the state. Humphreys has pointed out
that
new transcendental visions are likely to be presented by persons in a pre-
cariously independent, interstitial or at least exposed and somewhat soli-
tary position in society; they are therefore particularly likely to occur in so-
cieties sufficiently differentiated to have specialized social roles with distinct
bases of authority, but not complex enough to have integrated these roles
into functionally differentiated structures. This might suggest that the reason
for the absence of transcendence in Egypt and Mesopotamia is the encapsu-
lation of religious and intellectual specialists in the organization of the tem-
ple or palace. (Humphreys 1975: 112)
Thus the priests and bureaucrat-scribes of Mesopotamia were first and fore-
most officials in the employment of the state: The habitat of the bureaucrat-
scribe is well defined and remains the same throughout the history of Mesopo-
tamia: it is the palace and the temple, the oikos-like structures or economic inte-
gration systems, which I have called the Great Organization (Oppenheim
1975: 39). In that situation the most obvious and best known activity of the
scribes is the recording of the flow of goods, staples, animals, and workmen
through the appropriate channels that keep the organization functioning. The
priests, too,
by their functions, were little inclined to abstraction. Their role was not to
speculate on the nature of the world and of the human spirit: it was to en-
sure the continuity of Tradition. Therein lay their duty, just as others had
been made responsible for the continued running of public affairs and the
administration of the provinces. They were all, ultimately, in the service of
the prince, who demanded absolute obedience, that is, the unfailing dis-
charge of the duty assigned to each. This conception is most obvious in As-
syria, where the royal authority had a greater hold over the mass of its sub-
jects than it did in Babylonia. However, it is no less obvious in that country.
But such habits of subordination did not favour free discussion and, in
Mesopotamia, we do not find an awakening of rational philosophy. (Garelli
1975: 50)
So Oppenheim notes
the absence of any polemic in cuneiform literature. There is no arguing
against opposing views; we find here none of the revealing dialogue, which
in Greek life and thought finds expression in the court, in the theatre, and in
the lecture room What is written on clay typically either records past
transactions or formulates traditionally determined relations; hardly ever is
it intended to refute divergent opinions or to discuss the relative merits of al-
ternate possibilities, and least of all to communicate to a reader informa-
tion about the writer himself (except in letters), his background, and his civi-
lization. No effort is made to relate within one conceptual plan differences in
outlook or evaluation. (Oppenheim 1975: 38)
These official functionaries were also concerned only with the requirements
of their immediate society, whereas Humphreys suggests that
296 Transcendence
One of the factors influencing the intellectual to adopt a transcendental per-
spective appears to be the need to make his work comprehensible to an au-
dience widely extended in space and continuing indefinitely into posterity.
How far is our own appreciative response to these works and especially to
the rationalism of the Greek philosophers due to the authors deliberate in-
tention of transcending limitations of social structure and temporal hori-
zons? How far is this successful transcendence due to content and how far to
form, to the structuring of the communication in such a way that it contains
in itself enough information to make it immediately comprehensible? Is this
the common quality of rational discourse and of classic works of art?
(Humphreys 1975: 112)
3. Transcendent ethics
Now that we understand in general terms how societies changed during the
Axial Age, we are in the position to establish some of the basic characteristics
of the transcendent ethical thinking that was bound up with these changes. But
we must remember that there were important cultural differences between
these societies one of the most obvious being in political organization, so that
we must expect different ideas about law and justice in the small, republican
societies of Greece from those of the large imperial state of China and the king-
doms of India, for example. With regard to philosophy itself, one important
difference is that in Israel, unlike Greece, India and China, there was none the
whole idiom of thought was not only religious (as in India) but was expressed
in the form of a set of divine statutes; the prophets addressed the people in a
hortatory and poetic manner, and even the wisdom literature cannot be re-
garded as truly philosophical. But despite the thoroughly unphilosophical at-
mosphere of the Old Testament, it has an inescapable and profound moral sig-
nificance because of its unique emphasis upon the personality of God and Man:
The most important feature of the Old Testament fellowship of God and man,
i.e. its moral emphasis, is obviously related to the clear conception of personal-
ity, human and divine, in Israels religion. Personality always implies moral
obligation, and finds its highest expression through morality. Where personal-
ity is adequately recognised, there will necessarily be the recognition of moral-
ity (Robinson 1956: 38).
In Greece, philosophy seems to have originated in a fascination with cosmic
speculation, and only later with Socrates does ethics assume the supreme im-
portance which it maintained throughout antiquity. In India, philosophy
sprang from religious thought and was centrally concerned with individual
salvation, and while Buddhism involved a radical reconstruction of society in
which caste was abolished, it never seems to have produced a rationalistic sys-
tem of ethics such as developed in Greece, Islam, and China. The bent of Chi-
nese philosophy was markedly utilitarian and, like that of Greece, was espe-
cially concerned with how society should be organized. Here the Mohists de-
veloped a rational, secular ethics very similar in type to that, for example, of
Aristotle or Cicero. Much later, Islam took up Greek philosophy, and moral
philosophy was much debated.
Transcendent ethics 297

Religious revelation played very different roles in the societies we are con-
sidering. It was of no importance in Greece or China, but absolutely central in
Israel, Islam, and for the Hindus. Buddhism rejected it entirely since Bud-
dhism denied the existence of God and relied solely on a rational system of
philosophical psychology.
Law, in the form of judicial procedures, was a major factor in the ethical
thinking of Greece (and later, of course, Rome), Israel, and Islam; but in China
and India it had a rather different significance, relating not so much to judicial
procedures (though these were important) as to punishment and the enforce-
ment of rules of conduct and role-performance.
Finally, we must note the great importance which contact with other cul-
tures had for the Greeks and Romans, and for Israel; in India awareness of cul-
tural differences seems to have been of much less importance, while the Chi-
nese were the most isolated of our societies, and awareness of cultural differ-
ences seems to have had little impact on their moral thinking.
These differences and resemblances cut across one another in numerous
ways, so that we cannot classify the societies of our study in any consistent
sub-categories. There were also, it must be emphasized, significant theoretical
disagreements within these cultural traditions which must also be taken into
account. These disagreements seem to fall into a similar pattern, however, at
least in Greece, India and China. The typical responses of the ancient thinkers
to the problems of their society may, first of all, be divided into what we may
call the pro-social and the renouncers. In the ranks of the pro-social, those
who treat the practical re-organization of society as a matter of the first impor-
tance, we find, for example, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Cicero; the Brah-
minical tradition of India; and the Confucians, Mohists and Legalists of China.
In Israel the whole tradition of the Torah was of this type, and so, too, was the
teaching of Muhammad.
Among the renouncers we find two main traditions; ascetics and hedon-
ists, who for different reasons prefer to opt out of society and leave it to man-
age its own affairs. In Greece the Cynics were in many ways ascetic renouncers,
though, since Greece was not India and had no tradition of asceticism, the Cyn-
ics were always marginal and ridiculed. In India, of course, renunciation of
society was the norm for Hindus after the stage in life of being a married
householder, but in Jainism and Buddhism the ideal of renunciation was even
more fundamental and was the basis of the Buddhist sangha, the monastic or-
der. In China many of the Taoists also renounced social life, although, like
Buddhists and Jains, they too developed a community organization. It is possi-
ble that the Nazirites of Israel were also ascetic renouncers but very little is
known of their mode of life. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that ascetic re-
nunciation soon became a very significant feature of Christian life, and in Islam
the Sufi movement was yet another example of this.
The hedonist renouncers in Greece, and later in Rome, were the Epicureans,
in India the Lokayatas, and in China the Yangists. The philosophical beliefs of
these schools of hedonists display a number of interesting parallels, and pro-
vide, among other things, some anticipation of modern individualism. They
298 Transcendence
represent an important dissenting tradition in their respective societies, and we
shall examine their doctrines in detail at the end of this chapter. Leaving them
for the time being on one side, we can discover in the non-hedonist thinkers of
the ancient world a substantial measure of agreement of a number of central
issues, despite the manifold differences between the various cultures with re-
gard to religion, law, and political organization.
The aim of life is assumed to be happiness, whose attainment requires the
capacity, as we might put it in modern terminology, to adapt to ones envi-
ronment in the most effective way consistent both with ones general human
nature and with ones own personal characteristics. This involves understand-
ing how the cosmos works, and also the nature of ones self and ones own
place within society. The development of certain excellences of character and
mind, or virtues, such as control of the physical desires and the emotions,
courage, and especially wisdom is of primary importance. It is these virtues
that equip one to perform well as a human being, and therefore to attain hap-
piness. The order of society is also of great importance, since happiness for in-
dividuals is inherently bound up with the sort of society they live in, and all
the thinkers of our period have something to say about ideal types of social
organization. Virtue is an essential part of the social order since not only does a
society of virtuous people work better than a society of vicious people but be-
cause there are certain key social roles, such as parent and child, subject and
ruler and friend, whose proper performance is necessary for the good of the
social order, and these roles require the appropriate virtues if they are to be
performed adequately.
But while the thinkers of antiquity were very much concerned with what
people ought to do, with duty, as well as with their character, we do not find
that they were concerned with duty in the modern sense of moral obligation.
Duty meant obeying the religious law (where it existed), or the accepted norms
of propriety, and carrying out the requirements of ones social roles. At its
more abstract, we may call this sort of duty the doing of what is appropriate or
fitting in the circumstances. But they did not have any interest in the formula-
tion of such abstract rules of moral obligation as the Categorical Imperative, or
of Utility, or Rawlsian justice, and applying these to real life situations. What
one ought to do was what the virtuous person with a properly developed
character would do, not something that had to be worked out primarily on the
basis of abstract ethical rules. This relative lack of concern with moral rules, by
comparison with the emphasis given to virtue, is one of the most important
ways in which ancient systems of ethics differ from the moral thought of mod-
ern Western society.
To compare in detail the moral ideas which developed in all the great civili-
zations of the ancient world would be an immense task far beyond the scope of
this chapter, and my aim here is limited to showing how all these ethical sys-
tems share certain essential features, and that these are also closely linked to-
gether, forming a coherent intellectual structure.
1. The concepts of Righteousness/Justice/Truth the precise emphasis
varies are extended beyond the thinkers own society, and become
universal, even cosmic principles of moral order, valid for all socie-

ties. A permanent tension is therefore established between the eternal
moral law and the institutions of actual societies. It is not simply spe-
cific social injustices such as the oppression of the poor and weak
which are condemned, but we find that kingship and social class, and
indeed necessity of having society at all became the subject of specu-
lation and ethical justification.
2. In other words, society itself becomes an object of thought, and mod-
els of ideal societies are formulated. These debates focus on such is-
sues as the authority of government; the difference between natural
law and the laws of the state; whether the state should be governed
by the moral example of the ruler or by clear laws rigorously en-
forced; and the source of the moral law itself is it from nature, or
from Heaven or God, or is it a human invention?
3. World rejection is a universal feature of this new attitude to life, and
is expressed not only in movements of religious renunciation, but
more generally in the questioning of the belief that material prosper-
ity and social success are the supreme goods.
4. Popular opinion or traditional authority are no longer treated as the
obvious and only guides to proper conduct, and there is a new oppo-
sition between conventional opinion and the critical views of an intel-
lectual elite of experts or sages. The claims of conscience in the face of
social pressure to conformity become more clearly recognized.
5. Thus we find a growing awareness of the inner life of the individual.
This manifests itself in a new consciousness of the need for self-
awareness, and know thyself becomes, in one form or another, a
general maxim. Intentions and motives are closely scrutinized; and
an increasingly sophisticated range of psychological concepts devel-
ops. The emphasis on physical purity shifts to purity of mind and
heart, and moral courage becomes more important than the merely
physical variety, while in the realm of law the mental element is in-
creasingly recognized.
6. The question What is virtue? becomes central, and there is a clear
progression from the notion of the virtues as a bag of socially desir-
able attributes to concentration upon a few essential virtues which
are the necessary excellences for all human beings as moral agents,
and schemes of the virtues form an integrated whole. One of the most
important features of these schemes is the belief that the body and its
desires must be subordinated to the higher elements of mind and
soul. The moral life is increasingly seen as a slow struggle to develop
ones character by bringing ones desires into harmony with the right,
and the image of the path or way becomes a predominant symbol of
this dynamic model of the moral life as a series of choices lasting until
death.
7. Wisdom is an essential aspect of this moral growth, by which the
moral agent comes to understand what is truly right, and by so doing
300 Transcendence
obtains inner tranquillity of mind and true happiness and, in a reli-
gious context, salvation.
8. The topic of human nature is generally discussed, both in relation to
virtue and in relation to speculation about society, and forms one of
the essential foundations for the idea of a universal morality tran-
scending the limitations of ones own society.
9. There is everywhere a major extension of the morality of the good
of benevolence, mercy, and compassion towards all men, not just to
members of ones own society or even culture. The ethics of retalia-
tion are part of this development: not only is revenge often depre-
cated, but we find several traditions advocating the ideal of benevo-
lence even to ones enemies.
10. There is a growth of the idea of a common humanity which tran-
scends the boundaries of nation and culture and social distinctions of
rank, such as slavery, so that all good men are brothers, and the ideal
condition of man would be universal peace.
11. Religion becomes thoroughly permeated with moral values, and the
salvation of ones soul is dependent on ones personal virtue and
good deeds alone.
It is not suggested, however, that all these features of transcendent ethical sys-
tems are found equally well developed in all the areas of our study, and Hindu
society is the weakest example.
While these ideas might have been expressed in different ways and listed in
various orders, it will be clear that they have a strong internal coherence. So,
for example, universal moral ideals of truth and justice and right, social criti-
cism and reform, the importance of the inner life of the individual, the analysis
of virtue, and the moral significance of our common humanity all depend on
one another, as do the other ideas in my list. The internal coherence of these
ideas, their transcendence of society and their dynamic quality of representing
societies and individuals as functioning wholes, all correspond well with
Kohlbergs criteria of Post-Conventional moral thought and with Piagets crite-
ria of Moral Autonomy, and with the advanced levels of social cognition and
self-awareness which we examined in Chapter IV.
We have seen, however, that the notions of individual rights that are prior
to society, social contract, individual liberty, and Utilitarianism, which are cen-
tral to Kohlbergs Stage 5 model of Post-Conventional moral thought are the
product of modern Western liberal individualism and as such have no claim to
be the unique cross-cultural tests of moral understanding. No doubt, it is nec-
essary to have reached the stage of formal operations in order to grasp, say, the
Rawlsian model of justice, but this is not the only form of transcendent ethical
thought. The modern concept of individual rights, in particular, was un-
known in traditional India and Japan (OFlaherty and Derrett 1978: ix); in
China (Hansen 1985b: 360; Bodde 1991: 200); and in Greece and Rome rights
were those of citizens under the law. All the theories we shall be considering
(with the exception of the hedonists) regarded society as prior to the individual

and we cannot therefore expect to find the concepts of modern Western liberal-
ism of much use in grasping ancient ethics.
But by the criteria of the ability to reflect explicitly and analytically on soci-
ety as a whole, to think of individuals independently of their social status, to
distinguish between general moral principles and specific duties and customs,
their critical approach to the claims of custom and convention, their emphasis
on the importance of conscience, their awareness of the significance of inten-
tion and motive, and in the integrated analysis of the components of the hu-
man personality, the ancient ethical thinkers show that they had attained
Kohlbergs Post-Conventional and Piagets Autonomous level of moral
development.
While, however, an advance in individual cognitive ability is a very impor-
tant aspect of the new understanding of morality, we must also recognize that
the exposition of moral teachings in the recorded sayings of Buddha, Confu-
cius, the Jewish Prophets, Jesus, and Muhammad is poetic rather than philoso-
phical in manner. This cultural difference does not, however, entitle us to con-
clude that any of these thinkers would have been incapable of defending his
beliefs in philosophical debate, and it is very important to remember that ethi-
cal truths can be expressed in parables and poetry, as well as in the abstract
propositions of philosophy, and poetic language may also be more persuasive
and reach a larger audience, which is, after all, the aim of religious teachers.
It must also be remembered that religion and cosmology were of central
importance in these ethical developments. We noted that in the corporate order
it is taken for granted that society, nature, and the gods are closely linked to-
gether, and it certainly cannot be claimed that the new understanding of moral-
ity simply discarded this assumption as an outmoded superstition. In all of
these civilizations we find a world permeated with the numinous, the sacred,
and the mythic. The divine powers embody and preside over all the phenom-
ena of nature as well as over all the realm of civilization (Schwartz 1975: 2).
But what we do find is that this association is no longer just an implicit as-
sumption but is explicitly maintained and defended as a theory about man and
the universe, and the new cosmologies also provide a foundation on which
transcendent ethical theories such as natural law can be constructed. There are
also dissenting views: the Stoics thought that the universe was governed by the
logos while the Sophists and Epicureans denied this; and the Confucians and
the Mohists maintained that Heaven was concerned with human welfare,
while the Taoists said that Heaven was indifferent to man. The new cosmolo-
gies also provided a foundation on which transcendent ethical theories such as
natural law could be developed.
Some might suppose that the rise of the world religions was a reversion to
Piagets Moral Heteronomy, since in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hindu-
ism there is great emphasis on the authority of revelation, in which certain
commands are given on the basis of supernatural authority, and the people are
expected to obey, just as they obeyed the authority of tribal tradition. (And
even in China Confucianism became the official state philosophy, taught to
generations of students.) But such a view is a comprehensive misrepresentation
of the facts. In the first place, the great teachers all had to get their message ac-
302 Transcendence
cepted, since they did not speak from any prior position of authority, and this
meant that they had to convince enough of their contemporaries for their ideas
to survive. This in turn meant that believers had to have some grounds for be-
lieving those ideas to be true. Secondly, these teachings were those of specific,
identifiable individuals (the anonymous Hindu scriptures are the only notable
exception to this), and these individuals confronted other opposing views, as
Jesus confronted the Pharisees and the lawyers, Muhammad and Zoroaster the
pagan polytheists, Buddha the Brahmins and the Jains, and so on. Their teach-
ings are never presented simply as unquestionably true, but as true in opposi-
tion to a wider environment of error. They are therefore doctrines, a set of be-
liefs which it is in some sense enlightened to accept, and which appeared as
the result of a special individual insight into reality, whether or not this insight
was religious or philosophical in nature. Thirdly, while the teachings of Jesus,
Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, and so on are typically conveyed without
any philosophical or theological apparatus, they present immediate problems
of interpretation for their followers, and in the complex societies in which these
teachings appeared the intellectual challenge of exegesis was formidable. Fi-
nally, there is the related problem of the application of these teachings to social
life, and here again we find that the best minds were required for this very de-
manding intellectual task. It would therefore be quite wrong to think of the
world religions as simply imposing a monolithic set of beliefs on the uncritical
masses. These beliefs were presented as doctrines that were true, they were in
competition with other doctrines, they were difficult to understand, they had
to be taught explicitly by formal instruction, and they were controversial, too,
in their application. No doubt, as cultural traditions developed over the centu-
ries, these doctrines received uncritical assent from many of those who were
brought up in them, especially the least educated, but they remained a corpus
of doctrine, explicit bodies of thought which could in principle be defended
intellectually, and this was a radical innovation in human history, quite unlike
the collective representations of tribal society and the anonymous priesthoods
of the early states.
In the world religions we also find a marked tendency to the same rationali-
zation and simplification as in the political realm. This is not to be explained by
some crude model in which thought merely reflects social institutions, but is
the result of parallel intellectual activity in both religion and social organiza-
tion and which leads to similar results:
The notion of the one God who has neither court nor relatives, who has no
myth himself, and who is the sole creator and ruler of the universe, the no-
tion of self-subsistent being, or of release from the cycle of birth and rebirth,
are all enormous simplifications of the ramified cosmologies of archaic relig-
ions From the point of view of these religions a man is no longer defined
chiefly in terms of what tribe or clan he comes from or what particular god
he serves, but rather as a being capable of salvation. That is to say that it is
for the first time possible to conceive of man as such. (Bellah 1970: 32)
In this survey of the central themes of ethical thought in the literate civiliza-
tions of antiquity one has therefore to tread a fine line between the temptations
to ignore important cultural differences and impose an unduly simple model
The new awareness of individuality and the inner life 303

on the data, on the one hand, and on the other hand to be so distracted by these
undoubted differences that one is unable to discern the equally important
resemblances in ethical thought that they reveal.
4. The new awareness of individuality and the inner life
One of the most obvious and profound changes in moral understanding and in
the structure of ethical systems is in the significance of the individual and the
life of inner moral experience. The awareness of this becomes enormously
deeper, and at the same time more integrated, than it was in early states and
tribal societies. In those, status and corporate order provided a stable frame-
work of rules in terms of which the individual knew what was expected of him
and which gave him his identity, but this can be described as diffused among
the various social roles the individual was called upon to play.
But with the breakdown of these stable social systems based upon inherited
status, the individual was now forced to become more conscious of himself as
an agent who had to choose and decide between a variety of possible courses
of action and ways of life, and this was especially true in urban and commer-
cial situations. In Greece these were major factors in destroying the old ascrip-
tive order based in kinship and birth:
The man who draws his boat down into the sea and sails it is no longer tied
to the man who previously ordered his life across the boundary of his fields
He must decide for himself whether to sail east or west, what to buy and
how much to pay for it. If he succeeds he matters in the world The mer-
cenary must take orders from any general set over him, not just from the
commander of his phratry. (Forrest 1966: 77)
In the new urban civilization the progressive decay of tradition set the reli-
gious man free to choose his own gods, very much as it set the poet free to
choose his own style (Kitto 1954: 242). Referring to the discovery of individu-
ality in post-Homeric Greece, and the conditions associated with it, Misch says
there is, to begin with, the growth of material and spiritual culture, as a
rule the sudden consequence of the extension of the field of view to previ-
ously unknown peoples, with different ways of living. This gives the indi-
vidual consciousness a more manifold, more comprehensive, and even more
heterogeneous content, and the integrating energy must increase if unity is
to be conserved. The scope for such integration exists as soon as the tradi-
tional social bonds determining mens ends and aims no longer suffice for
the individual demand for a field of activity. (Misch 1950: 69)
The same process which led to an increased awareness of the self also oc-
curred in India: The old tribal structure of the society now tended to break up
under the influence of growing urbanism and the emergence of strong monar-
chies. These two features were further responsible for the growth of the idea of
individualism which characterises this period in a very marked manner.
(Misra 1984: 15).
It therefore comes as no surprise that Buddhism, a tradition that is con-
spicuous for its early association with urbanism, should conceive of the
problem of existence as one caused by an exaggerated notion of the ego or
304 Transcendence
self. The visible, tangible misery caused by excessive individualism in the
realm of politics or economics, or wherever competition and the display of
egoism are dominant is easily translated into the sphere of the transcenden-
tal as the idea that the malaise of the individual being is the exaggeration of
the ego or the individual self. According to this analysis, the source of tran-
quillity must be sought in a devaluation of that self. This step is accom-
plished by the philosophical formulation that the self is an illusion. (Senevi-
ratne 1987: 41)
In Israel, too, we find a growing sense of the individual:
In the period of the prophets a new sense of the worth of the individual
grew up in Israel. As a result of the monarchy the old tribal organization be-
gan to break up, and men no longer felt that the clan was everything and the
individual nothing. The religious experience of the prophets also fostered
individualism. Each of them had a personal experience of God but did not
depend upon the fact that they were members of the Commonwealth of Is-
rael. The nation was against them, yet they were confident that they had
stood in the council of the Most High. This conviction was exemplified most
perfectly in Jeremiah, whose confidence in Gods individual care triumphed
amid persecution and the downfall of the nation. The individualism of the
prophets has left its mark in the legislation of Deuteronomy and the Holi-
ness Code, which recognized new rights of wives, children, and slaves over
against the head of the house, which prohibits the punishment of children
for the crimes of fathers, or of fathers for the crimes of children. This new
consciousness of the individual human being found noble expression in the
words of Yahweh proclaimed by Ezekiel, Behold, all souls are mine, as the
soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine (Paton 1927: 221)
In the period of Muhammad in Arabia a similar development of self-
awareness had occurred:
Hitherto, so far as we can tell, a man had been content to reflect upon the
glory of the tribe and upon his own share in that glory. Now there was a
growing awareness of the existence of the individual in separation from the
tribe, with the consequent cessation of his individual existence at death.
What was the ultimate destiny of a man? Was death the end? The tendency
to individualism and away from tribal solidarity was fostered in Mecca by
the circumstances of commercial life. Though public order depended on the
clan system, yet in general a single family, even an individual with his de-
pendents, could constitute a viable unit. So we frequently find men acting in
opposition to their clans Muhammads earliest followers became Muslims
despite the disapproval of their clans and even of their parents. Business
partnerships seem sometimes to have cut across clan relationships (Watt
1953: 19). [In Islam] Mans consciousness of himself as an individual had
come to stay, and therefore had to be accepted and to be taken into account.
This the Quran does in the conception of the Last Judgment, for that is es-
sentially a judgment on individuals. The day of judgment is a day when one
shall have no influence on behalf of another at all (82. 19) The isolation of
the individual from his relations is described in 35. 19 (though it may not
have a reference to the Last Day): if a heavy laden one call another to its
load, no part of it will be born, even though it were a near relative. (Ibid., 73)

At the end of our historical period in medieval Europe,
The discovery of the individual was one of the most important cultural
developments between 1050 and 1200. It was not confined to any one group
of thinkers. Its central features may be found in many different circles: a con-
cern with self-discovery; an interest in the relations between people, and in
the role of the individual within society; and assessment of people by their
inner intentions rather than by their external acts. These concerns were,
moreover, conscious and deliberate. Know yourself was one of the most
frequently quoted injunctions. The phenomenon which we have been study-
ing was found in some measure in every part of urbane and intelligent soci-
ety. (Morris 1972: 158)
Bellah sums up this process as follows:
The identity diffusion characteristic of both primitive and archaic religions is
radically challenged by the historic religious symbolization, which tends for
the first time to a clearly structured conception of the self. Devaluation of the
empirical world and the empirical self highlights the conception of a respon-
sible self, a core self, or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experi-
ence, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency be-
lied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions. (Bellah 1970: 33)
But this new awareness of the individual and especially of the inner life did
not have all the connotations of modern Western individualism (for a good
discussion of which see Lukes 1973). In the first place, the individual was not
thought of as having some kind of reality that was prior to, or independent of,
society. For all except the hedonists, man is essentially a social being, even if
renunciation of society at some period of life is accepted as morally or spiritu-
ally valuable. Individuals are related to society in a part-whole fashion, just as
society itself is part of a meaningful cosmos, and egoism in the sense of making
ones own interests the chief criterion of action is condemned. There is there-
fore no idea of individual rights in the modern Western sense, since this is one
of the consequences of liberalism; duties or functions, not rights are what are
important. Nor, correspondingly, is there much idea of the importance of
uniqueness, and the notion of European romanticism that the moral man
should express his uniqueness in his life in a manner akin to the original artist
in his creative act (Munro 1985: 3) is generally absent. While thinkers were
well aware that there are many roads to sagehood, and that individuals differ
in their personality and aptitudes, difference for its own sake was not much
valued by comparison with the really important ideals of the moral life, which
were held to be the same for all men.
Munro also notes that privacy is one of the foremost values of the modern
liberals. It refers to areas of thought and conduct that should not be subject to
intrusion by the public or by the government Focusing on privacy in the
sense of a value to be protected, John Stuart Mill popularized the notion that
there was some purely personal or private conduct that is none of the publics
business (ibid., 8). In the complex societies we are studying there was certainly
a heightened contrast, at least for the upper classes, between public life in the
sense of taking office, and the private life of ones family, and a man might
withdraw into this type of private life as a matter of principle. Again, ascetic
306 Transcendence
values also justified a more radical withdrawal even from family life, but it
would be very hard to support the claim that these societies thought that ones
personal life should lie outside the public scrutiny. Indeed, the very idea would
have been questioned on the grounds that the purpose of society was to make
people good and, conversely, that good people produce a good society. This
was not only a Chinese attitude, but is found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Juda-
ism, Aristotle and the Stoics, Christianity, and Islam. The whole liberal empha-
sis on the value of privacy is more appropriate to modern societies such as our
own where there is no longer any certainty about what constitutes the good life
for individuals at all.
Bodde, in his discussion of the Chinese conception of the individual, refers
to Jungs distinction between individualism and individuation:
Individualism consists in deliberately giving prominence to and emphasiz-
ing presumed originality, as opposed to collective considerations and re-
sponsibilities. Individuation on the other hand means a better and more
complete fulfilment of mans collective responsibilities, in that, by making
adequate allowance for what is peculiar to an individual, better fulfilment of
his social aptitudes may be expected than when these characteristics are ne-
glected or surpassed [The individual] does not therefore become selfish
in the generally accepted sense of the term, but simply fulfils his own spe-
cific nature. As we have already noted, there is a world of difference be-
tween this and egoism or individualism. (Cited in Bodde 1991: 291)
This is a very illuminating distinction which applies not only to China but to all
the societies of our study, which can be said to have valued individuation
rather that individualism (and see Lukes 1973: 8 for a similar discussion of
this question).
But while the primary focus of moral attention was indeed upon what indi-
viduals had in common rather than upon their differences, this did not mean
that outward conformity to social convention or popular opinion was thought
to be morally sufficient. In the Analects (17.13) Confucius makes the cryptic
comment that the village honest man is the enemy of virtue (the spoiler of
morals [Soothill], spoils true virtue [te] [Waley]). Mencius explains this as
follows:
The village honest man is someone whose standard of conduct is based on
the approval of his fellows, and who criticizes the sages as eccentrics why
must they walk along in such solitary fashion? Being in this world, one must
behave in a manner pleasing to this world. So long as one is good it is all
right. He tries in this way cringingly to please the world. Such is the village
honest man. If a man is praised for honesty in his village, said Wan Tzu,
then he is an honest man wherever he goes. Why did Confucius consider
such a man an enemy of virtue? If you want to censure him, you cannot
find anything; if you want to find fault with him, you cannot find anything
either. He shares with others the practices of the days and is in harmony
with the sordid world. He pursues such a policy and appears to be conscien-
tious and faithful, and to show integrity in his conduct. He is liked by the
multitude and is self-righteous. It is impossible to embark on the way of Yao
and Shun with such a man. Hence the name enemy of virtue. (Mencius
7.B.37)

The sage, not the masses, is the proper judge of right and wrong, and the
same view is expressed by Socrates:
Socrates: what we ought to consider is not so much what people in general
will say about us but how we stand with the expert in right and wrong, the
one authority, who represents the actual truth. So in the first place your
proposition is not correct when you say that we should first consider popu-
lar opinion in questions of what is right and honourable and good, or the
opposite. Of course one might object, all the same, the people have the
power to put us to death.
Crito: No doubt about that! Quite true, Socrates. It is a possible objection.
Socrates: But so far as I can see, my dear fellow, the argument that we have
just been through is quite unaffected by it. (Crito 48a-b)
This new individualism or rather, individuation developed in a climate
of opinion which rejected not only popular opinion but also the traditional
emphasis on material prosperity and success. Bellah notes
the emergence in the first millennium BC all across the Old World, at least in
centres of high culture, of the phenomenon of religious rejection of the
world characterized by an extremely negative evaluation of man and society
and the exaltation of another realm of reality as alone true and infinitely
valuable. This theme emerges in Greece through a long development into
Platos classic formulation in the Phaedo that the body is the tomb or prison
of the soul, and that only by disentanglement from the body in all things
worldly can the soul unify itself with the unimaginably different world of
the divine. A very different formulation is found in Israel, but there too the
world is profoundly devalued in the face of the transcendent God with
whom alone is there any refuge or comfort. In India we find perhaps the
most radical of all versions of world rejection, culminating in the great im-
age of the Buddha, that the world is a burning house and mans urgent need
is a way to escape from it. In China, Taoist ascetics urged the transvaluation
of all the accepted values and withdrawal from human society, which they
considered unnatural and perverse. (Bellah 1970: 22).
In a much later period the same factors produced a similar response in Ara-
bia: The Koran compares this present world to vegetation after rain, whose
growth rejoices the unbeliever, but it quickly withers away and becomes as
straw. Men prefer life in the present world but the life to come is infinitely su-
perior; it alone is everlasting (ibid., 23).
The case of Socrates, the man of pre-eminent virtue put to death by his own
society is symbolic of this devaluation of worldly success, and the life of Jesus
affirms this even more emphatically. From the other end of the Old World the
message of Confucius was similar:
Success is a theme seldom dealt with in the Analects; for it is well known
that the Way does not prevail in the world, and the merits of the true chn-
tzu are not such as the world is likely to recognize or reward. Lack of recog-
nition is, indeed, one of Confuciuss most frequent topics, and to feel no re-
sentment (yan) when repeatedly cashiered or neglected is the chn-tzus
highest virtue. (Waley 1938: 36)
308 Transcendence
We do not find world renunciation in the tribal systems of morality and re-
ligion or in the early states:
Primitive religions are on the whole more oriented to a single cosmos; they
know nothing of a wholly different world relative to which the actual world
is utterly devoid of value. They are concerned with personal, social, and
cosmic harmony and with obtaining specific goods rain, harvest, children,
health as men have always been. But the overriding goal of salvation that
dominates the world-rejecting religions is almost absent in primitive relig-
ion, and life after death tends to be a shadowy semi-existence in some
vaguely designated place in the single world. (Bellah 1970:, 23)
In the Vedas for example an activistic and optimistic outlook went a long
way to influence their ethical attitude and their notion of moral virtues The
problem of war and peace is a great problem in Buddhism [but] in the Vedas
there is no doubt about war or the propriety of victory over the enemies
(Misra 1984: 14). For Buddhism, however all the water in all the oceans cannot
equal the tears shed by mankind since the beginning, and Buddhism shared
with post-Vedic Hinduism the conviction that suffering is the main problem
for man. All is suffering for the Sage (Yoga Sutra 2.15). To liberate the self from
suffering is the goal of all Indian philosophies and magico-mystical techniques.
In India metaphysical knowledge always has a soteriological purpose for it is
by knowledge of ultimate reality that man, casting off the illusions of the world
of phenomena, awakens and discovers the true nature of spirit (Eliade 1987:
520). The sense of the world as full of suffering becomes so prominent in the
Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, the Prophets and the Wisdom litera-
ture that it is perhaps unnecessary to refer to it in any detail: Vanity of vani-
ties, sayeth the Preacher, all is vanity (or emptiness, as it is rendered in mod-
ern translations) may be taken as a summary. In Arabia, the works of the great
pre-Islamic poets invariably resound with bitter cries of despair at the empti-
ness of human life (Izutsu 1966: 49); This world is transitory and vain, Islam
teaches, and says you must never count upon it; if you really desire to obtain
immortality and enjoy eternal bliss you should make the principle of other-
worldliness the basis of your life (ibid., 50).
All philosophers and religious teachers of the Axial Age, and of Christianity
and Islam, were therefore fundamentally concerned with the question asked
and answered by Plato and Aristotle, What is happiness or well-being and
how does a man achieve it? (Long 1986: 6). Despite the different emphases on
reason, or revelation, or asceticism, as the sources of enlightenment, we find
that all the traditions we are considering answered this question by asserting
that virtue, wisdom, and happiness are inseparably linked, and that selfishness
in general and the passions in particular are the prime source of unhappiness
by preventing us attaining the goal of tranquillity of mind. The keys to this end
are therefore self-knowledge and self-control. In Buddhism, When one has
overcome all desires, such inveterate tendencies of mind as attachment, malice,
hatred, envy and illusions are automatically annihilated and one comes to pos-
sess complete equanimity of mind (Misra 1984: 25). In the Upanishads, The
knowledge of the self reveals the fact that all our passions and antipathies, all
our limitations of experience, all that is ignoble or small within us, all that is

transient and finite in us is false all sufferings and limitations are true only
so long as we do not know ourself. Emancipation is the natural and only goal
of man simply because it represents the true nature and essence of man. It is
the realization of our own nature that is called emancipation (Dasgupta 1922:
58).
Tranquillity of mind, ataraxia, was equally important for the Greeks (even
for the Sceptics [Annas and Barnes 1985: 168]):
The Stoic sage is free from all passion. Anger, anxiety, cupidity, dread, ela-
tion, these and similar extreme emotions are all absent from his disposition.
He does not regard pleasure as something good, nor pain as something evil
The Stoic sage is not insensitive to painful or pleasurable sensations, but
they do not move his soul excessively. He is impassive towards them. But
he is not entirely impassive his disposition is characterised by good emo-
tional states. Well-wishing, wishing another man good things for his sake;
joy, rejoicing in virtuous actions, a tranquil life, a good conscience (Sen. Ep.
23, 2); and wariness, reasonable disinclination. Like Aristotle, the Stoics re-
garded the emotional attitude which accompanies action as an index of
moral character. (Long 1986: 206207)
In Arabia tranquillity of mind was hilm: the state of the soul remaining
tranquil, so that anger cannot move it easily, and its being unperturbed by any
calamity that occurs; the state of calm tranquillity notwithstanding the attack
of anger and being slow in requiting the wrongdoer.
It should be noted that hilm was no new discovery of Muhammad. On the
contrary, it was one of the most highly esteemed virtues among the old pa-
gan Arabs. Only it lacked a firm ground. The genuine Arabs of the desert
have always been notoriously passionate people who may be moved to any
extremes on the smallest provocations. Tranquillity of soul, the ataraxia of
the Greeks, is for them the most difficult thing to achieve, and, if achieved,
to maintain for long. In order, therefore, that hilm may become the real pivot
of all moral life, it must be given first of all a firm basis. This was furnished
by the sincere belief in Allah, the sole Creator of the whole world. It was to
this hilm firmly grounding in monotheistic belief, the moral reasonableness
of a religiously cultured man, that jahiliya stands diametrically opposed.
(Izutsu 1966: 3031)
In the Old Testament peace of mind is attained by wisdom, through the
study of Gods law, the embodiment of that wisdom with which He created the
universe: The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath
He established the heavens (Proverbs 3.4). Great peace have they which love
thy law; and none shall offend them (Ps.119.165).
In China, too, peace of mind was the supreme goal:
A key Confucian concept is the cultivation of the self, and this cultivation
takes place, in part, through introspection. The goal of self-cultivation is of-
ten described as a state of tranquillity. Tranquillity implies a lack of external
interference. Mencius, for instance, gives instructions on remaining un-
moved in ones mind (pu-tung hsin), free from biases and fears generated by
the world in which man lives. The Ta-hseh also preaches tranquillity, a state
made possible by the moral knowledge that is arrived at through introspec-
310 Transcendence
tion. Only when you know when to rest can you be calm. Only when you
are calm can you be quiet. Only when you are quiet can you be at peace,
only when you are at peace can you be thoughtful. Only when you are
thoughtful can you achieve the end. The Taoists, too, seek tranquillity.
Chuang Tzu talks of freeing the mind and achieving a tranquil state: Yen Hui
replied: I cast away my arms and legs. I dismiss my wisdom. I separate my-
self from my body and get rid of my mind to become one with the great Tao.
This is called sitting and forgetting. (Whitman 1985: 95)
Even the Mohists, who were dedicated to the external ideal of utility rather
than to introspection, regarded freedom from the emotions as essential
(Schwartz 1985: 159)
Tranquillity of mind attained by wisdom is closely linked to the idea of the
invulnerability of the sage. This was an extremely important concept for the
Greeks and Romans e.g. as certain cliffs, projecting into the deep, break the
force of the sea, and, though lashed for countless ages, show no traces of its
wrath, just so the spirit of the wise man is impregnable (Seneca De Constan-
tia III.5); In virtue of this power [of reason] a mind untouched by passion is a
fortress in itself, nor has a man a more impregnable citadel whither he may flee
and ever after defy assaults, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, and we encoun-
ter it generally in the ancient world: By arising in faith and watchfulness, by
self-possession and self-harmony, the wise man makes an island for his soul
which many waters cannot overflow (Dh. 25). Therefore whosoever heareth
these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken unto a wise man which
builds his house upon a rock; and the rain descended and the floods came, and
the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded
upon a rock. (Mt. 7.245).
The inner life of the morally developed individual required constant self-
examination, and in China the idea of introspection (nei-sheng, to look within)
was basic to the attainment of virtue in Confucianism:
In Confucian thought introspective examination had three purposes. First, it
caused the individual to refrain from self-deception and to achieve integrity
of thought (cheng i), which helped prevent people from deluding them-
selves into thinking that they possessed no faults [It led also to tranquil-
lity.] The second purpose of self-examination was to help a person under-
stand his real nature, to become aware of his evaluating mind and his innate
social tendencies, whose nature may be observed by environmental factors.
This is also known as knowing ones nature (chih hsing.) Thirdly, people ba-
sically resemble one another so in order to know how to treat them, a person
must look within and try to understand how he would feel in a similar situa-
tion. (Munro 1969: 95)
In the Analects, Tseng, the disciple of Confucius, says for example: I daily
examine myself on three points In planning for others have I failed in consci-
entiousness? In intercourse with friends have I been insincere? And have I
failed to practise what I have been taught?(An. 1.4). For Buddhism True mo-
rality is not confined to the external act of the doer but, rather, relates to his
mental purity. He has not only to put a curb on ethically wrong actions but
also, through conscious effort, to constantly train his mind to deter it from har-
Virtue 311

bouring ethically wrong notions and desires. There should be perfect harmony
between his actions and his thoughts, ethically pure actions springing forth
from an ethically pure mind (Misra 1984: 92). This reference to a pure mind
introduces us to another change in moral thought, which now emphasises in-
ner purity rather than that of the body and is often referred to as purity of
heart. One of the indices of this radical shift in moral understanding towards
the inner life of the individual is the way in which in Greece, Israel, and India
the notion of purity becomes increasingly used in the sense of purity of heart
and mind, and not just of the body.
1
(In Hinduism, however, external purity of
the body remains of great importance and this is also true in Judaism, and one
is not claiming that in these traditions the notion of physical purity was simply
replaced by the idea of moral purity.)
5. Virtue
The moral significance of the individual meant that the analysis of virtue was
of central importance in the ancient systems of ethics. But its treatment was
characteristically organic, and closely related to the essential features of human
nature. In these respects it differs significantly from the lists of socially desir-
able attributes typical of societies of corporate order. In content, as opposed to
structure, the differences are not so marked, so that courage and generosity are
commended, but even in content we find a new emphasis on the restraint of
bodily appetites, on benevolence, and on humility.
The general agreement is that there are certain virtues of special importance
for the complete human being; the cultivation of these puts a man in the proper
relation to cosmos and to society, and will produce a state of harmony or
health within him, so leading to tranquillity of mind and invulnerability to for-
tune. Virtue can only be attained by a long process of training and self-
scrutiny; it involves a lifetime of struggle. This powerful and important doc-
trine for right living was worked out in great philosophical detail in Greece,
India, and China; we do not find it in explicit form in the Old Testament which,

1
The idea of impurity in a moral sense certainly existed in China, e.g. Ju with the mean-
ing of disgrace, seems to have had the original meaning of to dirty, while hsiu, with
the meaning shame, seems to stem from the same root as ju, with an additional con-
notation of ugly (Eberhard 1967: 12). But this is essentially the same idea as the stain
upon ones honour rather than referring to virtue as such, and one cannot fail to be
struck when reading the classical Chinese texts by the lack of any expressions like pu-
rity of heart. The only references to purification itself which I have encountered are in
The Doctrine of the Mean, where there are a couple of references to fasting and purifica-
tion before sacrifice (Chan 1963: 102, 106). This impression of a lack of concern with pol-
lution and purity is confirmed by Professor Bodde (personal communication): The Chi-
nese have never been concerned with pollution. This is one reason why, for example,
they have almost no dietary prohibitions. It is probably significant that Buddhism,
which regards sex as unclean, came to China from the outside. While the notion of rit-
ual purity was therefore obviously present in China, it does not seem to have produced
any general conception of pollution in social relations outside the ritual context. Why
this should have been so is a matter which one must leave to the sinologists.
312 Transcendence
as already noted, is not philosophically minded, but in the New Testament
St Paul introduces the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and these
were combined by later Christian thinkers with the classical virtues of justice,
prudence, courage, and temperance. Muslim philosophers, too, found no diffi-
culty in combining Greek ideas on virtue with the tenets of Islam. The two
central questions for most ethical writers in Islam, both philosophical and
religious, are the nature and conditions of virtue, on the one hand, and the at-
tainment of happiness on the other (Fakhry 1991: 111).
For the Greeks and Romans there were four cardinal (or pivotal: cardo =
hinge) virtues: justice, dikaiosune, wisdom (sophia, speculative reason, in Plato,
and phronesis, practical wisdom in Aristotle); courage, andreia; and temperance,
sophrosune. They first appear in Plato, and are related to the basic components
of the human psyche. In the Republic Plato calls that in the soul whereby it
reckons and reasons the rational, and that with which it loves, hungers, thirsts,
and feels the flutter and titillation of other desires, the irrational and appetitive
(439d). The thumos, or principle of high spirit, that with which we feel anger is
a third element, since it may act against the desires, and ally itself with reason,
as in righteous indignation, and is also the basis of courage, which may also
lead us to withstand pain and fear of death. Thus the rational part of the soul
rules, and the principle of high spirit is its ally, and both co-operate in restrain-
ing the appetites, whose sobriety is the result of being in proper subjection to
the superior principles of courage and wisdom. Justice, however, is the proper
coordination of all three principles of wisdom, courage, and temperance. Vir-
tue, then, as it seems, would be a kind of health and beauty and good condition
of the soul and vice would be disease, ugliness and weakness (Republic 444e).
Aristotle adds to the four virtues, and there are other important differences
between their views. In Aristotles system there are three parts of the soul but
which differ from Platos: sensation, desire, and thought. The first two are the
irrational parts of the soul, and thought is the rational part, and is of two forms:
philosophical wisdom (sophia) by which we understand the highest of the nec-
essary truths; and practical wisdom, phronesis, the quality of mind concerned
with actual living, things just and noble and good for man. Practical wisdom
produces happiness (1144a), but cleverness is quite different, and is compatible
with villainy. All excellences therefore imply practical wisdom, because this is
the basis of all the other excellences. Justice is complete virtue, because he who
possesses it can exercise it towards others, and is the virtue which above all
concerns the good of others. In this sense it is not to be grasping, and to recog-
nize the rightful claims of others. Temperance is the excellence of the irrational
parts, The appetitive element in a temperate man should harmonize with rea-
son The temperate man prays for the things he ought, as he ought, when he
ought (1119b) Courage, too, is essential for the man of complete virtue; but
Aristotles list of the virtues goes beyond the four of Plato to include generos-
ity, good temper, proper pride (as opposed to vanity), modesty, and righteous
indignation. The four cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, temperance, and
courage passed into the orthodoxy of Classical culture, notably among the Sto-
ics, and Cicero made them the organizing principles of De Officiis.
Virtue 313

The Greek theory of the four cardinal virtues was basic to Islamic moral
theory, and the tenth century philosopher Miskawayh, for example, developed
a combination of Platonic theory with the Aristotelian concept of the Mean.
The soul possesses, according to Miskawayh, three faculties: (1) the rational
or angelic, lodged in the brain; (2) the appetitive or bestial lodged in the
liver; and (3) the passionate or leonine, lodged in the heart. From this divi-
sion it follows that the virtues, like their parallel vices, are divisible into
three corresponding groups. Thus when the rational part of the soul is mod-
erate and yearns for genuine knowledge, which is its true object, its virtue,
which is science or wisdom, would ensue. When the appetitive faculty seeks
its own object in moderation and complies with the directions of reason, its
virtue, which is temperance and its concomitant, liberality, would ensue. Fi-
nally, when the passionate faculty is ruled by the rational, self-control and
its concomitant virtue, courage, would result. From the conjunction of these
virtues will ultimately result the virtue of justice, which is the excellence or
perfection of the other three, insofar as they are related to each other and are
exercised in due proportion. That is why the principal virtues are deemed by
the philosophers to consist in these four only: wisdom, temperance, courage,
and justice; and their corresponding vices are designated as ignorance, in-
continence, cowardice and injustice. (Fakhry 1970: 212213)
The origins of the technical terms for virtue in the different civilizations
are of some interest. In Greek the word which is conventionally translated as
virtue was arete, which simply meant an excellence, whether of human con-
duct, or of artefacts, or anything else such as horses and dogs and as such had
no distinctly moral connotation, which was a later development. The Latin
equivalent, virtus, as we noted in Chapter IV, was derived from vir, a male, and
meant manliness, and it only later acquired the more philosophical significance
of virtue.
This derivation from a notion of what is essential or characteristic has some
resemblance to the Chinese case, for in China, too, when considering the de-
velopment of the idea of virtue, we find the slow emergence of distinctly moral
concepts from the sphere of archetypal social qualities and roles. I shall discuss
the Chinese case in more detail since it is less likely to be familiar to my read-
ers. Writing of the Book of Songs (or Odes) Waley says, If we put together these
moral songs and scattered maxims, we see at once that there was no conception
of a human morality, of abstract virtues incumbent upon all men irrespective of
their social standing, but only an insistence that people of a certain class should
fulfil certain rites and maintain certain attitudes (Waley 1937: 293). So, with
regard to the original meaning of te, virtue, he says In early, pre-moralistic
texts if we study the usage of the word carefully we find that te can be bad as
well as good. What is a bad virtue? But the early Chinese also regarded the
planting of seeds as a te. The word to plant (ancient Chinese dhyek) and te
(anciently tek) are cognate, and in the earliest script they share a common char-
314 Transcendence
acter. Thus te is bound up with the idea of potentiality Hence te means a la-
tent power, a virtue inherent in something (Waley 1934: 312).
1

Only later after Confucius did the word acquire its positive moral associa-
tion, especially with jen. Jen
2
is usually translated as human-heartedness, be-
nevolence, or love, and hence perfect virtue (Wieger 1927: 28), but it is a
homophone of jen
1
, man. Originally jen
1
may have meant not human be-
ing(s) but us as opposed to them, the members of ones own group. Jen,
members of the tribe, show a forebearance towards one another that they do
not show to aliens, and just as the Latin gens, clan, gave rise to our own word
gentle, so jen in Chinese came to mean kind, gentle, humane (Waley 1938:
27). In this connection we recall Tylors observation quoted earlier on the cog-
nate forms kind and kin, kindred. An alternative derivation for jen
2
is given
by Schwartz:
[T]he word [jen] in itself, as a key term of the ethical life, seems to be not
much older among us than the Analects itself. Its earliest occurrence can
probably be found in two hunting poems of the Book of Poetry in which we
catch a glimpse of two lusty noble huntsmen who are presented as hand-
some and jen. Lin Y-sheng has suggested that the meaning of the jen in this
context may have been something like manly or virile. If this is the case, one
can readily seen how it may eventually have come to be used by Confucius
in the moralized sense of true manhood or perfect virtue of Legges trans-
lation. Here, one would see something of a parallel to the evolution of virtus
and virtue from the Latin vir. What it seems to encompass in Confucius is
something as broad and even as ultimately mysterious as Socrates idea of
the good as applied to the moral life of the individual. It is an attainment of a
human excellence which where it exists is a whole embracing all the
separate virtues. (Schwartz 1985: 75)
Here, as in Greece, we meet the idea of the unity, the organic correlation of the
virtues. In the Analects jen, benevolence or compassion, is given the leading
place, for example: The meaning of jen is love your fellow men; the meaning
of knowledge is know your fellow men (An. 12.22). In the Analects a number
of virtues are mentioned, of which jen is the most important, but they are not
grouped, or listed in any order of importance. In The Doctrine of the Mean how-
ever, it is stated that there are five universal ways (the Five Relationships) and
that these are practised by three virtues. Wisdom, humanity, and courage,
these three are the universal virtues. The way by which they are practised is
one (Chan 1963: 105). In another section there is a more extensive grouping
which repeats this theme in more detail, but in a set of five virtues:
Only the perfect sage in the world has quickness of apprehension, intelli-
gence, insight, and wisdom, which enable him to rule all men; magnanimity,
generosity, benignity, and tenderness, which enable him to embrace all men;
vigour, strength, firmness, and resolution, which enable him to maintain a
firm hold; orderliness, seriousness, adherence to the mean, and correctness,

1
Munro (1969: 185597) however gives a quite different interpretation of the origin of
te, but does not mention Waley.
Virtue 315

which enable him to be reverent; pattern, order, refinement, and penetration,
which enable him to exercise discrimination. (Ibid., 112)
But the Chinese discussion of virtue also pursued the question of whether
man is naturally good or evil, a question that was also central in the Old Tes-
tament and the Christian and Muslim traditions, where it was posed by the
same dilemma of disobedience to the laws of God rather than to the ruler, as
in the Chinese case. The belief that mens nature is naturally good was chal-
lenged by the Mohists in particular. Mencius addressed this problem, and held
while men are naturally compassionate, human nature is a set of potentialities
which require the proper education and example to develop. Suppose a man
were, all of a sudden, to see a child on the verge of falling into a well. He
would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the
good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praises of his fel-
low villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child (Men-
cius 2.A.6). Because the man has all of a sudden to make a decision he has no
time to be influenced by selfishness or extraneous factors, and Mencius be-
lieves that the normal person will act with spontaneous compassion to save the
child. From this Mencius goes on to relate the basic dispositions of man to four
basic virtues:
From this [the case of the well and the child] it can be seen that whoever is
devoid of the heart of compassion is not human, whoever is devoid of the
heart of shame is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of courtesy and
modesty is not human, and whoever is devoid of the heart of right and
wrong is not human. The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence
[jen]; the heart of shame, of dutifulness [i]; the heart of courtesy and mod-
esty, of observance of the rites [li]; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom
[chih]. Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs. For a man pos-
sessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple
himself. (Mencius 2.A.6)
We have then the four cardinal virtues of benevolence, jen; righteousness, i;
propriety, the spirit of li; and true moral knowledge or wisdom, chih. Later, a
fifth virtue, hsin, good faith (not hsin = mind/heart) was added to these basic
four as a general development of the significance of five in Chinese correlative
cosmology. It appears from the textual references that not until the Han (no
doubt under the influence of the five-element theories) did the Confucian vir-
tues become collectively standardized as five (under the rubric of wu chang,
the five constants, or wu hsing, the five aspects of human nature. (Bodde
1991: 114)
With regard to the actual virtues which the Chinese held to be cardinal, it
must be noted that they gave no formal place to any quality that could be
strictly translated as justice. As we have seen, this was not a central moral
idea for the Chinese, but they certainly condemned the selfish and the grasping
man, and approved of the idea of rendering to each his due, and many of the
implications of Greek justice would have been subsumed under jen and i.
Courage appears as a major virtue in the Analects and The Doctrine of the Mean,
but not in the Mencius, and it seems likely that this was because he regarded it
as dependent on righteousness and in itself morally ambivalent:
316 Transcendence
Courage may serve any ends and since it simply belongs to the realm of the
passions and emotions it may, in fact, become subservient to unworthy pur-
poses Confucius is quoted as saying If in looking within, one finds one-
self in the wrong, then even though ones adversary be a coarsely clad com-
moner, should we not tremble with fear? If on looking within, one finds that
one is right, one should move forward against men in the thousands.
(Schwartz 1985: 270)
Here again, then, less difference existed from the Greeks than might appear,
since they too would have agreed that courage in isolation from the other vir-
tues may be used for evil purposes. Just as the four cardinal virtues of Mencius
are compared to the four limbs, the five cardinal virtues of Buddhism are called
organs, indriya, of moral practice, as there are five sense organs (indriya). The
Buddhist conception of virtue was developed in the context of the fundamental
teaching that suffering was rooted in desire and in egotistical selfishness:
Cut off the five selfishness, doubt, wrong austerities and rites, lust, hate;
throw off the five desire to be born with a body or without a body, self-
will, restlessness, ignorance; but cherish five faith (saddha), watchfulness
(sati), energy (viriya), contemplation (samadhi), vision (or wisdom panna). He
who has broken the five fetters lust, hate, delusion, pride, false views is
one who has crossed to the other side (Dh. 370)
The generally organic concept of virtue in the ancient world also includes
the idea of the mean, the avoidance of extremes. The phrase nothing in excess
was as current in the ancient world as the maxim know thyself, and it was an
essential feature of Aristotles theory, in the doctrine that virtue is the mean
between two extremes, which are vices as courage is the mean between cow-
ardice and rashness.
It is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see
in the case of strength and health both excessive and defective exercise
destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a
certain amount destroys the health while that which is proportionate both
produces and increases and preserves it. So it is, then, in the case of temper-
ance and courage and the other excellences. For the man who flies from and
fears everything and does not stand his ground against everything becomes
a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every dan-
ger becomes rash; and similarily the man who indulges every pleasure and
abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every
pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage,
then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean. (1104a
1126)
This emphasis on the mean, the avoidance of extremes, was general in the an-
cient world, and in no way a Greek peculiarity.
So we find in China, as in Greece, the idea of moral health as a condition of
equilibrium in which extremes are to be avoided, and no quality is present to
an excessive degree. In the Doctrine of the Mean equilibrium is discussed in the
following way:
[B]efore the feelings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, and joy are aroused it is
called equilibrium (chung, centrality, mean). When these feelings are aroused
Virtue 317

and all attain due measure and degree, it is called harmony. Equilibrium is
the great foundation of the world, and harmony its universal path. When
equilibrium and harmony are realized to the highest degree, heaven and
earth will attain their proper order and all things will flourish. (Doctrine of
the Mean 1; Chan 1963: 88)
In the Analects chung-yung had not yet become the technical term which it is
in the Doctrine of the Mean, but there are numerous references to the need for
the proper blending of personal qualities and the danger of excess in any: The
Master said: Courtesy uncontrolled by the laws of good taste becomes la-
boured effort, caution uncontrolled becomes timidity, boldness uncontrolled
becomes recklessness, and frankness uncontrolled becomes effrontery (An.8.2).
Again, The Master said: When nature exceeds training, you have the rustic.
When training exceeds nature, you have the clerk. It is only when nature and
training are proportionately blended that you have the higher type of man
(An.6.16). How perfect is the virtue that accords with the Golden Mean (chung
yung)! And long has it been rare among the people (An.6.27). To go beyond
the mark is as bad as to come short of it (An. 11.15).
Confucianism was also referred to as the Middle Way, between the egoism
of the Yangists and what was seen as the unrestricted altruism of the Mohists.
Having contrasted Yang Chus advocacy of selfishness, and Mo Tzus doctrine
of love for all, Mencius continues: Tzu-mo holds on to the middle half way
between the two extremes. Holding on to the middle is closer to being right,
but to do this without the proper measure is no different from holding to one
extreme. The reason for disliking those who hold to one extreme is that they
cripple the way. One thing is singled out to the neglect of a hundred others
(Mencius 7.A.26.).
In Buddhism we find again that the idea of the mean is very significant.
Buddhism itself was the Middle Way between the austerities of Jainism and the
hedonism of the Lokayatas, and in philosophy it was also a middle way, deny-
ing soul and God with the materialists, but keeping karma and Nirvana with
the Jains (Stcherbatsky 1961: 17). The idea of the mean is well expressed in this
story told of Buddha.
Sona Kolivisa was the son of a rich merchant who had joined the order of
monks of Buddha. Through excess of zeal he had been walking on thorns
and the path where he walked was covered with blood. Then he thought:
And if I were to return to my home and use my wealth in doing good
deeds? Buddha, the Master, knew his thoughts, and went to him and asked
him: When you were at home, Sona, could you play the lute? Yes, master
When the strings of the lute were overtaut, did your lute give proper
sounds? No, master When the strings of your lute were neither overtaut
nor overslack the lute gave the proper sounds. Was it not so? It was so,
master. Even so, Sona, an excess of zeal leads to self-exaltation, and a lack
of zeal leads to indolence: have an evenness of zeal, master your powers in
harmony. Be this your aim. (Mascaro 1962: 25)
The idea of self-harmony is also of great importance in Buddhism, as in
China and Greece, for example, He who is pure from sin and whose soul is
strong in virtue, who has self-harmony and truth, he is worthy of the holy
318 Transcendence
robe (Dh. 10). This harmony cannot be achieved without self-control, of the
passions and desires, of deeds, words, and thoughts, and this was necessary for
Hindus as well, who also treated the harmony of the self as essential for peace
of mind. In the Bhaghavad Gita it says, for example: Yoga is a harmony. Not for
him who eats too much, or for him who eats too little; not for him who sleeps
too little or for him who sleeps too much. A harmony in eating and resting, in
sleeping and keeping awake: a perfection in whatever one does. This is the
Yoga that gives peace from all pain (Bh. 6.1617).
We tend to think of perfection as meaning without fault, and in the Old Tes-
tament Noah and Job are described as perfect in this sense of being blame-
less (Job 1.1, 8; Gen.6.9) but it has a more significant moral significance as
wholeness or completeness or fulfilment of potential. The accurate transla-
tion of Eccles.12.13 is Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the
whole man and here it has the sense of that state in which nothing is lacking,
as it might be from the body, and a state of health. This appears in the New
Testament e.g. Thou art made whole: sin no more (John 5.14); made a man
every whit whole (John 7.23); Jesus Christ maketh thee whole (Acts 9.34). The
same idea of completeness was very important in Greek thought as well For
example: For Aristotle, telos connoted not only aim but completion, and he
found the answer to his question in the complete development and right exer-
cise of the faculties of mans nature, and particularly of the distinctive human
faculty of reason (Rackham 1931: xi). In China we find the same idea of
completeness:
In reply to Tzu-lus question about the complete or perfect (cheng) man,
Confucius mentions knowledge, courage, a lack of greed, a variety of skills,
and a mastery of li and music but goes on to add, But today we need not re-
quire all these things of a complete man. He who when he sees a chance of
gain, acts in terms of what is right, who is prepared to give his life in the face
of danger and who never forgets his promises even over a lifetime he can
also be deemed a complete man. (An. 14.13). (Schwartz 1985: 109)
This state of moral health, the harmonious organization of the personality
and the inner life which constitutes virtue, is not attained without a struggle.
Buddha said Mules when trained are good, and so are noble horses of Sindh.
Strong elephants when trained are good; but the best is the man who trains
himself. For it is not with those riding animals that a man will reach the land
unknown. Nirvana is reached by that man who wisely, heroically, trains him-
self (Dh.322323). Confuciuss disciple Master Tseng said, The scholar must
not be without capacity and fortitude, for his load is heavy and the road is
long. He takes virtue (jen goodness [Waley]) for his load, and is not that
heavy? Only with death does his course end, and is not that long? (An. 8.7).
In conclusion, it will be illuminating to devote some attention to the newly
emphasized virtues of humility and benevolence. Humility is often thought of
as a distinctive, and eccentric, teaching of Christianity but it was in fact highly
valued as an essential feature of moral life all across the ancient world. It was
certainly fundamental to Buddhist ideas of moral growth: It is easy to see the
faults of others, but difficult to see ones own faults. One shows the faults of
others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals ones own faults as a
Virtue 319

cunning gambler conceals his dice. If a man sees the sins of others and for ever
thinks of their faults, his own sins increase for ever and far off is he from the
end of his faults (Dh. 2523). Look upon the man who tells thee thy faults as if
he told thee of a hidden treasure, the wise man who shows thee the dangers of
life (Dh.76). And in the Laws of Manu it was said A priest should always be
alarmed by adulation as if it were poison and always desire scorn as if it were
ambrosia. For the man who is scorned sleeps happily, awakes happily, and
goes about happily in this world; but the man who scorns perishes (Manu
2.1623)
Confucius was remarkable for his humility:
The Master said: In literature perhaps I may compare with others, but as to
my living the noble life, to that I have not yet attained As to being a sage
or a man of virtue, how dare I presume to such a claim? But as to striving
thereafter unwearyingly, and teaching others without flagging, that can be
said of me, and that is all (An. 7.3233). When you see a man of worth,
think how to rise to his level. When you see an unworthy man, then look
within and examine yourself (An.4.17). It is all in vain! I have never yet
seen a man who could perceive his own faults and bring the charge home
against himself (An.5.26). Tseng Tzu said Talented, yet seeking knowledge
from the untalented; having many attainments, yet seeking knowledge from
those with few; having, as though he had not; full, yet bearing himself as if
empty; offended against, yet not retaliating once upon a time I had a friend
who lived after this manner (An. 8.5). Humility was jang, the spirit of yield-
ing: If one is able to rule a state by li and the spirit of yielding (jang) (ap-
propriate to it) what difficulty will there be? If one is not able to rule a state
by li and the spirit of yielding, of what use is li? The spirit of yielding to
others involves precisely the capacity to overcome such passions as the love
of mastery, self-aggrandizement, resentment and covetousness of which he
speaks elsewhere. What Confucius seems to be saying is that in this disposi-
tion toward yielding, we find the underlying spirit of li which ought to be
intimately associated with every concrete act of li. (Schwartz 1985: 73)
Humility developed a significant place in the thought of the Old Testament.
Moses is said to have been very meek, above all the men which were upon the
face of the earth (Nu.12.3), and in the Psalms it is said that the meek shall in-
herit the earth (Ps.37.11.). The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom;
and before honour is humility (Prov.15.33). Better it is to be of an humble
spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud (Prov.16.19). But
Trito-Isaiah and Micah provide especially significant texts: For thus saith the
high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the
high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to re-
vive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones
(Is.57.15), and Micah said, He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and
what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to
walk humbly with thy God (Mic.6.8). This traditional emphasis on the need for
humility was one of the main teachings of Jesus which it is perhaps unneces-
sary to elaborate upon here.
The notions of tribal honour in pre-Islamic Arabia were the very opposite of
humility: in the essentially non-religious context of Jahiliya, humility and
320 Transcendence
self-surrender were considered something disgraceful, a manifestation of
weak and ignoble character, whilst haughtiness, refusal to obey were, in
the eyes of pre-Islamic Arabs, marks of noble nature. With the advent of Is-
lam, the balance was completely overturned. Now, in the purely monotheis-
tic context of Islam, humility in the presence of God and total self-
surrender to Him became the highest virtues, and haughtiness and refusal
to obey the marks of irreligiousness. (Izutsu 1966: 22)
By comparison with the power of God the bravest and richest aristocrat was
as nothing, and God was compassionate and merciful, the benevolent as well
as omnipotent ruler of the universe. Thus it comes about that the element of
meekness, or humbleness, as the human counterpart of the benevolence of
God, is made the very pivotal point of Islamic ethics. Most, though not all, of
the recognized moral duties of Islam derive from this pious benevolence (ibid.,
678).
The only tradition in which the moral value of humility may be said to have
been distinctly weak is that of Greece, and Adkins has shown in great detail the
problems that they had in taming the strongly agonistic element in their atti-
tude to social relations. But Socrates set a pattern of intellectual humility when
he said that he was the wisest of the Greeks only to the extent that he alone
knew that he knew nothing, and humility in the more general moral sense be-
came a definite element of later Stoic teaching. Seneca wrote It is of virtue, not
of myself, that I am speaking, and my quarrel is against all vices, more espe-
cially against my own. When I shall be able, I shall live as I ought (De Vita
Beata XVIII.1), and
no man of sense will hate the erring; otherwise he will hate himself. Let
him reflect how many times he offends against morality, how many of his
acts stand in need of pardon; then he will be angry with himself also. For no
just judge will pronounce one sort of judgment in his own case and a differ-
ent one in the case of others. No one will be found, I say, who is able to ac-
quit himself, and any man who calls himself innocent is thinking more of
witnesses than of conscience. (De Ira I.xiv.23)
Marcus Aurelius said, When thy neighbours errors offend thee, straight-
way turn to thyself and consider what sin may be laid to thy charge (Thoughts
X.30). He also said that anger is not a form of courage, and that meekness and
gentleness [are] not only more human but more manly, and it is he that pos-
sesses these that has strength, nerve, and bravery, not the angry and discon-
tented (ibid., XI.18).
The other major development in the content of virtue which we should note
is the marked growth in the spirit of compassion and benevolence towards
ones fellow men, which is found in all the cultures of our study. In China, as
we have seen, the Confucians made jen, human-heartedness or benevolence, or
compassion, their central virtue, and the Mohists went even further in their
demands for universal love. The meaning of virtue, says Confucius, is love
your fellow men, and when asked if there is any word which could be
adopted as a lifelong rule of conduct, replies Is not sympathy the word?.
While Confucius said little about Heaven, the Mohists believed that Heaven
loves the whole world universally. Everything is prepared for the good of man.
Virtue 321

Even the tip of a hair is the work of Heaven It sends down snow, frost, rain
and dew to grow the five grains, hemp, and silk, thereby enabling people to
gain and be benefited by these (Bodde 1991: 315).
In Buddhism, love of ones fellow man is a central teaching:
As regards the place of love in Buddhism, let us quote a passage from the
Digha Nikaya which should settle the issue: All the means that can be used
as bases for right actions are not worth the sixteenth part of the emancipa-
tion of the heart through love. This takes all others into itself, outshining
them in glory. Just as whatsoever stars there be, their radiance avails not the
sixteenth part of the radiance of the moon, just as the sun, mounting up into
a clear and cloudless sky, overwhelms all darkness in the realms of space, so
all means to right actions avail not the sixteenth part of the emancipation of
the heart through love (Dial.3: 185). Metta (amity), Karuna (compassion),
and Dana (charity), are exalted virtues in Buddhist ethics. Buddha himself is
said to have decided to preach to the worldly people out of compassion for
them. In this connection, Buddhas words to his first band of disciples, ready
to move out for the propagation of his teachings, are noteworthy: Walk,
monks on tour for the blessing of the many-folk, for the happiness of the
many-folk, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the blessing, the
happiness of devas and men. (Misra 1984: 80)
In the Gita, God in the form of Krishna says to Arjuna:
Hear again my Word supreme, the deepest secret of silence. Because I love
thee well, I will speak to thee words of salvation. Give thy mind to me, and
give me thy heart, and thy sacrifice, and thy adoration. This is my word of
promise: Thou shalt in truth come to me, for thou art dear to me. Leave all
things behind, and come to me for thy salvation. I will make thee free from
the bondage of sins. Fear no more. These things must never be spoken to one
who lacks self-discipline, or who has no love, or who does not want to hear
or who argues against me. But he who will teach this secret doctrine to those
who have love for me, and who himself has supreme love, he in truth shall
come unto me. For there can be no man among men who does greater work
for me, nor can there be a man on earth who is dearer to me than he is.
(Bh.18.6369)
In the Old Testament are many references, both to the love of God for Israel,
and as a precept for human relations: And because He loved thy fathers, there-
fore He chose their seed after them, and brought them out in His sight with his
mighty power out of Egypt (Dt.4.37). When Israel was a child, then I loved
him and called my son out of Egypt (Hosea 11.1). In their affliction He was
afflicted and the angel of His presence saved them; in His love and in His pity
He redeemed them; and he bare them and carried them all the days of old (Is.
63.9). Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Lev. 19.18, 34). Love ye there-
fore the stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Dt. 10.19). In the
New Testament love is made the central principle, as in commandments to love
God with all our hearts and minds and our neighbours as ourselves upon
which hang all the law and the prophets. It should be remembered however
that even religions such as Christianity which make benevolence the keystone
of ethics do not equate benevolence with liking people. While the develop-
ment of the ideal of benevolence is no doubt rooted in the natural affection of
322 Transcendence
close family members, it is a broader concept than simple affection. For Mus-
lims, God was merciful and compassionate, and the term kafir meant ungrate-
ful rather than unbeliever (Izutsu 1965: 26.). Those who do not honour or-
phans and refuse even a small kindness to the poor and needy are not simply
niggards. From the viewpoint of Islam, the cause lies much deeper than that.
The characteristic mercilessness of their attitude originates in their kafir, their
lack of gratitude to God for His grace and goodness (ibid., 66). Thus Kindness
is enjoined upon believers upon every possible occasion. Kindness should be
the governing principle of human relations in society as well as in the family
(ibid., 68).
While benevolence was not one of the cardinal Greek virtues, Aristotle said
that, Affection also exists by nature between members of the same species, and
especially among men, and for this reason we praise those who love their fel-
low men (1155a 1622). Again, Euripides Trojan Women, written in 415 B.C.
against the background of the subjugation of the Melians, is set in Troy and its
theme is the plight of the Trojan women as they contemplate their approaching
slavery, and especially that of Andromache, widow of Hector, whose infant
son is to be taken from her and thrown from the walls of Troy. Gilbert Murray,
in his introduction to his translation, says This tragedy is perhaps, in European
literature, the first great expression of the spirit of pity for mankind exalted
into a moving principle, and according to Snell The terms philanthropos and
philanthropia are in the fourth century often used to express the idea that a help-
less or suffering person is also a human being (Snell 1960: 251). More gener-
ally, the terms denoted a friendly feeling towards others, and treating kindly
and charitably those to whom we are under no special obligation (ibid., 291).
Philanthropos was familiar to the Romans as humanitas, and Seneca wrote,
Where there is a human being there is the opportunity for a kindness (De Vita
Beata XXIV.3).
To seek, not the fruit of benefits, but the mere doing of them, and to search
for a good man even after the discovery of bad men this is the mark of a
soul that is truly great and good. What glory would there be in doing good
to many if none ever deceived you? But as it is, it is a virtue to give benefits
that have no surety of being returned. (De Beneficiis I.1.12)
In this moral context, it is understandable that there should have been a
marked tendency to condemn vengeance, and especially the attendant feelings
of hatred that accompany it.
So in Buddhism the Dhammapada says He insulted me, he hurt me, he
robbed me. Those who think not such thoughts will be free from hate. For
hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal
(Dh. 45), and forgiveness is also part of the eternal dharma required by all men
in the Hindu scriptures. In the Lao-tzu it says (LXIII) Do good to him who has
done you an injury. When Confucius is asked his opinion of this doctrine he
replies With what then would you recompense kindness? Reward injury with
just treatment [upright dealing (Waley)], and kindness with kindness (An.
14.36). But Confucius praises those who do not bear grudges and forgiveness
or shu (sometimes referred to as kuan, spacious, or as having liang, capac-
ity), certainly has an important position in the Confucian system Chinese
Virtue 323

ethics advise the gentleman to overlook minor wrongs or injuries. The highest
ideal, of extending ones help without seeking reward, is honoured in Confu-
cianism, but it is also considered somewhat impractical (Yang 1957: 293). In
China there were in fact different views of revenge, the middle way of Confu-
cius which considers it repulsive for a gentleman to talk about recompensing
injury with injury, rather than justice (ibid., 293), and the Taoist view that it
should actually be met with kindness. Those who are good I treat as good.
Those who are not good I treat as good. In doing so I gain goodness. Those
who are of good faith I have good faith in. Those who are lacking in good faith
I also have good faith in. In so doing I gain in good faith (Lao-tzu XLIX). Rec-
ompensing injury with injury was also disapproved of by Confucius for the
practical reason that it was thought to lead to an endless process of retaliation.
So in Israel while the lex talionis was a legal principle of the Torah, revenge
itself was problematic: Hobbs notes that while shalom is often translated as
peace, the notion of payment is an important element of the word: This use is
important because it unveils what is a basic meaning for the word, that of re-
payment, recompense, or restoration of something damaged. It is a small step
from this to another use of the root of the word in the Old Testament, and that
is to avenge, often with the use of force (Hobbs 1989: 217). On the other hand,
in a society that was increasingly becoming subject to centralized justice, kin-
based precepts of revenge could not be tolerated, and the ideal of a society
without private revenge would have had a greater opportunity to develop. So
we read: Say not thou, I will recompense evil; but wait on God, and he shall
save thee (Prov. 20.22.) Say not, I will do so to him as he hath done to me; I
[God] will render to the man according to his work (Prov. 24. 29). If thine en-
emy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to
drink; for thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall re-
ward thee (Prov. 25.2122). Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge
against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself:
I am the Lord (Lev.19.18). As we all know, the teachings of Jesus on the subject
of revenge are even more uncompromising, and the ideal of forgiveness is a
very prominent feature of the Gospels.
In Islam, While blood vengeance by kin was permitted in the Quran, it was
strictly limited to the culprit himself, and the way of compensation is recom-
mended as a preferable alternative (Izutsu 1966: 68). More generally, as in the
Old Testament, the emphasis is placed on God as the avenger of wrongs.
Since, then, there is God who never wrongs anybody, who is aware of all
that men do; and who promises to take vengeance on those who have done
any wrong, what better policy for man to follow then to submit all these
matters to Allahs will? Though in practice the problem of vengeance was
still studded with all sorts of difficulties, theoretically at least the conclusion
was clear and simple: here, too, benevolence and love should be made the
guiding principle of human conduct. (Ibid., 69)
Plato condemns revenge in clear terms, on the ground that revenge is itself
a wrong which must always be avoided; and in the Crito Socrates says So one
ought not to return wrong or injury to any person whatever the provocation is
It is never right to do a wrong or return a wrong or defend oneself against
324 Transcendence
injury by retaliation (49d), and in the Laws (872e) he says that heaven will
avenge all evil deeds.
Revenge was also contrary to the spirit of Stoicism, which taught that the
wise man should try to make himself indifferent to the sufferings of this life,
including the wrongs we receive from others. Liberty is having a mind that
rises superior to injury, as Seneca put it. But, you ask, if a wise man re-
ceives a blow, what shall he do? What Cato did when he was struck in the
face. He did not flare up, he did not avenge the wrong, he did not even forgive
it, but he said that no wrong had been done (Seneca De Constantia XIV.3). Mar-
cus Aurelius said:
When any man sins against thee, let thy first reflection be: With what con-
ception of Good and Evil did he commit this sin? When this is clear to thee
astonishment and anger will give place to pity. For if thy conception of the
Good be still identical with, or similar to his, it is a matter of duty to pardon
him. But if thou hast passed the stage in which these things seem either good
or ill, thou wilt be the more ready to show kindness to one who is yet in
darkness. (Thoughts VII.26)
6. Human nature and society
a. Man, cosmos, and natural law
These profound analyses of the individual and the nature of personal excel-
lence were, however, only a part of a much wider concept of Man and human
nature in relation to the cosmos, and of the ideal society in which we should
live. In section 1 of this Chapter we noted the importance of law in the early
states, which was generalized to the cosmos as a whole.
Wherever we find unification and universalization, even on a limited scale
as in Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, the concept [of law] becomes central;
it is a concept whose origin in the political sphere is evident. In the astral
fatum in Babylonia, in the divine order in Egypt, in the decree of God in Is-
rael or of Heaven in China, in the physis of the pre-Socratic philosophers
everywhere we encounter the idea of a universe ordered according to law, to
which man only has to conform to obtain salvation and happiness. The Sto-
ics have left us with the best formulation of moral and cosmological thinking
in a concept whose political origin is patent: they defined the world as City
of Men and Gods The type of security sought is that which can be pro-
vided by a well ordered state The fundamental quest is for safety, if pos-
sible in this world, if not, in another; safety can only come from the rule of a
law permanent, unchanging, and sovereign. It does not matter in this con-
text if there is a law-giver or if the law is immanent in the nature of things.
(Weil 1975: 32)
It is extremely difficult to separate, even in thought, the idea of conscious
purpose from orderly systems, since the two are so integrally linked in our
own experience. So, even today, orthodox scientific biologists, where explain-
ing some ingenious organic adaptation, frequently lapse into the verbal im-
agery of what nature has designed or avoided or produced, as though nature
Human nature and society 325

were some God-like being with conscious purposes. In ancient cosmology,
therefore, it is not surprising that thinkers found it almost impossible to sepa-
rate the idea of order from consciousness, and therefore from some being who
is the source of that order. I quote a typical example: In the Atharva Veda and
the Brahmanas the notion of order is connected with Prajapati, but the refer-
ences are puzzling. Sometimes Prajapati is said to be in control of all law and
order, and at other times he is described as the first born of right order. In
the old Vedic tradition, Varuna and Indra are linked with the idea of law and
order, but again it is not clear whether they are the sources or the guardians of
the ideas (Larson 1972: 146, 147).
The same ambiguity is also frequently present in Greek and Chinese
thought about the cosmos. In the Western tradition of thought the idea that the
workings of the universe are governed by divine laws, as men are governed by
the laws of kings, has had a very long history. China, too, from an early date
thought of Heaven as giving commands to men. But by our period the domi-
nant notion of the cosmos was, in Joseph Needhams term, organic: The har-
monious co-operation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior au-
thority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a
hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the
internal dictates of their own nature (Needham 1956: 582). Bodde points out,
however, that while this is certainly correct, there are a few passages in early
Chinese texts that in varying ways suggest the existence in early China of
ideas not too far removed from those that in Europe led to the developed con-
cept of laws of nature (Bodde 1991: 334). The recently discovered silk manu-
scripts of Huang Lao (lost for 2000 years) show that this influential philosopher
of the Former Han also believed in a version of natural law comparable to that
of the Stoics (Peerenboom 1993). Natural law could thus provide a basis for a
socially transcendent system of moral principles, and which could be presented
as objectively valid rather than as the mere conventions of a particular society.
Besides its social transcendence, another aspect of cosmic law which is of
crucial importance is what we may call its intelligibility: since the cosmos is
not the inert, lifeless, matter of modern Western physics, but is permeated by
a kind of immanent self-ordering property, it forms a whole whose parts and
processes are not just interrelated, but comprehensible to Man as a thinking
being. Thus the essence of Man is identical with the essence of the cosmos, and
we find this doctrine in the concepts of logos among the Greeks, Brahman in
India, Hokhma in the Old Testament, and Tao in China. So we have the very
important idea of man as microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, and that the
essential and distinctive mental element in man is akin to the creative and or-
dering element in the cosmos. This idea in conjunction with that of natural law
was an extremely important factor in developing the central idea of humanity
as transcending social boundaries. This very profound doctrine takes us far
beyond the relatively crude formulation of the gods as beings who punish and
reward human actions, and is the real point of contact between man and the
divine in the transcendent systems of ethics. (It later became central in Islam,
see Nasr 1987: 2140.)
326 Transcendence
Before considering logos, tao, and brahman, however, it should be noted that,
just as there were only a relatively limited number of social philosophies as
responses to the problems of the Axial Age, the philosophical possibilities, too,
were by no means unlimited. The idea that all things are ultimately one, mo-
nism, is opposed by the claim that the cosmos is constructed out of a myriad of
particles and so is radically pluralistic. Change is said either to be an illusion,
resulting from our subjective limitations which mask the underlying stability
of things, or else change is claimed to be the only reality. Order is either the
product of some underlying principle (theistic or immanent), or else it is the
product of the spontaneous interaction of the fundamental bits from which the
cosmos is made. These possibilities of thought produce a variety of philoso-
phies which are nevertheless derived from a very limited number of basic
themes.
(i) Logos
Heraclitus seems to have been the first thinker to make extensive use of logos as
a philosophical concept: the word logos, in ordinary Greek of this period, has a
family of meanings: word, story, reckoning, proportion are all possi-
ble renderings in different contexts (Hussey 1972: 391). For Heraclitus the
technical sense of logos is probably related to the general meaning meas-
ure, reckoning, or proportion (Kirk and Raven 1971: 188). But logos also
had a central relation to language used to represent reality (Hussey 1972: 59)
and therefore connoted rationality as well as proportion and order. Heraclitus
believed that the cosmos is fundamentally orderly, and that this order is main-
tained by the balance of opposing forces; indeed, in some respects our impres-
sion of opposition is itself delusive, since for Heraclitus opposites are one, part
of a total structure of the cosmos. But this process of cosmic regularity was not
automatic and impersonal: It was not natural to Greek thinkers of any period
to suppose that what was self-moving and law-like in behaviour was dead or
mindless (Hussey 1972: 47). The cosmos therefore was also God, a mental as
well as a physical process, and this allowed a relationship between the soul or
mind of man and God, because the logos is present in each individual. It has
been shown that Anaximenes probably, and possibly the other Milesians, made
an analogy between the role of God in the world and that of the soul in the
body, with the suggestion that individual souls are detached pieces of the di-
vine stuff, and may perhaps rejoin it after death. The same analogy seems to be
implicit in Heraclitus (ibid: 56).
Some degree of human understanding of cosmic processes is therefore both
possible and desirable. Wisdom, and therefore it may be inferred, satisfactory
living, consists in understanding the Logos, the analogous structure or com-
mon element of arrangement in things, embodying the metron or measure
which ensures that change does not produce disconnected, chaotic plurality
(Kirk and Raven 1971: 205).
The logos doctrine was later to have a profound impact on Stoicism: Hera-
clitus assumption that it is one and the same logos which determines patterns
of thought and the structure of reality is perhaps the most important single
influence upon Stoic philosophy (Long 1986: 131). The Stoic universe is a

world determined by law, by immanent logos. This is a fundamental concept in
Stoicism, and it runs through all three aspects of their philosophy [physics,
logic, and ethics]. After all, these are only aspects, ways of presenting some-
thing which in the last resort is a unity nature, the universe, or God (ibid.,
144). While Aristotle did not make explicit use of the logos doctrine, he never-
theless treated the world as inherently rational and knowable, and the human
mind as an integral part of it, not as something standing mysteriously apart
from an unconscious and mindless process. (Randall 1960: 105).
(ii) Brahman
In India we find the development of the concept of brahman, which is very
similar to that of logos. although its etymology is quite different. In the words
of Benveniste all the usages of the term [brahman] have in common the notion
of ceremonial form in the behaviour of the priest who makes the offering and
in the operations of the sacrifice (Benveniste 1973: 232). This specific and lim-
ited notion of ritual order was, however, given much broader and more pro-
found significance in Indian philosophy, because the idea developed that the
rituals of sacrifice were themselves efficacious in forcing the gods to do the will
of the priests. the growth of sacrifices helped to establish the unalterable
nature of the law by which the (sacrificial) actions produced their effects of
themselves (Dasgupta 1932a: 27). Ritual law thus became Cosmic Law in the
hands of the philosophers: Looking at the advancement of thought in the Rg-
Veda we find first that a fabric of thought was gradually growing which not
only looked upon the universe as a correlation of parts or a construction made
of them, but sought to explain it as having emanated from one great being
[Brahman] who is sometimes described as one with the universe and surpassing
it, and at other times as being separate from it (ibid., 267). In the Upanishads,
the final form is given to the idea that the atman, the soul or essence of man, is
identical with brahman: The fundamental idea which runs through the early
Upanishads is that underlying the exterior world of change there is an un-
changeable reality which is identical with that which underlies the essence in
man (ibid., 42). This is the great atman-brahman doctrine, which has been fun-
damental to Hindu thought ever since.
(iii) Hokhma
In the vast majority of Old Testament uses, hokhma, wisdom, has the sense of
innate intelligence of a quite general kind which can also be increased by ex-
perience and instruction (Whybray 1973: 7). Wisdom in the religious sense also
is an intellectual quality which produces the key to happiness and success, to
life in its widest sense (ibid., 8). Even in the thought of Israel, therefore, in
which the transcendence of God dominates everything, there still develops the
idea that wisdom is an essential aspect of God. Isaiah 31.2 is the earliest date-
able statement in the Old Testament that Yahweh is wise, and makes it clear
that the kind of wisdom which is attributed to Him is essentially the same as
human wisdom in its quite general sense (Whybray 1973: 10), except that God,
of course, has wisdom in an infinitely greater measure.
The Lord possessed me [wisdom] in the beginning of his way
328 Transcendence
Before his work of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,
Before the earth was
When he established the heavens I was there
When he marked out the foundations of the earth;
There I was by him as a master-workman
And I was duly his delight
Rejoicing always before him
Rejoicing in his habitable earth
And my delight was with the sons of men. (Proverbs 8: 2231)
And, if the cosmos is rational, rationality is also an essential element of man,
and thus the link is established between man and the divine: There, then, [in
Jewish thought] is the ultimate nature of man. He was made in the image of
God and but little lower than God; but also he is infused and impelled and
fashioned by the wisdom of God himself. By nature man may be related to the
brute, but vastly more significant is his kinship with God and participation in
the wisdom of God (Irwin 1977: 291).
(iv) Tao
The Chinese conception of tao, which means road or way or course of
things, was also an extremely general principle of universal order, transcend-
ing even Heaven, which had a theistic quality entirely lacking in that of tao.
Joseph Needham notes the similarity of the tao to the logos of Heraclitus con-
trolling the orderly process of change, and in the words of the Taoist philoso-
pher Chuang Tzu:
The Tao has reality and evidence, but no action and no form. It may be
transmitted but cannot be received. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It
exists by and through itself. It existed before Heaven and Earth, and indeed
for all eternity. It causes the gods to be divine and the world to be produced.
It is above the zenith but it is not high. It is beneath the nadir but it is not
low. Though prior to heaven an earth, it is not ancient. Though older than
the most ancient, it is not old. (Cited in Needham 1956: 38)
The tao, like logos and brahman, is one: it is the Supreme oneness and all things
meet in the tao, in the sense of the One.
The tao, like brahman and logos, manifests itself in each individual as te, vir-
tue: for the Taoists, realizing the tao within oneself is produced by a state of
mental emptiness, hsu. The Taoist sage is a receptive mirror, who neither
welcomes nor objects to anything. His sense is a calmness in the acceptance of
all situations (Munro 1969: 155). For Confucians, on the other hand, one real-
izes the tao by strenuous moral effort. But for both schools, There seems to
have been a common belief that acting naturally is concurrently a means for
uniting the self with some greater or comprehensive unity; in fact the good life
involved a conscious recognition of the need for this union(ibid., 155). Integ-
rity, or sincerity, in the Taoist and Confucian traditions is a form of unity with
the tao.
But while the attribution of conscious purpose to the cosmic order is vari-
able, and the Buddhists of India also denied that idea, there is the general belief

that the cosmos makes sense and is understandable, and that man has his
proper place in the scheme of things, which if he is wise he will try to compre-
hend and so live in accordance with his true nature. It is this belief about the
cosmos, or nature, which is the basis of the idea that values have an objective
existence, and which is so alien to modern thinkers, for whom nature is a
meaningless process of inert and mindless particles. In the ancient world man
therefore has a special status in nature because of his ability to understand it,
but an understanding which went beyond purely intellectual comprehension.
This vision of the cosmos as one, as governed by a single ruling agency,
whether personal or impersonal, implies that truth is one, eternal and un-
changing, regardless of which society the thinker comes from. In one sense this
view has obviously developed historically from a more primitive indistinction
between the natural and the social, but now thinkers are aware of this distinc-
tion, and instead are arguing explicitly that man and cosmos share certain fun-
damental attributes and that man is part of the cosmic order. This, cognitively
speaking, is on a much more advanced level of thought, and has special ethical
significance as the basis of ideas of natural law.
b. Human nature and equality
A second element in the concept of Man as such was the development of theo-
ries of human nature, especially by contrast with animals. We noted that this
distinction is very important in primitive society, but it is greatly elaborated,
refined, and systematized by the new class of thinkers. Reflection on man, as
such, inevitably focuses on what all human beings have in common, and is
therefore one of the conceptual means by which social differences both of cul-
ture and rank may be transcended, at least in thought, and so it is one of the
essential factors in developing a transcendent system of ethics.
In Homer, man is contrasted to the gods by reason of his life of pain, feeble-
ness, and mortality, and to the beasts by his eating of bread, rather than grass
or raw meat; unlike these sources of subsistence, bread is the product of skill
which is learned.
In this phrase [men that eat bread] there is a latent thought of great sig-
nificance that man is different from the animal world because he can de-
velop the arts (technai), of which agriculture is one. Still more important is
the thought implied in the adjective audeentes, which means using articulate
speech. Men may speak different languages or dialects, but human speech,
as opposed to mere animal noises, is common to them all. In view of the
close link in the Greek mind between the spoken word and reasoning, both
denoted by the one term logos, this epithet also points forward to one of the
main elements in later Greek thinking about the nature of mankind: man is a
talker, a creature that uses words. (Baldry 1965: 12)
In the Homeric view of man, it is also assumed that certain social values
and institutions are universal: women are naturally inferior to men, and have a
completely different status the home whereas the business of men is war,
politics, and the games. The class division between nobles and commoners is
also thought to be universal.
330 Transcendence
The differences between man and animal were elaborated by the Pre-
Socratics, so that Anaximander noted that other creatures are soon self-
supporting, but man alone needs prolonged nursing (ibid., 25), and
Anaxagoras said that man is naturally superior to the animals because he has
hands (ibid., 29). For Heraclitus, thought is common to all men, and the uni-
versality of the Logos lies behind all human laws or customs. But men are di-
vided among themselves because they fail to use their reason (ibid., 26).
The growing idea of a basic human nature, in which varying degrees of ex-
cellence could be obtained, helped to undermine confidence in the natural-
ness of traditional distinctions of status as determining moral worth which we
have discussed in previous chapters. These had already been weakened by
commercialism and the experience of the Peloponnesian War, and the evident
corruption of aristocratic oligarchies such as the Thirty and the Four Hundred.
Socrates regarded high birth and wealth as irrelevant, and the body in general.
The psyche is our vital part, and its primary feature is the logos (Baldry 1965:
53). Through rightness of logos we can obtain wisdom, and through wisdom,
happiness eudaemonia no longer contingent on the benevolence of a kindly
daimon, but on the fruit of the wise mans own attitude of mind (ibid., 54).
But if wisdom and virtue are qualities inhering in the individual, then the
good of all nations are brothers. Euripides wrote Every quarter of the sky is
open to the eagles flight; every country is fatherland for a man of noble mind.
A wise man lives far from my own land, though I have never set eyes upon
him I count him a friend For many slaves the name is their only disgrace;
in spirit they are more free than many who are not slaves. One thing alone
dishonours slaves the name. In all else a slave is no worse than a free man if
he is honest (ibid., 33).
A new universalistic criterion thus became available for assessing human
beings: The verbal classification of men into sages and fools had as its nec-
essary complement a horizontal grouping of them as kinsmen, it being a matter
of no consequence whether they were Greek or barbarian, rich or poor, free or
slaves (ibid., 56).
These quotations from the ancient sources represent, it must be remem-
bered, the ideas of an elite, and we must be careful not to assume that they
were therefore current among the people as a whole. The idea of the human
race, even among the educated, was also a thoroughly qualified one in the
sense that it did not mean that they thought that foreigners were their equals.
While the Greeks had a genuine curiosity about foreigners and were in some
ways open and sympathetic to alien culture, in the last resort it was a cool,
ultimately self-assured look at foreign civilizations. There was no temptation to
yield to them (Momigliano 1975: 15). The Greeks remain proudly monolin-
gual as, with rare exceptions, they had been for centuries. It was not for them
to converse with the natives in the natives languages (ibid., 12). A universalis-
tic spirit developed also among the Jews and Romans to some extent but they
too, despite their interest in Greek philosophy, did not regard one anothers
cultures as equal simply because they were all human beings: The Romans
and the Jews had this in common in their relations to the Greeks, that ulti-
mately they were in no doubt about the superiority of their own respective

ways of life (ibid., 13). The Chinese, too, were in no doubt about their cultural
superiority to the neighbouring barbarians.
The Chinese interest in human nature had rather different roots from those
of the Greeks. The rise of the unattached shih class of wandering scholars who
in the Warring States period were increasingly relied upon as administrators of
the larger and more complex states of the times, and the rise of a wealthy mer-
chant class, meant that the ascriptive principles of birth and hereditary class
distinction were no longer adequate to serve as norms of social organization.
These new social influences therefore led to an intense interest in human
nature, hsing,
1
in the sense of the innate or natural tendencies of man as such.
This was particularly important in China, where from an early period the duty
of the ruler was to educate the people morally, and that raised the question, as
we noted earlier, of why people behaved badly and whether they were natu-
rally good. This emphasis on human nature was essentially egalitarian, as
among Greeks, since, almost inevitably, it transcends social distinctions of
status, and opposition to hereditary privilege is the single theoretical position
common to all the philosophical schools of the Warring States era (Munro
1969: 2).
Discussion about the differences between man and animals seems to have
occurred later in China than in Greece and to have had less philosophical im-
portance, but the doctrine of the ladder of souls does appear and the philoso-
pher Hsun Tzu (approximately 305235 B.C.) wrote that
Water and fire have subtle spirits (chhi [chi], somewhat analogous to the
pneuma of the Greeks) but not life (seng [sheng]). Plants and trees have life
(seng) but not perception (chih); Birds and animals have perception (chih) but
not a sense of justice (i).
Man has spirits, life, and perception and in addition the sense of justice;
therefore he is the noblest of earthly beings. In strength he does not equal the
ox, nor in power of running the horse, and yet he uses them; how can this
be? Man is able to form social organizations (chhn [chn]) and they are not.
How is it that men can do this? Because they can co-operatively play their
parts and receive their portions (fen). How is it that they can carry this out?
Because of justice and righteousness (i), which unite the parts into a har-
mony, and therefore a unity, and lead to strength, and in the end to triumph.
(Needham 1956: 73)
As in Greece, man is analyzed into a number of components which he
shares with the rest of living things, and is distinguished from them by his
mental functioning. We note however that in the Chinese view it is mans

1
In dealing with the original meaning of the term, Graham points to the striking affini-
ties of the etymology of the term with the etymologies of the Greek physis and the Latin
natura. The word hsing is derived from the word sheng, whose original meaning as a
verb is to be born and to grow and whose normal meaning is life. The resem-
blance to the Greek phuo (to grow) and the Latin nascor (to be born) is very striking. Out
of this meaning there emerges the derived meaning of an innate tendency toward
growth or development in a given, predetermined direction. (Schwartz 1985: 175)
332 Transcendence
moral awareness, his evaluating mind rather than reason in a purely intellec-
tual sense which is regarded as characteristically human. While Hsun Tzu
compares man with animals, Bodde points out that this is limited to the lack of
social organization among animals, and reflects a general lack of philosophical
interest in animals on the part of the Chinese, which itself may be due to the
relative unimportance of animals in the Chinese mode of subsistence (Bray
1984: 34).
The Indians made some comparison between man and animals, and we find
a generally similar conception of the ladder of souls: The best of living beings
are those that have the breath of life; and the best of those that have the breath
of life are those that live by their intelligence; the best of those that have intelli-
gence are men; and priests are traditionally regarded as the best of men (Manu
1. 96). For them the most important difference, apart from the rational faculty,
between human and non-human is that the world of animals involves brute
force, of which a favourite metaphor is that of the big fishes eating the little
fishes. In India, human nature was therefore of central religious importance
and was analyzed in terms of an extremely subtle philosophical psychology,
relating to the problems of suffering and salvation. It should be emphasized
however that most of the thinkers in the societies we are considering did not
object to the idea of social hierarchy as such; indeed it was considered to be
essential for the preservation of good order. To some extent the increasing ri-
gidity of the caste system can be seen as a functional response of this type:
The complexity of the new Indian society is clearly reflected in the need for
codifying the laws of the various social groups, which is what is aimed at in
the Brahmanical dharmasutras. The purpose of the laws is to differentiate be-
tween the various social groups generally identified as those of jana, jati, and
varna. These, however, are made part of a coherent view of society. There is
an implicit belief that the demarcation of differences would lead to a resolu-
tion of tensions, an attitude that could only have been feasible in the absence
of a situation of conflict. (Thapar 1975: 123)
In China the Confucian philosopher Hsun Tzu said:
If people live together but are without social distinctions (fen), there will be
strife To get rid of such calamity there is nothing like clarifying the so-
cial distinctions when forming social aggregations. If the strong coerce the
weak, the intelligent terrorise the stupid, and the people below rebel against
their superiors; if the young insult the aged and the government is not
guided by virtue if this be the case, then the aged and the weak will suffer
the misfortune of losing their subsistence, and the strong will suffer the ca-
lamity of division and strife This is why wise men have created social in-
stitutions on their behalf. (Bodde 1991: 197)
According to Bodde, the standard sequence of social classes with the scholar
bureaucrats (shih) at the top, followed by farmers (nung), artisans (kung), and
merchants (shang) at the bottom, only became firmly established at the begin-
ning of the second century B.C. (Bodde 1991: 372), and he attributes the devel-
opment of the scheme to the Legalists in particular, but later it became assimi-
lated into Confucian thought.

The Greeks and Romans, too, accepted a hierarchical order as one of the es-
sential features of a stable society, and in Islam and in medieval Europe the
same idea appears again, and maintained its dominance until the 17th century.
The most obvious example of social hierarchy is that between the rulers and
the ruled, and it is to theories of the state that we may now turn.
c. Theories of the state
Theories of human nature were closely linked to speculation about the origins
of government and the state. In the societies we are considering the state now
comes to be regarded as having been instituted because of its functional value
to human beings. While most of these societies are monarchical, kingship is
therefore treated as a social convention, not as an aspect of cosmic order and an
unquestionable part of the nature of things. Recurring issues are those of how
far the king should rule by moral example, or by Machiavellian cunning, or by
rigorously enforced law.
In Buddhist theory men are portrayed as not aggressive in their simplest so-
cial condition, but as becoming aggressive as the result of selfishness:
Disorder among human beings reached its highest point when with the dis-
appearance of the spontaneous growth of rice as the result of their greedy
hoarding of it, men divided the rice fields among themselves, settled
boundaries, and proceeded to steal each others plots and engage in lying
and censure and punishment. It is at this point that human beings, gathering
themselves together and arguing the need for the selection of a certain be-
ing, who should be wrathful when indignation is right, who should censure
that which should be censured and should banish him who deserves to be
banished, selected from among themselves the handsomest, the best fa-
voured, the most attractive, the most capable and invited him to be king in
return for their contribution of a proportion of their rice. (From the Agganna
Suttanta, cited by Tambiah 1976: 13)
Buddha accepted monarchy as the inevitable political reality of his day, and
set about incorporating it into his scheme of society (Gokhale 1966: 15). In
many respects the Buddhist king exemplified the same virtues deemed neces-
sary for the Hindu king by Manu and Kautilya, but his ideal relations to his
people have more resemblance to the Chinese ideal of the king as a moral ex-
ample, rather than simply the maintainer of order through punishment. For
[the Buddhists] the state is not merely a punitive instrument but primarily an
agency for the moral transformation of man as a political animal (ibid., 20).
This concept of the political society is that of a great family presided over by
a morally elevated being with a father image. The Buddhists explain this by
stating that even as a father is near and dear to his sons, the Cakkavatti [uni-
versal monarch] is beloved by all his subjects. It is this very sentiment that is
echoed by Asoka (circa 273 -232 B.C.) where he says, All men are my chil-
dren. Just as in the case of my own children I desire that they may get wel-
fare and happiness in this and the next world so do I also desire for all. In
this great family the interests of its members are complementary rather than
conflicting There is an insistence on equality of spiritual opportunities, al-
though hierarchical economic and social relations are almost taken for
334 Transcendence
granted. The goal is to prevent hierarchical relations from restricting equal
opportunities for moral and spiritual development and in the administration
of justice This morality must be universal in its scope and the nature of of-
fenses and the intensity of punishments must be ordered by important ethi-
cal considerations. This was a distinctive advance on the emergent Brah-
manical theories of justice and punishment based on the ritual status of per-
sons graded into a hierarchy of castes. (Ibid., 21)
The Buddhist kingship also differed from the Hindu conception in another
important respect. For the Hindu king, making war was part of his caste duty,
his svadharma, and we find nothing in Manu or the Arthashastra to suggest that
there is any kind of international morality by which warfare should be limited.
Indeed, Kautilya gives detailed advice to kings about how to wage successful
war without any sort of moral restraint. This was repulsive to Buddhist ideas,
since they, like the Chinese, regarded warfare as cruel and inhuman, and some-
thing to be undertaken only as one of the unpleasant necessities of life. We
shall have more to say on this when we deal with concepts of international law
later in this section.
In the Old Testament, the origin of the monarchy is described in similarly
elective terms. The people (1 Sam. 8) ask Samuel to give them a king to reign
over them and defend them, like all other peoples, but he warns them that their
king will take their sons and daughters, fields, vineyards, crops and animals.
God is described as finally approving the peoples desire for a king, but with
what appears to be some reluctance. The duty of the king to obey the law of
God, and not to lift up his heart above his brethren is made clear in Deut. 17,
1820. God, in theory, remains the true legislator, though in practice the king
could introduce changes (Whitelam 1979: 21718).
In China, the Mohist theory of the origin of government stresses the original
lack of agreement among men about priorities and values, and their conse-
quent inability to co-operate. The Mo-tzu (Chapter 11) says:
In the beginning of human life, when there was yet no law and government,
the custom was: Every man according to his own idea. Thus when there
was one man there was one idea, when two men two ideas, and when there
were ten men there were ten different ideas. The more people there were,
the more were the different concepts. Hence each man approved of his own
view and disapproved of that of others, and so there arose mutual disap-
proval among men. As a result, father and son, and elder and younger
brothers became enemies and estranged from each other, and were unable to
reach any agreement. The people of the world worked against each other
with water, fire, and poison. Surplus energy was not spent for mutual aid;
surplus goods were allowed to rot without sharing; excellent teachings were
kept secret and not taught to one another. The disorder in the (human)
world was like that among birds and beasts. Yet it was evident that all this
disorder was owing to the want of a ruler.
Therefore there was a selection of the person in the world who was virtuous
and able, and he was established as the Son of Heaven When the rulers
[ministers, feudal lords, village elders etc.] were all installed, the Son of
Heaven issued a mandate to the people, saying: Upon hearing good or evil
one shall report it to a superior. What the superior thinks to be right, all shall

think to be right. What the superior thinks to be wrong, all shall think to be
wrong. (Fung 1952: 100)
Here the we see the classic Chinese conception of government as the model
established for the guidance of all, which establishes virtue and harmony
throughout society.
The Legalists, however, emphasised the need for the imposition of law and
order to prevent the anarchy and exploitation that existed before the state:
some took advantage of their strength to conquer the weak and of their
numbers to oppress the few. Therefore, the Yellow Emperor instituted the
formalities of ruler and minister and superior and inferior and the rites for
father and son and elder and younger brother, the union of couples as hus-
band and wife. At home he put to work the executioners axe, abroad he
employed weapons and armour. (The Legalist Shang Yang, cited by Peeren-
boom 1993: 87)
Mencius approaches the subject from a somewhat different perspective,
which is that government is one of the essential functions of the body politic. In
book 6A he responds to the question Why should the ruler, who exists for the
sake of his people, be much richer than them, and not have to work on the
land? As summarized by Lau, he says that
The answer is twofold. First, the work of government is so much more im-
portant [than the farmers]. Any incompetence on the part of the ruler will
affect the whole state while an incompetent farmer will ruin only his own
plot. Second, the ruler uses his heart, or, as we should say, his mind, while
the common man uses his muscles, and it natural for the latter to be ruled by
the former. Here we can see that, for Mencius, the pattern of the body politic
is similar to the pattern of the human body. A mans body consists of many
parts, and, as we have seen, the importance of the heart as an organ is far
greater than that of any other part of the body. It is the master of the whole
body. Similarly, the ruler in the body politic is supreme. (Lau 1970: 4243)
Platos theory of the state is also essentially cooperative, and he presents it
as the solution to mans diverse needs which can only be met by co-operation:
The origin of the city, then, said I, in my opinion is to be found in the fact
that we do not severally suffice for our own needs, but each of us lacks
many things. Do you think any other principle establishes the state?
No other, said he.
As a result of this, then, one man calling on another for one service, and an-
other for another, we, being in need of many things, gather many into one
place of abode as associates and helpers, and to this dwelling together we
give the name of a city or state, do we not?
By all means.
And between one man and another there is an inter-change of giving, if it so
happens, and taking, because each supposes this to be better for himself.
(Republic 369)
There follow many pages of detailed description of the cooperative conse-
quences of the division of labour and social specialization.
336 Transcendence
According to Aristotle, human society evolved through three stages, those
of family, village (an association of families) and the state, polis. When several
villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly
or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare
needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life (1252b 28
30). The state is natural because it represents, through its self-sufficiency, the
fullest development of the various possible forms of society. It is also natural
because man himself cannot live in isolation and remain human, and the social
needs of man are best provided by the law and justice of a state without which
he is actually worse than the beasts. Aristotles account of the government is
therefore that it arose to meet human needs, which are inherently social and
co-operative.
The Muslim philosopher al-Farabi (A.D.870 950) wrote in a similar vein:
It is through this diversity [of natural aptitudes among individuals] that
various classes arise within the state, which is a necessary form of associa-
tion answering mans basic needs, which he cannot gratify without the assis-
tance of his fellow men. Being analogous to the human body, the state re-
quires a ruler, together with a series of subordinates, corresponding to the
heart and the subordinate organs of the body respectively. (Fakhry 1970:
143)
In these societies the justification for the political tutelage of king over sub-
jects included the incapacity of the people to understand the problems of gov-
ernment (a question much debated by Greek and Roman thinkers), and Ull-
manns remarks on the medieval European doctrine of popular ignorance ap-
ply generally:
It is not necessary to exercise ones historical imagination to realize how lit-
tle knowledge of the matters which were the concern of governments could
in fact be presupposed not only among the rural population but also among
the townsfolk. In obvious contrast to modern conditions, the individual as a
subject had no means to inform himself; he had not much opportunity of ac-
quainting himself with any of the issues at stake, and he could not be ex-
pected to have an adequate grasp of the matters which the king, by virtue of
his own governmental apparatus, necessarily possessed. It is against this
sort of background that one can understand not only the preponderant in-
fluence of Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas in the Middle Ages but also the
requirement postulated in all spheres of theocratic governments whether
papal, royal or imperial makes no difference the requirement of knowl-
edge, of scientia, with which the subjects, precisely because they were sub-
jects, were not credited. (Ullman 1967: 27)
d. Natural law
The state is therefore seen as the basis of social order, of which law is a funda-
mental expression. But the development of written law codes eventually pro-
duced an awareness that there is an important contradiction within the idea of
law itself: that between law as the expression of what is natural, right, and
proper on the one hand, and as the purely conventional rules of particular
communities on the other. In its divine or universal aspects the legal is indis-

tinguishable from the moral, but in its local, particular, aspects what is legal
may be very different from what is moral, and this issue takes us back to the
question of man and cosmos which we discussed in section (a).
Growing awareness of other cultures, which was of prime importance for
the Greeks, as was their experience in writing their own law codes, and the
problem of devising new laws and forms of punishment in the large central-
ized state of China led to the realisation that written law had certain character-
istics that put it in conflict with moral values. Should the people be controlled
by specific rules and the fear of punishment at all?, which was the main Con-
fucian question; Is not litigation itself a bad thing to encourage?, another Con-
fucian question. Does not law often come into conflict with the demands of
fairness and general principles of morality because it is too rigid?, a question
raised by the Greeks. Are all laws in the code of equal importance simply be-
cause they are in the code, or are some laws weightier than others? In other
words, as law codes become more detailed and specific, thinkers were obliged
to face the problem of distinction between the law as social regulation, and the
law as expressing general moral rules.
The development of written systems of law therefore inevitably leads to ri-
gidity and the besetting sin of formalism, in Sir Carleton Kemp Allens
phrase. The whole point of legal systems is to remove uncertainty about the
punishment of crimes and the settlement of disputes, and the uniformity and
universality of legal rules are therefore absolute requirements of written codes.
Yet, as Plato observes in the Laws, A perfectly simple principle can never be
applied to a state of things which is the reverse of simple. We find therefore
that while in societies without written codes it is possible (as Gluckmans de-
scription of Lozi law reminds us, for example) to embody general standards of
fairness and morality in the decisions of legal tribunals, this presents a new
problem with written codes.
The Greek word for the law enacted by the states in their codes was nomos,
and included such procedures as the allocation of land to citizens. But over
time the word increasingly acquired the connotation of the purely conventional
and arbitrary:
As the sphere in which it was thought to prevail narrowed, so did the word
bring with it more of the suggestion of arbitrariness. Good and evil became
merely a matter of convention, nomos: Far from expressing something that
is inherently good, the word now implies appearance, illusion, falsity, some-
thing relative and subjective as opposed to objective truth, and we reach the
famous antithesis of nomos and physis, law and nature. (Jones 1956: 35)
Aristotle was the first philosopher to make an explicit distinction between
law as a specific social regulation and law as a general moral principle:
By the two kinds of law I mean particular law and universal law. Particular
law is that which each community lays down and applies to its own mem-
bers: this is partly written and partly unwritten. Universal law is the law of
nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural jus-
tice and injustice that is common to all, even to those who have no associa-
tion or covenant with each other. It is this that Sophocles Antigone clearly
means when she says that the burial of Polyneices [her brother] was a just
338 Transcendence
act in spite of the prohibition [by King Creon]: she meant that it was just by
nature. Not of today or yesterday it is, but lives eternal, none can date its
birth. (1373b313)
The rectification or moderation of strict law by application of general moral
principles is generally referred to as equity. Aristotle provided the first thor-
ough examination of this (epieikeia), saying that systems of law are inevitably
too general, and may result in injustice when applied in particular instances.
When the law speaks universally, then, and the case is not covered by the
universal statement, then it is right, when the legislator fails us and has
erred by over-simplicity, to correct the omission to say what the legislator
would have said had he been present, and would have would put into his
law if he had known this is the nature of the equitable, a correction of the
law owing to its universality. (1137b 1028)
The equitable man, then, is defined as the man who chooses and does such
acts, and is no stickler for justice in a bad sense but tends to take less than his
share though he has the law on his side (1138b1). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle
elaborated on the more general implications of equity:
Equity bids us to be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less
about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what
he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused
so much as his intentions, nor this or that detail so much as the whole story;
to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or for the most part
been. It bids us remember benefits rather than injuries, and benefits received
rather than benefits conferred; to be patient when we are wronged; to settle
a dispute by negotiation and not by force; to prefer arbitration to litigation
for an arbitrator goes by the equity of a case, a judge by the law, and arbitra-
tion was invented with the express purpose of securing full power for eq-
uity. (1374b923)
Equity became of great importance in Roman law, and it is possible to dis-
tinguish certain general doctrines of equity which profoundly influenced Ro-
man law in many of its branches. Under the various titles of aequitas, aequum et
bonum, utilitas, humanitas, benignitas, ratio naturalis, and in a great measure bona
fides, it appears almost everywhere (Allen 1958: 367, and see also Jolowicz
1961: 423).
In the post-exilic period of Judaism, the Talmudic commentary upon the
Torah
recognized the existence of necessity of an unwritten law, controlling mat-
ters left to the moral feeling of the individual the finer demands of moral-
ity which did not admit of formulation and classification. The unwritten law
was designated dabhar ham-masur lal-lebh, Something which is left to the
heart It is thus entirely misleading to speak of the Jewish religion as
purely legal in character. The designation din, law, for the individual provi-
sions applies exclusively to those religious duties which deal with definite
actions that can be judicially formulated what is prohibited or allowed.
The din demands nothing but obedience; the dabhar ham-masur lal-lebh, on the
other hand, appeals to the moral feeling, and thus recognizes morality as a
necessary supplement to the law. The Halakha gives numerous instances in

which the individual cannot be punished according to law, but is guilty in
the eyes of the law of God. (Perles 1914: 856)
The principle of equity is also of great importance in Islamic law.
The term insaf [equity] does not appear in the Quran, where the root kst is
used to refer to equity, The principle of istihsan may be considered as a
continuation of the Quranic idea and terminology: it expresses, in fact, a
more flexible and more circumstantial conception and practice of the over-
rigid justice produced by the formal instruction of kiyas. In introducing con-
crete considerations of time, of practice, and of persons, istihsan allows the
adoption of solutions which tend towards equity. istihsan, writes Ch. Che-
hata may be considered as the form which this idea of equity has taken in
the mind of the Muslim jurisconsults. Benignitas (istihsan) is a very human
aspect of the principle jus est ars aequi et boni. It belongs on the borderline be-
tween law and morals. (Arkoun 1971: 1236 -1237)
Since the problem of equity arises as the result of the inflexibility of written
law codes when applied to real cases, we do not find that equity is a significant
independent principle in either India or China. In both societies civil disputes
were settled at the local level and did not normally involve royal or imperial
courts, so that equitable considerations could be incorporated in the judicial
procedures themselves. In China, since Han times, instead of such devices as
legal fictions, equity, or amending legislation, Confucian jurists exalted ancient
custom, arbitration and compromise, confining positive law to purely penal
(criminal) purposes (Needham 1956: 519).
The relations between different communities provided another series of di-
lemmas to which the concept of natural law was a response. The Melian Dia-
logue, which is a celebrated passage in Thucydides history of the Peloponne-
sian War, provides an excellent example of the moral conflict between the rule
of force and the rule of natural law in international relations. In 416 B.C. the
island of Melos, a Spartan colony which had nevertheless remained neutral in
the Peloponnesian War, was invaded by the Athenians who demanded that
Melos should join the Athenian alliance. The Melians refused, and after a siege
were defeated and enslaved. In the following year Athens sent an expedition-
ary force to attack Syracuse, but after a series of military blunders the Athenian
force, together with its ships, was annihilated in 413.
M.I. Finley suggests, in his notes to the translation of Thucydides, that this
dialogue, which is conducted at a highly abstract level, represents Thucydides
own reflections about the moral problems about empire and power (Finley
1972: 615616), even though some sort of negotiations between the Melians and
the Athenians presumably occurred. Thucydides account would have been
affected by his knowledge of what was to happen to Athenian fortunes at Syra-
cuse, when they were to be on the receiving end of what they had dealt out to
the Melians.
In the dialogue the Athenians begin by dismissing appeals to general moral
principles, and make what is essentially Thrasymachus case in the Republic
that justice is simply what is in the interests of the stronger party: The stan-
dard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the
340 Transcendence
strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have
to accept (Thucydides: 402). The Melians reply:
Then in our view (since you force us to leave justice out of account and to
confine ourselves to self-interest) in our view it is at any rate useful that
you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men
namely that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a
thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should be allowed
to use and to profit by arguments that fall short of a mathematical accuracy.
And this is a principle that affects you as much as anybody, since your own
fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance and would be an exam-
ple to the world. (Ibid., 402)
The Athenians dismiss the practical dangers to themselves, and when the
Melians say We trust that the gods will give us fortune as good as yours, be-
cause we are standing for what is right against what is wrong, the Athenians
reply:
So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much
right to that as you have. Our aims and our actions are perfectly consistent
with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with the principles which gov-
ern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men
lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule
whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the
first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and
we shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us. We are
merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else
with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way.
And therefore, so far as the gods are concerned, we see no good reason why
we should fear to be at any disadvantage. (Ibid., 404405)
Discussion of the morality of conquest and empire was intensified with the
rise of the Roman empire, particularly when it absorbed the Greeks. The idea
of the just war was one part of this problem, and is discussed for example by
Cicero (De Repub. Bk.3), and the justice of rule by one people over another was
a second part. This section of the De Republica is missing, but Ciceros argu-
ments were preserved by Saint Augustine:
According to Augustines summary of the argument in his City of God,
Cicero said that the rule of subject states was just, because slavery was in the
interests of a certain kind of men this kind of men, if left to their own de-
vices, would only damage their own interests, for example by robbery and
civil war. If, however, the imperial power administers its rule correctly, it
will be in its subjects interests and the opportunity for injustice will be
removed from them. Therefore in such cases subjection is better than inde-
pendence.
This argument is reinforced by the claim that it is a principle of nature that
the best rule the weaker in the interests of the latter. It is in this way that
God rules man, the mind rules the body and reason rules the desires, anger
and other vicious parts of the soul Thus the argument is that the rule of
the best (i.e. Rome) over the weaker (i.e. Romes subjects) is both natural and
advantageous; for the latter are incapable of living in peace and harmony

without Romes assistance. This leads to the conclusion that empire is just as
long as it has the well-being of the subjects in mind. (Erskine 1990: 193)
The Romans were not philosophers, and did not develop a theoretical juris-
prudence until the last period of the Republic (Jolowicz 1961: 90). Their devel-
opment of the ius gentium, the law of nations, and ius naturale, natural law, was
the direct outcome of the problems generated by the relations between Romans
and foreigners. The strict theory of Roman law that remained throughout its
history was that the ius civile was only for citizens, and, as there was originally
no other law than the ius civile, the foreigner was both rightless and dutyless
(Jolowicz 1961: 100). However literally this may have been practised in early
Rome, it was clearly incompatible with any sort of extensive relationships with
other peoples and Jolowicz notes that members of the Latin league trading in
Rome had their rights protected, and the treaty between Rome and Carthage in
509 B.C. also provided mutual protection at least for those legal rights relating
to commerce. What in fact grew up was
a system that was not the Roman ius civile nor a code of private interna-
tional law, but a general system of rules governing relations between free
men as such, without reference to their nationality. Much of this system of
law, seeing that it was based on the edicts of Roman magistrates, was Ro-
man in origin, but it was Roman law stripped to a great extent of its formal
elements, and influenced by other, especially Greek, ideas. (Ibid., 102)
These legal rules were crucial, therefore, in the development of the idea of
the ius gentium, For, once established, they in turn influenced the development
of the law as applied between citizens, especially in the direction of making it
less formal, and thus there came into existence the ius gentium, in its practical
sense, i.e. that part of the law that we apply to both to ourselves and foreign-
ers (ibid., 103).
The idea of ius gentium was closely compatible with Aristotles distinction
between natural (physikon) law, and man-made (nomikon) law, and Aristotle
had asserted that natural law was the same everywhere and had equal validity
everywhere; as well as being natural it was common (koinon) (ibid.,
103).The identification of natural law with divine law was extremely easy, and
in opposition to the ius civile it expresses much of what we mean by distin-
guishing morality from law.
When we move to India and the Hindu tradition, the closest that we come
to the distinction between positive and natural law and it is not very close is
that between sacred and secular law. The fundamental connotations of dharma,
which are those of cosmic and social order, are broader than our notions of
law, duty, or even righteousness, though it can be translated by these
words in certain contexts. But dharma, in so far as it describes duties that we
would term religious, only covers one area of human action: the others, which
also have their legitimate place in the Hindu scheme of things, are artha, pros-
perity, social success, wealth, power; and kama, physical desire. Analogously to
its differentiation between social categories according to caste function, Hindu-
ism seems also to have made a radical differentiation of human action in gen-
eral, and this is especially clear in the contrast between dharma and artha. We
shall see in our discussion of duty later in this chapter that while Hindus did
342 Transcendence
distinguish between eternal or general dharma, which prescribed universal
moral standards for all men, such as benevolence, and self-control, they subor-
dinated these general moral principles to ones particular dharma of caste and
social role.
The Indian tradition of law therefore seems not to have been so much one of
a general set of legal principles upon which all enlightened men of whatever
society could have agreed, contrasted with the particular laws of each society,
as of different types of law for different areas of human action, and different
social groups.
Buddhism as such was not concerned with law, but with general ethical
principles: unlike the dharmashastras varna-linked and therefore relative codes
of conduct, Buddhism holds that the teachings of Buddha apply to all, irrespec-
tive of their station in life. The ethic of dharma is one of absolute imperatives
(Tambiah 1976: 40). As we have seen, the duty of a Buddhist king was to be a
father to his people, and to maintain religion by supporting the sangha. In dis-
cussing the contribution of Buddhism to Indian political theory, Gokhale says
The most important element introduced was the acceptance of a higher mo-
rality as the guiding spirit behind the state. The state is created through a
demand for the rule of morality and it is this morality that stands between
social order and incipient or actual anarchy. Secondly, the early Buddhists
put forward the theory of two wheels, two distinct realms of action by pos-
iting two separate but equally important ideals of a Cakkavatti, the leader of
the temporal realm and the Bodhisattva, preeminent in the spiritual domain
Finally there was the early Buddhist argument that morality exists by and
for itself and cannot be associated with the notions of ritual purity and im-
purity; the state must function as an instrument of this higher and universal
morality with a transformation of man from being a merely political creature
into a wholly moral one. (Gokhale 1966: 22)
The necessity of force to attain these ends was recognised as a regrettable
necessity, and in reality the history of Buddhist kingship in India and else-
where showed as much use of violence in internal and external relations as in
other systems (ibid., 21). But, unlike the Hindus, who considered warfare as
one of
the caste duties of a king, the Buddhists disapproved of all warfare on the
grounds of compassion. In the thirteenth pillar edict erected five years after
his conquest of Kalinga, Asoka states that it was the remorse and pity
aroused in his mind by the horrors of the conquest the killing, death by
disease, and forcible carrying away of individuals, to which noncombatants
and even peaceable Brahmans and recluses were exposed that resulted in
his conversion. He does not say to what. That, apparently, was supposed to
be quite clear to anyone. It was sufficient to say that he had come to the
opinion that the only true conquest was conquest by the religion (by the
Dhamma). (Rhys Davids 1955: 159)
It seems reasonable to conclude that the Buddhists thought about the rela-
tions between general moral principles and positive law in very much the same
terms as the Greeks and Romans, even though they did not use the idiom of
natural law.

The classical Chinese conceptions of law were very different from those of
Greece and Rome, since they regarded law as something imposed by royal au-
thority, not as agreed to by the people, but they did not consider that this type
of law had any religious significance. When written law appeared, it was used
neither to uphold traditional religious values nor to protect private property.
Rather, its primary purpose was political: that of imposing tighter political con-
trols upon a society which was losing its old cultural values and being drawn
by inexorable new forces along the road leading eventually to universal em-
pire (Bodde 1981: 175). These early written law codes were the edicts of rulers,
and certainly not like the law codes of Rome and the Greek city states, but were
regarded, like nomoi, as purely social ordinances. They were also thoroughly
penal in character: The earliest reliably known to us is the books of punish-
ment (hsing shu) which Tzu-chan, Prime Minister of the State of Cheng, or-
dered to be inscribed in 536 B.C. on a set of bronze tripod vessels (ibid., 177).
We can therefore understand why no one at any time has ever hinted that
any kind of written law even the best written law could have had a divine
origin (ibid., 174). Indeed, philosophical reflection on society led to the very
clear understanding that law, in the fa-hsing sense, was a purely human con-
trivance to ensure an orderly society. In a Legalist text of the third century B.C.
for example (Shang chn shu, Chapter 23) it says as the people were numerous
and wickedness and depravity arose among them, they [the Sages] therefore
established laws (fa) and controls and created weights and measures (ibid.,
177).
But the Confucians, as we have seen, objected to the whole idea of forcing
the people to be good by punishments, which they thought would merely be
evaded and lead to shamelessness, and while they came to accept the practical
need for written laws, continued to maintain that the moral example of the
king and his officials was also necessary to bring order and virtue to society.
the most important Confucian objection to the codification and publication
of law may well be that laws are too determinate, too gross, and too inflexible
(Peerenboom 1993: 136). This seems close to the Greek idea about the defects of
written law requiring correction by equity, but expressed in the different social
idiom of the virtuous ruler. In the final outcome, therefore, both Legalist and
Confucian ideas of law combined in the Chinese legal tradition. Written law
remained fundamentally penal, but the predominant concern of all parties was
to avoid becoming involved in lawsuits at all and, as in India, disputes were
mainly settled by social processes outside the formal procedures of the law.
The Confucians therefore emphasised li, in opposition to the Legalists fa,
but it is important to realize, however, that for the Confucians li was not
merely an accumulation of customs, rules, and taboos:
the Confucians believed that underlying the minutiae of the specific rules of
li are to be found certain broad moral principles which are what give the li
their validity. This is so because these principles are rooted in innate human
feeling; in other words, they represent what men in general instinctively feel
to be right. It is this interpretation of li which caused some modern scholars
to suggest that a parallel may be drawn between Confucian li and the West-
ern concept of natural law on the one hand, in apposition to a counter paral-
344 Transcendence
lel which may likewise be drawn between Legalist fa and Western positive
law. (Ibid., 179)
But this interpretation of li was open to two types of objection from thinkers
of a more universalistic persuasion. In the first place, the large number, com-
plexity, and refinement [of the li] meant that they were largely an upper class
monopoly. Indeed, what most readily distinguished the Confucian ideal gen-
tleman (the chn-tzu or superior man) from ordinary men was his mastery of
the li (Bodde 1981: 179). Secondly, adherence to li could easily become a petti-
fogging obsession with the minutiae of etiquette which was both burdensome
and obscured the more important moral ideals.
The Mohists seem to have been the first explicitly to emphasize the distinc-
tion between li and i:
The first clear use of i as a conception of morality, distinct from traditional
rules, appears to emerge in opposition to Confucianism and tends to confirm
the hypothesis that Confucius himself never distinguished the two. Mo Tzu
criticized Confucian li theory for confusing traditional rules with i (moral-
ity). Thus, it is Mo Tzu who first makes theoretically explicit the distinction
between morality and traditionally accepted mores. Mo Tzu said: this is be-
cause they confuse what is habitual with what is proper, and what is cus-
tomary with what is right [i]. In ancient times east of the state of Yeh lived
the people of the land of Kai shu. When their first son was born, they cut
him up and ate him, saying that this would be beneficial to the next son.
When their fathers died, they loaded their mothers on their backs, carried
them off and abandoned them, saying, one cant live in the same house with
the wife of a ghost! These were regarded by the superiors as rules of gov-
ernment and by the people as accepted procedures. They continued to prac-
tise these customs and did not give them up, carried them out and did not
abandon them. And yet can we actually say that they represent the way of
benevolence and righteousness [jen-i]? This is what it means to accept what
is habitual as proper and what is customary as right Mo Tzu thus makes a
clear distinction between custom and morality (i) and, following Mo Tzu,
this distinction becomes common ground among classical philosophers of all
schools. Mencius, writing in response to Mo Tzus critique, emphasizes the
pair jen-i and, in comparison to Confucius, enormously downplays the con-
ventional li. (Hansen 1985b: 363)
We also recall here the Taoist distinction between artificial, man-made
morality and that of nature embodied in the Tao. While the Chinese, then, like
the Buddhists, did not use the exact idiom of natural law in opposition to
positive law, in their distinction between li and fa they seem to have come
close to it, and especially in the later opposition between jen-i and both fa and
li.
It should be noted that the moral dilemma of empire and the conquest of
states with different cultures did not present itself to the Chinese in the same
terms as it did to the Greeks and Romans. In the first place, the distinction be-
tween the Chinese and the barbarians was not at all clear-cut. The barbarians
were by no means all wandering tribesmen, but in many cases were organized
into powerful states, such as Wu and Chu, and Chu in particular was re-
garded by Chinese as superior in administrative organization to many Chinese
states. The Chinese states themselves were neither linguistically nor culturally

homogeneous, and in the words of Creel (from whom this account of the bar-
barians is taken) China was in fact a very exclusive club of states and rulers
(Creel 1970: 217). The Chineseness of these states varied, and the Western
Chou themselves when they originally conquered the Shang were distinctly
marginal members of the club. Membership offered some degree of political
advantage in the formation of stable alliances, but above all it offered prestige,
so that the barbarian states themselves wanted to be accepted as members,
while the Chinese considered that it was to their advantage to allow large and
potentially dangerous barbarian states such as Chu to be accepted. The Chi-
nese thus regarded the barbarians as fellow human beings who would benefit
from adopting Chinese culture.
e. The mental element in law
In the previous chapter we noted the problem which early systems of law en-
counter in assessing the mental element in wrong-doing, an element that is
fundamental from the ethical point of view. In Greek law, Except in such ob-
vious cases [e.g. accident, self-defence] the Greeks long felt unable to delve into
mens mental states for the purpose of distinguishing different degrees of guilt.
Methods of legal proof, particularly among peoples in early stages of legal de-
velopment, have to rely upon outward phenomena of the plainest sort in order
to draw inferences as to the existence and nature of responsibility for human
conduct (Jones 1956: 261). But with the increasing complexity of society, and
greater legal experience, During the fifth century there had clearly been a
greater emphasis on fault as the basis of liability, and in the fourth Demosthe-
nes [XVIII 2745] puts the completely different attitude shown to intentional
and unintentional injuries among the unwritten laws of nature supported by
the universal moral sense of mankind (ibid., 264).
Plato discusses various aspects of intention at length in the Laws, and
Aristotle breaks new ground by distinguishing between consequences which
are and those which are not reasonably to be anticipated. There is responsi-
bility for the former; the latter are to be treated as accidental. By recognizing
that there might be liability for foreseeable harm without evil intent, Aris-
totle opened the way for recognition of negligence standing beside intention
as a separate ground of legal as well as moral culpability. But there is no
evidence that Greek law ever took advantage of it so far as to accept such an
objective standard of conduct as was later to be represented by the bonus pa-
ter familias of Roman and the reasonable man of English law. (Ibid., 274)
The history of Roman law shows the same type of development:
There is no doubt that, in the main, the Roman law at the time of the XII
Tables has the primitive principle that a man is responsible for his acts irre-
spective of his state of mind, no distinction being, as a rule, drawn between
intentional, negligent, and accidental acts, but this principle was no longer
applied without exception. One of the very few things that we know about
the law of murder is that a distinction was already drawn between inten-
tional and unintentional killing, for a fragment tells us that if the weapon
sped from his hand rather than was thrown by him, then a ram was substi-
tuted probably given to the agnates a relic of the time when the agnates
346 Transcendence
of the slain man were entitled to take vengeance on the slayer. (Jolowicz
1961: 17778). [By the post-classical period], Another general change which
takes place is a shifting emphasis from the concrete facts of any legal rela-
tionship to the intention (animus) of the parties (ibid., 532). Parallel with the
stressing of the subjective intention in the formation of contract and other
acts in the law, is the development of the subjective element in liability.
(Ibid., 533534)
The same disregard of intention and motive is found in early medieval Eng-
lish law:
If once it is granted that a mans death was caused by the act of another, then
that other is liable, no matter what may have been his intentions or his mo-
tives. (Pollock and Maitland 1923(2): 471)
In the twelfth century the resuscitated Roman law introduced some new
ideas. Men began to contrast, as Glanville does, civil with criminal cases, to
speak of dolus and culpa and casus, and to lay stress on the psychical element
in crime. (Ibid., 477)
Nevertheless, the law
still finds grave difficulties in its way if it endeavours to detect and ap-
preciate the psychical element in guilt and innocence. The thought of man
shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth not the thought of man:
thus at the end of the Middle Ages spoke Brian C.J. in words that might well
be the motto for the early history of criminal law. It cannot go behind the
visible fact. Harm is harm and should be paid for. (Ibid., 474475)
The mental element has a significant place in the Laws of Manu. Judges, for
example, are given advice on the discernment of mental states. By external
signs let him discover the internal dispositions of men, by their voice, their col-
our, their motions, their aspect, and their gestures. The internal working of the
mind is perceived through the aspect, the motions, the gait, the gestures, the
speech and the change in the eye and of the face (Manu 8.2526). Distinct mo-
tivations for perjury are recognized, and punished with differing degrees of
severity: Covetousness (the largest fine), distraction (the lowest fine), fear,
friendship, lust, wrath, ignorance, and childishness. The potential perjurer is
warned about the consequence to his soul, even if he may hope to be unde-
tected: The soul itself is the witness of the soul, and the soul is the refuge of the
soul; despise not thine own soul, the supreme witness of men. The wicked, in-
deed, say in their heart: Nobody sees us, but the gods distinctly see them,
and the evil within their own breasts. If thou thinkest, Oh friend of virtue, with
respect to thyself I am alone, know that that sage who witnesses all virtuous
acts and all crimes, ever resides in thy heart (Manu 8.8485, 91).
Intention also came to be of central importance in Chinese law. Underlying
the classification of offences such as homicide, Bodde and Morris consider that
motivation is of great importance: it is among the varieties belonging to this
group that we find the closest analogies with the differentiations familiar to us
in Western legal systems. Examples would include premeditated homicide,
intentional (but unpremeditated) homicide, homicide in an affray, by mis-
chance or accident, in roughhousing, or by inducing the victim to commit sui-
cide (Bodde and Morris 1967: 30). The category of negligence as distinct from

accident also existed: The formula for negligence was neither unforeseeable
nor unavoidable (ibid., 286), and for accident was neither forseeable nor
avoidable, literally what the eyes and ears do not reach, what thinking and
planning do not arrive at (ibid., 342).
It is difficult to say how widespread was the practice of corporate liability in
the ancient civilizations, but since it is explicitly denounced in the Old Testa-
ment and in China it is reasonable to suppose that it was an accepted practice
particularly with regard to treason and apostasy (see Halpern 1991: 12). But
centralized states inevitably tend to disapprove of the blood feud because this
is a facet of kin group solidarity, and to this extent will favour individual re-
sponsibility. The centralization of justice in the kingdom of Judah in the sev-
enth century, with the destruction of clan solidarity, would have greatly dimin-
ished the social significance of the blood feud, so that in Deuteronomy it is
stated The fathers shall not be put to death for the children neither shall the
children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his
own sin (Deut. 24.16 and see Boecker 1980: 37). Jeremiah, immediately before
the passage announcing the new covenant between Israel and God, in which
the Divine Law will be known to men inwardly, says In those days they shall
say no more, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the childrens teeth are
set on edge. But everyone shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth
the sour grape his teeth shall be set on edge (Jer.31.2930).
Mencius says Formerly, when King Wen ruled over Chi punishment
did not extend to the wife and children of an offender (Mencius 1.B.5). Bodde
cites a case of Menciuss contemporary King Wu of Chin, who died as a result
of a weight-lifting contest. The competitor, together with his relatives, was
immediately executed (Bodde 1991: 292). Corporate responsibility was cer-
tainly advocated by the Legalists, who divided the population into groups who
were responsible on pain of death for the good behaviour of all the other mem-
bers; while in cases of treason it remained Chinese legal policy to execute the
whole family of those found guilty, although this seems more probably an ex-
pression of realpolitik than of ethics.
f. Conclusions
From what we have seen so far about ancient speculation on man and society,
it seems that there was general agreement that man is inherently social, and
that the state is a practical necessity to ensure human well-being by preventing
anarchy and the oppression of the weak by the strong, and ensuring that our
needs, deriving from our lack of individual self-sufficiency, are met. It was un-
derstood that positive law is a purely expedient human contrivance to this end,
and a distinction is made between this type of law and more fundamental
principles, which are for the most part given religious or cosmic significance.
As far as social institutions are concerned, we can say therefore that these were
generally treated in rationalistic terms (with the exception of Hindu justifica-
tion of caste) but that fundamental moral values remain, for the most part,
closely related to the beliefs that the cosmos as a whole is an orderly process
which makes sense, and that the wise man tries to understand this process and
attune himself to it. The least metaphysical of the ethical systems seem to have
348 Transcendence
been those of Aristotle and of the Mohists. While Aristotle believed that nature
was a rational system, we have seen that he did not give much importance to
the logos doctrine (unlike the Stoics), and his treatment of ethics is primarily
based on empirical facts of human nature and society. The various types of po-
litical system which he discusses in the Politics are rated in terms of how well
they work, and of how just they are, not in terms of any cosmic significance
they might have. (Platos Republic, by contrast, is thoroughly imbued with
metaphysical beliefs.) In later antiquity, Ciceros moral philosophy is also
completely social in its orientation, and can stand by itself without cosmic or
religious support. (For example, he ridicules the idea that the gods punish per-
jury, and says that it is wrong simply because it diminishes the bonds of social
trust.) We must also recognize that in its main emphasis the teaching of Confu-
cius was thoroughly social in nature and content.
7. Duty and moral obligation
We noted in Chapter II that the extreme importance of the concept of duty in
modern moral philosophy (together with the emphasis on words such as
ought and must) derives from Kant in particular, and from the general ra-
tionalist belief that ethical dilemmas can be solved by the application of some
very abstract rule, such as the Categorical Imperative, or the principle of Util-
ity, or Rawlsian justice calculations.
For any man brought up in a western and democratic society the related
concepts of duty and responsibility are the central concepts of ethics; and we
are inclined to take it as an unquestionable truth, though there is abundant
evidence to the contrary, that the same must be true of all societies. In this
respect, at least, we are all Kantians now. Surely, we assume, in any society
what is my duty in these circumstances? is the basic question which re-
quires a moral decision; and since, as we all know, ought implies can,
anyone who has to pass judgement on any action must first inquire, in con-
sidering whether the agent did or did not do his duty, whether he could or
could not have acted otherwise, and hence whether he may be held respon-
sible for his actions or no. That there should exist a society so different from
our own as to render it impossible to translate duty in the Kantian sense
into its ethical terminology at all impossible, that is to say, to translate
duty by a word not only of equivalent connotation but also of equivalent
status and emotive power is, despite the evidence, a very difficult idea to
accept. (Adkins 1960: 23)
Adkinss remarks about the Greeks apply to all the societies of our study,
and the closest one comes to a general rule of duty is the Golden Rule. The
Golden Rule, in which the idea of trading places with others is an essential fea-
ture, may be represented as one of the basic aspects of justice, but it has equally
close affinities with the ideas of reciprocity, benevolence or agape, and selfless-
ness. So when Jesus said All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men
should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them: for this is the law and the
prophets (Mt.7.12), he was, as he indicates, drawing on such statements as
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Lev.4.15) and Do that to no man
which thou hatest (Tobit 4.15). Hillel (died 10 B.C.), one of the great Torah
Duty and moral obligation 349

scholars, expressed the same idea: What is hateful unto thee do not unto thy
fellow. This is the great foundation; the rest is commentary. Go now and learn
(According to tradition, Hillel defined the essence of the Torah in this way in
response to the challenge from a pagan to teach him the Torah while he, the
pagan, was standing on one leg.) In Zoroastrianism the Golden Rule was for-
mulated by the philosopher Adhurbadh (A.D. 309379): Do not do unto others
what would not be good for yourself (Zaehner 1956: 99). Confucius formulates
the Golden Rule in two places in the Analects. The first is in response to the
question What is virtue?: When abroad, behave as if interviewing an hon-
oured guest; in directing the people, act as if officiating at a great sacrifice; do
not do to others what you would not like yourself; then your public life will
arouse no ill-will nor your private life any resentment (An. 12.2). The justifica-
tion here is one of practical good sense and of prudential reciprocity, and of
getting along with ones neighbours. But in the second passage the Golden
Rule is linked explicitly with jen, human-heartedness: Is there any one
word, asked Tzu Kung, which could be adopted as a lifelong rule of con-
duct? The Master replied: Is not sympathy the word? Do not do to others
what you would not like yourself. (An.15.23)
In Hinduism in the period we are considering the essence of the Golden
Rule is based on the identification of self with others according to the atman-
brahman doctrine. In the Upanishads it is said, Who sees all beings in himself
and himself in all beings he will dislike none [Isa. Up.6] (Hiriyanna 1932:
381), and in the Gita: And when a man sees that the God in himself is the same
God in all that is, he hurts not himself by hurting others (Bh. 13.28). Identifica-
tion of ones own self with that of others, or non-self, is the basis of the Bud-
dhist version of the Golden Rule: All beings tremble before danger, all fear
death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill. All beings
fear before danger, life is dear to all. When a man considers this, he does not
kill or cause to be killed (Dh. 129130).
The Golden Rule is expressed most clearly in Greek thought by Isocrates in
the fourth century: Manifest your good will towards me in deeds rather than
in words. Do not do to others that at which you would be angry if you suffered
it from others (To Nicocles 61). Conduct yourself toward your parents as you
would have your children conduct themselves toward you (To Dominicus 14),
and Deal with weaker states as you would expect stronger states to deal with
you (To Nicocles 24, and see also Panegyricus 81).
In Islamic thought the Golden Rule is an integral part of the idea of equity,
insaf. In the thirteenth century dictionary Lisan al-Arab, it is said that ansafa is
to assure to others the same right that one claims for oneself (Arkoun 1971:
1236), and the tenth century philosopher Miskawayh wrote that The virtue of
justice (adala) confers on a man a disposition (haya) which causes him to treat
first himself with equity, then to treat others with the same equity (insaf/intisaf)
which he expects from them The rationalization of this idea is pursued in the
writings of the scholars, and insaf came to mean impartiality, objectivity, integ-
rity, in short, a complete ethical code for the activity of the man of learning
(ibid., 1237).
350 Transcendence
But the Golden Rule is not at all the same as the Categorical Imperative be-
cause it is inherently context-dependent; that is, it does not prescribe or forbid
any category of action, such as never to tell a lie, and was not therefore the
equivalent in the thought of the ancient world to our abstract notion of moral
obligation. This did not mean, then, that people supposed that it was impossi-
ble or unimportant to know what to do in particular circumstances because
duty in this sense was primarily based on conventional role obligations.
In the ancient world, including traditional European civilization, the idea of
a functional, organic social order was much clearer than it has become in the
modern West. Our own concept of duty originated in the context of specific
relationships, as we noted in Chapter II when considering the etymologies of
duty, obligation, ought, should, and shalt, and the idea of duty as role-
performance was basic in the societies of our study. So the superior man of
Confucius knows what is proper to the various fundamental social roles.
When Duke Ching of Chi inquired of Confucius the principles of government,
Confucius answered saying Let the prince be prince, the minister minister, the
father father, and the son son (An. 12. 11). In the Chinese tradition the Five
Relations were: father-son; elder brother-younger brother; man-wife; ruler-
subject; friend-friend. These were almost the same as those singled out by Aris-
totle in his discussion of friendship: father-son; elder-younger; man-wife; ruler-
subject; friend-friend. (1158b 1314). In Buddhism, too, we find a somewhat
similar list. Buddha is asked what rituals a householder should perform to the
cardinal points, and in typical fashion he converts ritualistic duties into general
moral duties. He bids his questioner, as a householder, to worship: parents as
east, teachers as south, wife and children as west, friends as north, servants
and employees as nadir, and brahmins as zenith (the duties are reciprocal)
(Misra 1984: 105). In Hinduism these relationships were also important, but
overlaid by the caste duties of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra. To carry
out the duties of ones station without hoping for any material reward is the
foundation both of the good society and of personal happiness. This is the mes-
sage of the Bhaghavad Gita.
It will be seen that the family is central in all these schemes and in China
especially it is the focus of personal moral development and of social well-
being. When the personal life is cultivated, the family will be regulated; when
the family is regulated the state will be in order; and when the state is in order,
there will be peace throughout the world. From the Son of Heaven down to the
common people, all must regard cultivation of the personal life as the root or
foundation. There is never a case when the root is in disorder and yet the
branches are in order (Great Learning; Chan 1963: 867).
Because the cosmos and society were generally conceived in functional, or-
ganic terms, it was easy to think of duty as the appropriate or fitting,
whether we are thinking of ones social or cosmic functions. Greek expressions
for duty and ought derive from ideas of the fitting, the necessary, the proper,
as can be seen from the following literal translations given by Liddell and Scott.
dei, there is need, it is necessary, on which Liddell and Scott note that the
sense of moral obligation properly belonging to chre is later; ta deonta what is
necessary; to prepon, what is fitting; chre, it is necessary; and the Stoic ta

kathkonta, ones due or duty, from kathkon, what is normal, regular, proper.
The idea of the appropriate or the fitting is clearly expressed in Aristotle.
The temperate man, for example, desires the things he ought, as he ought, and
when he ought (1119b16), and the generous man will give to the right people,
the right amounts, and at the right time, and with all the other qualifications
that accompany right giving, such as doing it in an ungrudging spirit
(1120a25).
But the idea of the appropriate or the fitting is a more precise expression of
the idea of duty than what is customary, and the Stoics coined the term
kathkon, the appropriate, or functional: the function of a man is now to per-
form appropriate acts (kathkonta) the starting point of which is not mere im-
pulse or instinct but reason (logos). An appropriate act is defined as that which
reason persuades one to do. (Long 1986: 190). Cicero translated kathkon by
officium: officium is an ambiguous word. Like its English derivative, office,
officium is regularly used in Latin for the task, function, or duty of an official a
consul, legionary commander and so forth. A consul is bound or obliged by his
office to fulfil certain duties, but one cannot speak of the duties of an infant,
much less the duties of animals and plants, to which the Stoics also ascribed
kathkonta (ibid., 188). Closely allied to these two terms were the Greek prepon,
which Cicero translated as decorum, an appreciation of the fitness of things,
propriety in inward feeling or outward appearance, in speech, behaviour, dress
etc., so that all just things are proper, and vice versa (ibid., 97).
In China we find the same idea of duty as the appropriate or fitting: In
Confucianism, behaviour is prescribed according to social categories and i
a
,
duty or righteousness, is seen as related to its homophone i
b
, appropri-
ate, in the sense of an act appropriate to ones station as ruler or minister, fa-
ther or son, husband or wife (Graham 1985: 77).
The superior man does what is proper to his position and does not want to
go beyond this. If he is in a noble station, he does what is proper to a posi-
tion of wealth and honourable station. If he is in a humble station, he does
what proper to a position of poverty and humble station. If he is in the midst
of barbarian tribes he does what is proper in the midst of barbarian tribes. In
a position of difficulty and danger, he does what is proper to a position of
difficulty and danger. He can find himself in no situation in which he is not
at ease with himself. (Doctrine of the Mean, 14; Chan 1963: 1012)
To do the right thing, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way, is
to do the proper or fitting thing, but it is not deduced by each individual ap-
plying some very abstract moral rules such as the Categorical Imperative, or
the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, or Rawlsian principles of jus-
tice. In ancient society people still thought that in general they knew how to
behave towards those in the various roles of their society, since this was laid
down by convention or divine commandment.
In many cases duty was also based on the revealed commandments of God
and sacred scriptures, and on the underlying belief in a meaningful cosmos
which provided the ultimate framework for human action. At this point one
must stress that for the whole of the ancient world all men are not seen as
equally qualified to know what is right. In so far as duty is laid down in codi-
352 Transcendence
fied form such as in the Jewish Torah, the Islamic shariah, the secular and canon
law of Western Christendom, or Hindu law, then there are experts to interpret
this law. In the Buddhist and Chinese traditions, too, the guidance of the wise
and enlightened is regarded as a necessity for ordinary folk. It is generally as-
sumed that the example and teaching of experts and sages is worth more than
the uninstructed intuitions of the ignorant, in order to be able to take the right
decisions along the path of ones life, to follow the true way and not the false.
Ordinary people were therefore expected to follow the teachings of priests,
lawyers, or sages, who ideally were qualified as guides and exemplars by their
wisdom and virtue, and the right course of a human life was generally repre-
sented as the way.
In the Old and New Testaments, strangely, the actual word duty hardly
occurs. In the New Testament, the English word duty is employed only once,
to translate the rather limited idea of servants merely having performed that
which was required of them (Lk.17.10), and it does not, accurately speaking,
occur at all in the Old Testament.
It is a singular fact that there is no word in the Hebrew language corre-
sponding to the word duty. At Ex.21.10 and 2 Chron.8.14. it is a gloss of the
Hebrew, while in the third case, the famous Fear god and keep His
commandments; for this is the whole duty of man (Eccles.12.13), the verse
in Hebrew runs this is the whole of man. And the reason is plain. When the
Jew thought of duty, his mind went back to the commandments of God and
he simply said, Yahweh commanded. For his children Gods command-
ments are their code of duty. (Bruce 1909: 74 n.1)
Despite the absence of an actual word for duty, it is obvious that the Jews con-
sidered themselves obliged to act in certain ways, and that their code of law,
the Torah, came to be organized at both general and specific levels, the Ten
Commandments laying out ones general duties to God and to man, while spe-
cific duties are provided in the rest of the code.
In Islam, too, the commandments of God as revealed in the Koran were the
basis of duty, but Islamic jurists not only had a word for obligation, wajib, de-
fined in terms of Islamic law, but distinguished between five moral categories
of action: the obligatory, the recommended, the permitted or morally neutral,
the disapproved, and the forbidden.
In India, the concept of duty was expressed in the concept of dharma.
Dharma as social duties rests upon and expresses a view of innate nature or
constitution to which ones role or function corresponds (Creel 1972: 156)
dharma, then refers to fixed position. Everything by being what it is, and
not being something else, has its dharma, its distinctive character and there-
fore its special function. Thus, innate constitution is the natural basis for pre-
scribed or proper function. (Ibid., 56)
With regard to social duties, The Hindus recognize two different levels of
duty: the relative svadharma, ones own particular duty and absolute (sanatana,
eternal), also called samanya, equal, the same for everyone or sadhavana com-
mon, general. Svadharma is very complex; sanatana dharma is rather like the Ten
Commandments easily memorized, not so easily followed (OFlaherty 1978:
96). The general duties of sanatana dharma are those which are already familiar

to us from our investigation of Hindu conceptions of virtue: the ten-limbed
dharma for all classes is non-injury, truth, purity, not stealing, charity, forbear-
ance, self-restraint, tranquillity, generosity, and asceticism (ibid., 96, and see
also Dasgupta 1932b: 509).
An important factor in the development of a principled ethics has been the
awareness of conflicts between duties: the necessity of choosing between two
good acts rather than between doing ones duty and failing to do it, and the
necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils. We recall that in Kohlbergs
Heinzs Dilemma, the choice is between saving life and obeying the law, and
it is here that we must employ some superordinate rule to guide us, and nei-
ther a general code of duties, from general to particular, nor the idea of virtue,
will be sufficient. It is in such situations that general criteria such as justice,
benevolence, and utility become of special relevance, and this process of decid-
ing between conflicting goods also requires us to transcend the limitations of
role and status and specific social relationships, and to consider other people,
as, first and foremost, human beings, to whom such principles as the Golden
Rule can be applied.
Cicero not only discusses the conflict between what is morally right and
what is expedient, but also, When a choice of two morally right courses is of-
fered, which one is morally better, an essential issue which, he claims, the Stoic
Panaetius ignored (De Offic. 1.3.10). The conservation of an ordered society,
beneficence towards others, and rendering to every man his due are three of
the most important principles in his ethical system, and they are applied in a
number of dilemmas. Promises, for example, are not to be kept, if the keeping
of them is to prove harmful to those to whom you have made them; and, if
the fulfilment of a promise should do more harm to you than good to him to
whom you have made it, it is no violation of moral duty to give the greater
good precedence over the lesser good (De Offic. I.10.32). Cicero also attempts
to formulate a number of more specific rules to guide moral decision-making.
So, first of all, he defines propriety in terms of consistency of life, which is
essentially the Stoic ideal of a life at harmony with itself: If there is any such
thing as propriety at all, it can be nothing more than uniform consistency in the
course of our life as a whole and in all its individual actions (De Offic. I.31.
111). In acting with propriety, the first and most important rule is to keep im-
pulse subservient to reason. Secondly, We must estimate carefully the impor-
tance of the object that we wish to accomplish, so that neither more nor less
care and attention maybe expended upon it than the case requires, and thirdly,
we must act with moderation, which is The science of doing the right thing at
the right time (De Offic. I.40.142). So, for example, in acts of kindness and
generosity, we must, in the first place, see to it that our act of kindness shall not
prove an injury either to the object of our beneficence or to others (as for exam-
ple by reneging on promises or using the property of others). In the second
place, that it shall not be beyond our means (for in that case we shall not have
enough to help those with a prior claim on us, such as our family); and Finally,
that it shall be proportional to the worth of the recipient; for this is the corner
stone of justice; and by the standard of justice all acts of kindness must be
measured (ibid., 1. 14.42). Again, he sets out a list of priorities of obligation:
354 Transcendence
Now, if a contrast and comparison were to be made to find out where most of
our moral obligation is due (plurimum tribuendum sit officii), country would
come first, and parents; for their services have laid us under the heaviest obli-
gation; next come children and the whole family, who look to us for support
and can have no other protection; finally, our kinsmen, with whom we live on
good terms and with whom, for the most part our lot is one (ibid., I.17.58).
With regard to strangers, he advocates generosity as long as it costs us nothing
for, he argues, human needs are infinite and an individuals resources are fi-
nite, so that to give aid to all and sundry would render us incapable of helping
our family and friends, who have first claim on us.
The most obvious example in the Analects of the problem of choosing be-
tween two moral rules is the case put to Confucius by the Duke of She. He re-
fers to a man so upright that when his father stole a sheep he denounced him
to the authorities. The implicit choice here is, of course, that between loyalty to
the state and filial piety. Confucius replies that in his view it is more upright
for the sons to shield their fathers and vice versa than to denounce them to the
state (An. 13.18). But no general rule is referred to, and we are left to conclude
from our general knowledge of Confucian principles that the family and filial
piety is the foundation of the state and society, and therefore has a primary
moral claim over the state. (In later Chinese law it was a penal offence for a son
to denounce his father, even if he was guilty, except in the case of treason).
Two important dilemmas are dealt with in the Mencius, the first concerning the
rectitude of killing a wicked king, the case in point being the last Shang King,
Tchou (Chou), by King Wu of Chou. Mencius is asked Is regicide permissible?
He replies A man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who
cripples rightness is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and crippler is out-
cast. I had indeed heard of the punishment of the outcast Tchou [Chou] but
I have not heard of any regicide (Mencius 1.B.8). As Hansen points out (1972:
17882), Mencius is here using the doctrine of rectification of names to solve
this problem by redefining King Tchou (Chou) as outcast, and regicide as
punishment, but the solution is not just a matter of playing with words, since
the renaming involved here does express in concise terms the fundamental
moral principle that the ruler himself is subject to the moral order. Mencius
uses the same technique when given another moral problem, and also intro-
duces the idea of expediency:
Shun-ya Chuan said, Is it a rule of propriety that men and women should
not touch hands when they give and receive things? Mencius said, It is a
rule of propriety If someones sister-in-law is drowning, should he rescue
her with his hand? Mencius said, He who does not rescue his drowning sis-
ter-in-law is a wolf. It is a rule of propriety for men and woman not to touch
hands when giving and receiving things, but it is a matter of expediency
(chuan) to rescue ones drowning sister-in-law with hands. (Mencius 4.A.17,
Hansens translation, Hansen 1972: 179)
It is interesting that Mencius does not apply Confuciuss formulation of the
Golden Rule in such a context. Surely, one might suppose, it would have been
easy to argue I would not like to be left to drown, so I ought not to leave my
sister-in-law to drown. In fact, however, Mencius argues that to leave ones

sister-in-law to drown would be characteristic of a person devoid of human
feelings, a brute. This is characteristic of a moral system based on virtue rather
than on a modern rule-based system, and we shall explore this distinction later
in this section. Chuan, expediency, did not become an accepted part of Confu-
cian thought until the development of Neo-Confucian theory, and was associ-
ated in classical times not with the Confucians but with the Mohists (see Chang
1963: 73). Of all the classical moral thinkers the Mohists could deal quite easily
with such problems because they had developed most fully the idea of all per-
sons as equally deserving of moral concern, and they had the general criteria of
benefits, or utility, and universal love, ai, to apply such cases.
A potential conflict between duties was also recognized in India. We have
already noted that for Hindus there are two types of duties, those incumbent
on all human beings, and those which are specific to each caste and social role.
The contradiction [between them] first arose in the post-Vedic age, when svad-
harma became rigidly codified in the law books while sanatana dharma became
defined in a non-sacrificial context (OFlaherty 1978: 97). It has been argued by
some that general duties take precedence over and control the application of
specific caste duties, varnadharma, but Dasgupta observes that in fact the con-
trary was the case: Where there was a conflict between the caste duties and the
common duties, it was the former that had the greater force the common
duties had only a general application, and the specific caste duties super-
seded them, whenever the two were in conflict (Dasgupta 1932b: 507, and see
also OFlaherty 1978: 97). So Dasgupta cites the case of the Brahmanical duty of
animal sacrifice, which violates ahimsa, non-violence to living creatures; and
the Kshatriya duty of warfare, which violates not only ahimsa, but many com-
mon social duties. Conversely, the performance of ascetic penances, tapas, is
generally good, but is forbidden to Sudras as adharma, sin. Dasgupta refers
to the case of the Sudra saint Sambuka, whose penances in the forest led to
the death of the infant son of a Brahmin, so King Rama went out in his chariot
and beheaded Sambuka for violating his caste duty (ibid., 506507). The classic
discussion of the dilemma whether to obey svadharma or sanatana dharma is in
the Bhagavadgita where Arjuna asks the Lord Krishna if it is right to slaughter
thousands in the performance of ones caste duty as a king or warrior. The fa-
mous answer is Better ones own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than
the dharma of another well performed. Better is death in the doing of ones own
dharma: the dharma of another is fraught with peril (Bhagavadgita 3.35 cited by
Koller 1972: 143). In India it was apparently the rise of the Bhakti movement,
the loving devotion to God, which ultimately resolved the conflict between
specific and general dharma in favour of the latter (OFlaherty 1978: 97).
While there were therefore some general maxims and principles by which
to resolve conflicts of duty, in the daily business of living it was the virtues
which were supposed to guide our choices of what to do; so Cicero treats the
cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, and courage as the basic means by
which social life must be maintained; Before [these] virtues is set the task of
providing and maintaining those things on which the principal business of life
depends so that the relation of man to man in human society may be con-
served (De Offic. I.v.17).
356 Transcendence
Indeed, the great emphasis on virtue in ancient ethics was in certain re-
spects antipathetic to the formulation of ethical rules, and the general impres-
sion which one receives from all the literature was that men were not primarily
interested in asking what should I do? but rather in trying to discover what
shall I be?; not what what is my duty?, but what is virtue?. For the ancients,
this was the essential question, since without being in the first place wise and
temperate, courageous and benevolent, one could not hope to discover what
one ought to do, or have the necessary qualities of character to do it consis-
tently. Following rules without being virtuous is in an important sense the an-
tithesis of the truly moral, and A.C. Danto develops this point well:
[O]ne aim of moral education, and Aristotle noted as much, is to build char-
acter, so that ones actions are properly moral only when they proceed from
our character in some nearly analytical way. Actions, he wrote in the Nico-
machean Ethics (II.4.1150b), are called just and temperate when they are such
as the just or temperate man would do; but it is not that the man who does
these is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and
temperate men do them. And this transcends the following of rules, even if
one could codify the rules of justice and temperance, since one could comply
with these and not be a just or temperate person I think one cannot over-
stress the degree to which rules and morality are almost at logical odds. A
man who followed the rule book for kindness, namely, giving lumps of
sugar because this is kind (and helping old ladies across streets, etc.) would
not through this fact be a kind man, however outwardly his mechanical be-
haviour would resemble that of the spontaneously kind man. (Danto 1972:
219)
So Hansen notes that one aspect of the Confucian distaste for legalism was
an opposition to the writing down and application of specific prescriptive
rules of conduct the Confucian attitude is teaching through moral example
or model emulation, a technique which specifically dispenses with fixed rules
(Hansen 1972: 174). Therefore, in the assessment of conduct, the tendency is not
to say X violated this or that rule of duty but X lacks this or that virtue. To
criticize someone morally for Confucianism, is to find him lacking in some es-
sential moral virtue some natural tendency to behave morally. Thus, while
his specific sin might be evidence for a moral condemnation, he is not con-
demned or blamed for violation of some rule, but for being pu hsiao pu jen, non-
filial or non-human hearted. Essentially he is being criticized for failing to cul-
tivate his character properly (ibid., 184).
The moral teachings of all these traditions were therefore a complex body of
maxims and rules for developing ones character, and if one were looking for a
general idea standing for moral duty in the ancient world, the symbol of the
way would be the best example. It occurs in Greek thought as far back as He-
siod who wrote:
Evil doing in plenty a man shall find for the seeking.
Smooth is the way, and it lies near at hand and is easy to enter.
But on the pathway of virtue the Gods put sweat
From the first step. (Hesiod Works and Days 287sq).
The concept of ethics in the ancient world 357

In the Old Testament The way of the Lord occurs frequently, eg. Thou
shalt keep the commandments of the Lord, to walk in his ways (Dt. 8.6.). Lead
me, O Lord, in thy righteousness because of thine enemies; make thy ways
straight before my face (Ps.5.8.). And Jesus said I am the way, the truth, and
the life (John 14.6.). The early Christians were also referred to as followers of
the way (Acts 9.2, 19.9, 23). References to the way are innumerable in Bud-
dhism; its main precepts are referred to as the Noble Eightfold Way, and Bud-
dhism is the Middle Way between the extremes of asceticism and sensuality. In
the Gita we read: These are the two paths that are forever: the path of light and
the path of darkness. The one leads to the land of never returning [Nirvana]:
the other returns to sorrow (Bhagavadgita 8.26). In Islam Shariah is an Arabic
term used to designate Islamic Law. It originally referred to a path trodden by
camels to a water source, and the commonly used Arabic phrase al shariah al
islamiyah may be translated as the Islamic way (Mayer 1987: 431). For
Mencius i, righteousness is mans straight path (Munro 1969: 75) and while
the concept of Tao, way or road, was extended to embrace the order of soci-
ety and of the cosmos, it emphatically also embraces the inner moral life of
the living individual (Schwartz 1985: 100). Confucianism, like Buddhism, is
also referred to as the Middle Way between extremes in general, and between
Yangism and Mohism in particular.
8. The concept of ethics in the ancient world
Finally, how far do we find that there was an attempt to give an explicit justifi-
cation for the processes of ethical reasoning themselves, so that it could be
claimed that what is right can be known by our reason? If we call this ethical
objectivism, Hourani has pointed out that ethical subjectivism, the doctrine
that right means whatever is approved or commanded by someone or other,
can be supported not only by hedonistic individualism but by the theological
doctrine that right is whatever God commands. Thus in the case of the Greeks
it was the debate of Socrates and Plato with the Sophists about the objective or
subjective status of moral judgements that led to an objective ethics based on a
definition of ethical terms, a theory of Forms, and a corresponding theory of
knowledge (Hourani 1971: 146).
The problem of justifying an objective ethics was also faced by Muslim
theologians and philosophers in their discussion of the relation between reason
and revelation. Rationality makes two rather different appearances in Islamic
ethics. The first is in relation to human faculties and the nature of the soul.
From at least the time of Muhammad reason was opposed to the passions, and
Fakhry quotes a Tradition of the Prophet: A man is praised in the presence of
the Prophet, who asks: But how is his reason? He is told about his piety, and
his many good deeds but continues to ask about his reason, concluding: The
stupid worshipper causes more harm through his ignorance than the profligate
through his profligacy. Verily, people come closer to their Lord through their
reason (Fakhry 1991: n.7).
It was common ground that reason is what distinguishes man from the ani-
mals, and is his noblest faculty, by which he is able to comprehend Divine
358 Transcendence
revelation. So al-Isfahani (d. ca. 1108) said that Just as it is impossible that a
dead man should hear unless God has created life, hearing, and sight in him, it
is equally impossible that he who does not apprehend the objects of reason
should apprehend the truths of revelation, and Without revelation, reason
will not be guided, and without reason, revelation cannot be made explicit
(quoted in Fakhry 1991: 18081).
But the second manifestation of rationality is in connection with the relative
authority of reason and revelation in ethical matters, a debate which became
entangled with the sovereignty of God. Within the Islamic tradition a rational-
istic and objectivist system of ethics in this sense was developed by the
Mutazilites, who flourished during the 9
th
11
th
centuries under the Abbasid
caliphate and the Buwayhids, in a period of great intellectual development and
when debate between Islam and other religions was at it height. Most of the
Mutazilites were Iraqis or Persians, and many were converts to Islam or sons
of converts (Hourani 1985: 74). We have already noted that in such a context of
religious debate the appeal to reason is needed if any genuine dialogue is to
take place at all. Like Aquinas, they postulated that revelation supplies us with
knowledge of how we should act that we could not have attained by reason
alone such as the value of prayer but that reason can tell us a good deal
about right and wrong independently of revelation, which is why unbelievers
can still make sound moral judgements on many issues. But unlike Aquinas,
the Mutazilites were in fact what we would now call intuitionists.
Like Plato and Socrates, modern Western moral philosophers, and the Chi-
nese Mohists, they were centrally concerned with the definition of ethical
terms, such as wrong, evil and obligation, and were able to make some
powerful arguments against those theologians who argued that the revealed
commandments of God were the only source of moral obligation. For example,
they pointed out that if this were so, then lying and other wrongdoing would
become good if commanded by God. But the weakness of the Mutazilite posi-
tion was its intuitionism: To [the critics], all claims to know ethical principles
by reason were mere fancies, inspired by whims, and it was no easier for
Mutazilite theologians to justify their claims than it has been for modern intu-
itionists (Hourani 1971: 31). The critics argued, for example, that if reason
could give us certain insights into ethical truths then we would find a universal
consensus about them, as there is to the truths of mathematics, but we know
that in reality there is much disagreement the bedouin of the desert, for ex-
ample, approve of robbery and plunder, whereas sedentary peoples disap-
prove of these.
But the Mutazilites also held that God as well as man is bound by objective
moral obligations, and this was rejected by the majority of theologians as dero-
gating from Divine sovereignty and omnipotence. For this reason in particular,
as well as the general weakness of intuitionism, the Mutazilite approach to
ethics was rejected in the mainstream of Islam until a revival of interest in
modern times.
One might have expected a similar interest in philosophy when Judaism en-
countered Greek philosophy in the Hellenistic age but this did not occur, at
least among the rabbinate, for religious reasons:

The Talmud knows nothing of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (fl. first century
CE) or any other Hellenistic Jewish philosophers. Certain that they pos-
sessed Gods revelation the rabbis spurned formal Greek philosophy which
they associated with idolatry. In the ninth century CE, Jews encountered
Muslim philosophy, which claimed that it taught the purest monotheism be-
cause its doctrine of God had been refined through rational argument. For
the next seven centuries that is, as long as cultural involvement with the
Muslims persisted a tiny Jewish intellectual aristocracy created Jewish phi-
losophy. (Borowitz 1987: 139)
The problem of an objective ethics arose in China as the result of reflection
on human nature as the source of moral guidance. The later Mohists are ex-
tremely significant to us because they provide an independent example of an
objectivist system of ethics which is based entirely upon the nature of man and
society and not upon any metaphysical pre-suppositions. In most early Chi-
nese thought (Confucianism, early Mohism, Taoism, even Legalism) ethics is
rooted in metaphysics and in the idea of a Heaven which man should obey or a
Way with which he should accord (Graham 1978: 59). But by the fourth cen-
tury BC the gap between the spontaneous order of Heaven and the contrived
order of human society (ibid., 244) was perceived with greater clarity, and the
Yangists had argued that following the dictates of human nature was a justifi-
cation for egoism, so it seemed that morality was in conflict with human na-
ture, or, that the wicked could claim that they were acting in accordance with
the will of Heaven. The Mohists reacted to this problem by deriving a rational-
ized ethic from the actual desires and dislikes of men, putting aside the prob-
lem of its relation to the will of Heaven (ibid., 59).
In Mohist ethics the two basic concepts are desire and dislike, which are
used to define benefit and harm. We must then, in making moral decisions,
apply the notions of benefit and harm in a consistent manner: Deciding how to
act requires consistent procedures, and in justifying the chosen course we ap-
peal to what actions are for, on behalf of, and one chooses this course rather
than that for the sake of oneself, of others, of ones family, of the world (ibid.,
45). In such a system it is clearly legitimate to act at times for ones own inter-
ests, but nevertheless the principle behind the procedure of choice seems,
although this is not directly stated in the surviving fragments, to be the sacri-
fice of the part for the whole, the finger for the arm, the arm to save ones life,
the man for the sake of the world (ibid., 45). So the dependence of the individ-
ual on society is recognized, and it is assumed that there is no principled basis
for preferring ones own interests above those of others.
This brings us to the much misunderstood idea of ai-jen, love of man, in
Mohist ethics. Ai, however, does not mean liking or affection in an emotional
sense, any more than the Christian agape can properly be translated as affec-
tion:
Love of man (ai-jen) is the love of persons for their own sake. It is most
clearly exhibited, on the one hand, in self-love, on the other in the love of
Tsang and Huo (Jack and Jill), the stock examples of persons too humble to
be loved for themselves alone. Love of self and of others is strictly parallel; I
do not love others if I benefit them solely for my sake, for example, for the
360 Transcendence
sake of praise or blame (and love of ones self is not for the sake of mak-
ing use of ones self). (Ibid., 48)
But this doctrine of love is not indiscriminate and in applying it
the first question is whether we are benefiting the person whom it is our
duty to benefit. The benefit of society as a whole depends on each person
performing the duties which are his portion (fen); these require him to give
special care to certain categories of persons, creditors, rulers, the aged, his
elders, his kin. In benefiting persons we must therefore arrange according to
grade Doing more for those with whom duty requires more, less for
those whom duty requires less, is what is meant by arranging according to
grade. (Ibid., 46)
This is an effective reply to the Confucian objection, specifically by Mencius,
who claimed that the doctrine of ai-jen would confound all social distinctions.
Whether Mencius misunderstood the Mohist position or deliberately misrepre-
sented it does not concern us here, but it seems clear that the Mohists had suc-
ceeded in developing a theory of ethics which transcended status entirely yet
provided for the necessary performance of ones duties in an organized society.
A remarkable innovation of the later Mohist ethic is that it conceives morality
in terms, not of fixed social relationships between father and son, ruler and
subject, but of individuals benefiting themselves, each other, and the world
(ibid., 51). Intention was extremely important in Mohist ethics, and despite the
statement that to be righteous is to benefit, results are not the only thing that
counts. The Mohists distinguished between chih, interest and kung, achieve-
ment. A man is judged not by his achievements, nor by the mere desire to
benefit (which would be benevolence), but by whether he has both the intent
and the ability no external conditions can make me more beneficial (ibid.,
50). The good itself is not apparently defined in the extant Mohist fragments,
but oddly enough however Mencius has a definition which fits perfectly into
the Mohist system. The desirable is what is meant by the good. He may
even have taken it from the Mohists, much as he detested them (ibid., 5051). It
should be noted, however, that while this ethical theory was an important rival
to Confucianism (Mencius stated that the words of Yang Chu and Mo Ti fill
the world (3.B.9), the Mohists as a philosophical school disappeared after the
First Emperor abolished all systems of philosophy except Legalism in 210 B.C..
The Mohists probably lasted until c.100 B.C., when Confucianism began to be
the state orthodoxy (Bodde, personal communication).
Specific terms to denote the ethical were only developed in Greece, Rome,
and Islam in the context of philosophy, and even here were much more closely
linked to the study of character than to general issues of right and wrong, or of
how society should be organized. When Aristotle introduced the term ta thika,
he and his contemporary Greeks had in mind, essentially, matters concerning
character, from thos, custom, habit, disposition or character. A similar range
of meanings attached to Latin mos, custom or usage which in the plural, mo-
res, could mean the customs of a group or the habitual conduct of an individ-
ual, and hence character. Thus the Greek ethics was explicitly introduced
into Latin as morals by the translation of Cicero, who wrote because it re-
lates to character [mores], called in Greek thos, which we usually term that part

of philosophy the study of character, but the suitable course is to add to the
Latin language by giving this subject the name of moral sciences [moralem]
(De Fato, 1). (The MS of De Fato begins in the middle of a sentence, as quoted
here.)
The philosophical concept of ethics also appeared in Islamic philosophy.
Islamic ethics took shape only gradually and the tradition of the different
elements of which it is composed and was not finally established before the
5th/11th century. Unlike the Greek world, in which popular ethics were re-
fined and reshaped by philosophical reasoning without any break between
them, and with no perceptible influence of any foreign doctrine, so that
eventually philosophy came to express the moral values by which the lives
of the educated classes were governed, in Islam ethics appear in their ma-
tured state as an interesting and, on the whole, successful amalgamation of a
pre-Islamic Arabian tradition and Quranic teaching with non-Arabic ele-
ments, mainly of Persian and Greek origin, embedded in or integrated with
a general Islamic structure. (Walzer and Gibb 1960: 325)
The term adab, habit, a hereditary norm of conduct, custom (Gabrieli 1960:
175), which also had a definitely ethical connotation (Walzer and Gibb 1960:
326), gave place with the development of a philosophical ethics to the term
akhlak, plural of khuluk, innate disposition, which thus has the same basic
meaning as ta thika and mores. Adab later acquired the meaning of the sum of
knowledge which makes a man courteous and urbane (Gabrieli 1960: 175).
There is, however, no word in the Old Testament which can be translated as
ethics, nor are there any other explicit concepts of moral philosophy.
In contrast to philosophical ethics, which tend to be more anthropocentric
and abstract, Old Testament morality was never considered apart from the
religion or theology with which it was connected. Without using the words
duty, supreme good, virtue, motive, or end, the Old Testament pre-
sents each of these topics, and more, in concrete terms and examples No-
where does the Old Testament pause to demonstrate that man has a moral
nature; instead, it everywhere assumes this to be the case as much as it as-
sumes the reality of theism. (Kaiser 1983: 4)
In India, while dharma is a concept with strong ethical implications, we dis-
tort its meaning by trying to equate it with ethics in the Western sense. Tradi-
tionally ethics as a discipline has been absent from Hindu thought (Creel 1972:
160, and see also Raju 1954: 2067 n. 19). The element of justification of what is
right by reference to ultimates is absent because in the Hindu tradition the co-
gency of the prescripts in dharma did not rest on such a foundation (Creel 1972:
167).
The Chinese term for ethics is lun-li hseh, study [hseh] of the principles
[li] of (human) relationships [lun], but this is a modern translation of the West-
ern concept, to which there was no real equivalent in pre-modern Chinese
(Bodde, personal communication). It should also be noted that Chinese was
relatively poor in resources for expressing abstractions and general classes or
qualities. Such a notion as Truth tended to develop into something that is
true. Man tended to be understood as the people general but not ab-
stract (Wright 1953: 287, quoted in Bodde 1991: 30). It would obviously be su-
362 Transcendence
perficial, however, to conclude that only where there is an explicit term for
ethics can there be transcendent moral thought.
9. The Hedonists
We now come to an important tradition in the ancient world which would
have none of all this high-minded idealism that we have been discussing so far.
I shall refer to these thinkers as the hedonists, and our analysis of ancient eth-
ics would be distorted and incomplete if we did not acknowledge the existence
of this important tradition in Greece, India, and China. The term hedonists
seems preferable to materialists since the Stoics can be said to have been ma-
terialists; while the term atheists is also unsatisfactory as a designation for the
hedonists because Buddhists, too, rejected theism. Hedonism has a very close
relation to the doctrine that the senses give us the most, or the only reliable in-
formation about the world, and it is this emphasis on the senses, on the indi-
vidual as a physical being, and therefore on pleasure as the supreme good
which is the common and most important element in these philosophies. The
Epicurean theory, based on the teachings of Epicurus of Samos (341270 BC)
will be familiar to many readers and was very influential in the Graeco-Roman
world. It is less well known that a very similar theory was advocated in India
by the Lokayatas or Carvakas, and in China by the followers of Yang Chu.
Graham (1985: 73) dates Yang Chu to approximately 350 BC, and while there
was no single founder of the Lokayata school (setting aside the dubious figure
of Brhaspati), there seems to have been a book, the Lokayata-shastra which Das-
gupta (1940: 516) suggests was written between 300 150 BC.
We find a number of common assumptions in all these theories: primary
importance is ascribed to the individual as a physical being; the senses give the
most reliable information about the world, and pleasure is the only important
aim in life; there is no evidence for the existence of the soul, which either does
not exist at all or, like consciousness, is produced from the material elements of
the body and does not survive death. There is no inherent order in the cosmos,
which is produced by the fortuitous combinations of matter, and therefore no
purpose or general scheme of things. (The Epicureans supposed that gods ex-
isted, but that they were powerless and indifferent to man.) All these schools
seem to have been quite indifferent to society and the general good, and to
have advocated withdrawal and pursuit of private satisfactions. It is hardly
surprising that these doctrines were considered shocking and outrageous by
many of their contemporaries, and we must be aware that because much of
what has survived of hedonist theories is in the writings of their opponents, it
is hard to obtain an unbiased assessment of what they actually said. Neverthe-
less, there is an inner coherence of hedonist theory which it is implausible to
attribute solely to hostile commentary; and the similarities between the ideas of
the Lokayatas, the Yangists, and the Epicureans suggest that their adherents
were responding to certain universal features of the human condition. It is not
therefore in the least surprising that the hedonist theories should have devel-
oped independently in Greece, India, and China. They also have a familiar ring
to the ears of modern Westerners, and Hume in particular was strongly influ-
The Hedonists 363

enced by Epicurean theory. Ancient civilizations were not cultural monoliths,
whose members were unable to escape from the unconscious bonds of their
culture, but philosophically very diverse, and hedonist theory is a good exam-
ple of this variability.
a. The Epicureans
Epicurus was a follower of the atomistic teaching of Democritus, and believed
that all that there is consists of atoms and the void.
1

If all events and all substances are ultimately explicable by reference to
atoms necessarily moving in empty space, both divine causation as popu-
larly conceived and its sophisticated equivalents Platos Forms and Demi-
urge or World-Soul, Aristotles Prime Mover and Heavenly Intelligences
become superfluous. Epicurus held that beliefs in divine management of the
cosmos and of human destiny were a major cause of human failure to live a
tranquil life (Long 1986: 20).
Epicurus, of course, could not prove the existence of atoms, but atomism
does serve the more general philosophical purpose of undermining the possi-
bility of a cosmic order and of teleology in general.
Things are not good for anything, he argued; this is merely a piece of
learned superstition. There is no purpose which the world as a whole or
things in particular are designed to fulfil. For design is not a feature of the
world; it is manifestly imperfect. Given the fact that the numbers of atoms is
infinite and that their shapes are immensely various, it is not remarkable
that similar combinations of things arise (ibid., 40).
This attack on religion was motivated by his belief that fears of destiny and
of divine judgement after death were an important source of unhappiness, and
that mankind would be the happier if such beliefs were destroyed. Epicurus
believed that the soul, psyche, exists but that it is composed, like the body, of
atoms, albeit very fine ones, and that it is the primary cause of sensation. Like
the body, it disintegrates at death which is the end of all conscious existence.
The senses, for Epicurus, provide us with our knowledge of the external world,
and he held a theory of extreme realism, namely that our sense impressions are
caused by similar properties in objects.
It is interesting that, like the Indian hedonists, he was not interested in logi-
cal inference as a means of discovering anything significant about the world.
Epicurus recognized the distinction between universal and particular; but he
did not regard universals as having existence in their own right, like Plato; nor,
apparently, was he interested, as Aristotle had been, in classifying things under
genera and species. He did not set up principles such as Platos same and differ-
ent, or Aristotles substrate and form, for the analysis of objects and their proper-
ties (ibid., 20). This seemed to him mere playing with words, and of no practi-

1
The Epicureans were no doubt also influenced by the Sophists. Guthrie (1969: 47) re-
fers to the extreme phenomenalism, relativism, and subjectivism in Sophist epistemol-
ogy, and says that in general the resemblances between the Enlightenment and the age
of the Sophists are certainly many and striking (ibid., 48 n.2).
364 Transcendence
cal value: The value of words is to express those concepts which are clearly
derived from sensation and feelings. These latter give us our only hold on facts
and the only foundation for language (ibid., 20). It is therefore not surprising
that he considered pleasure to be the primary good: We say that pleasure is
the starting-point and the end of living blissfully. For he recognized pleasure as
a good which is primary and innate. We begin every act of choice and avoid-
ance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience of
pleasure as the criterion of every good thing (Ep. Men. 1289, cited in Long
1986: 62). Consistently with this view, the traditional virtues of justice, temper-
ance, wisdom, and courage are only valuable because they lead to pleasure, not
because they are good for man in themselves, as an essential part of being hu-
man. Epicurus did not regard man as inherently a social being, but on the con-
trary as having no natural leanings towards community life (ibid., 70). The
Epicurean theory is summed up in a few words by Lactantius: There is no
such thing as human society; each individual looks out for himself. There is no
one who feels affection for another, except for his own benefit (ibid., 147). It is
very interesting that Epicurus gives an explicit view of the social contract as a
truce between egoists: Natural justice is a pledge of expediency with a view to
men not harming one another and not being harmed by one another (K.D.
xxxi, cited in Long 1986: 69). Justice, as [Epicurus] conceives of it does imply
recognition of the interests of others besides oneself. But the basis of this rec-
ognition is self-interest. The compact of which he speaks has self-protection as
its basis. It is an agreement to refrain from injuring others if they will refrain
from injuring oneself (ibid., 71).
1
As Long says, this is essentially the same as
Glaucons definition of justice in the Republic, to which we may usefully refer
here. Glaucon expresses the egoists view of society in the following terms:
By nature, they say, to commit injustice is a good and to suffer it is an evil,
but that the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the excess of
good in doing wrong, so that when men do wrong and are wronged by an-
other and taste of both, those who lack the power to avoid the one and take
the other determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one an-
other neither to commit nor to suffer injustice, and that this is the beginning
of legislation and covenants between men, and that they name the com-
mandment of the law the lawful and the just, and that this is the genesis and
essential nature of justice a compromise between the best, which is to do
wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to be wronged and be impo-
tent to get ones revenge (Republic: 359 a-b)
A rather similar theory is also provided by the Epicurean Lucretius in De Re-
rum Natura (Book V, lines 11361150).
Epicurus was famous for his advocacy of friendship, and his followers, who
had no political ambitions or desire to serve their society, formed associations
of friends, and Epicurus himself seems to have been a humane and kindly man.

1
This is not, of course, the only possible form of social contract theory. Socrates, for ex-
ample, expresses a very different one. On ideas of the social contract in ancient Greece
see Guthrie 1969: 135547.
The Hedonists 365

But even here no genuine altruism is involved. Friendship is good because of
the pleasure which having friends provides for us. To be sure, he says that It is
more pleasant to confer a benefit than to receive it, but this still makes ones
own pleasure the essential aim of having friends, not any altruistic identifica-
tion with them.
b. The Lokayatas
It is likely that the Lokayata school (which Thapar 1975: 125 says was closely
associated with the towns) was the result of a number of trends in early Indian
philosophy. In one work, Lokayata is referred to as vitanda a type of purely
negative, sophistical destruction of other theories with no positive contribution
of its own (Dasgupta 1940: 152), and it was also, like Buddhism and Jainism, in
the nastika tradition of denying the authority of the Vedas (ibid., 157). It also
became associated with materialism and the denial of the after-life of the soul,
and with the hedonist theory of human conduct. The word Lokayata is trans-
lated by Dasgupta as That which is found among people in general (1932a:
78), from loka, world, and according to Radhakrishnan (1929: 279) lokayata is
the Sanskrit for materialism. Carvaka, another name for the same school, ac-
cording to Dasgupta is derived from carv, to eat: They were called Carvaka
because they would only eat but would not accept any other religious or moral
responsibility (Dasgupta 1932a: 79). (On the Lokayatas see also H.P. Shastri
1925, and M.H. Shastri 1982.) We might perhaps render the various connota-
tions of these names as vulgar, worldlings, materialists, and gluttons.
Here again, the emphasis is upon the individual as a physical organism.
The substance of this doctrine is summed up by a character in the allegorical
play of Prabodhacandrodaya: Lokayata is always the only sastra [science]: In it
only perceptual evidence is authority; the elements are earth, water, fire and
air; wealth and enjoyment are the objects of human existence. Matter can think.
There is no other world. Death is the end of all (Radhakrishnan 1929: 278). By
matter can think is meant the doctrine that human consciousness and reason
are the product of the four material elements in the human body, as alcohol is
the result of fermentation, or the red colour of saliva is produced by the combi-
nation of betel, areca nut, and lime. The soul, however, can only exist in rela-
tion to the body, and disappears at death. Because the four elements are all that
exist, there are no gods and no reincarnation, and so no fruit of good or evil
deeds, and therefore no law of karma. It is on account of diverse kinds of ar-
rangements and rearrangements of the atoms of air, water, fire and earth that
consciousness is either produced or manifested and the bodies and senses are
formed or produced. There is nothing else but these atomic arrangements, and
there is no further separate category (Dasgupta 1940: 539).
The senses are our only valid source of knowledge in the world, and the
Lokayatas denied the validity of inductive inference. Large numbers of cases
all differ in particulars, and from the fact that we have found many conjunc-
tions of events in the past it does not follow that this will be so in the future.
There is, for example, no necessary connection between smoke and fire. They
also argue that (1) impressions made by inferential knowledge are dim and not
so vivid as those produced by perception; (2) inference has to depend on other
366 Transcendence
things for the determination of its object; (3) inference has to depend on percep-
tion; (4) inferential cognitions are not directly produced by the objects; (5) in-
ference is not concrete; (6) it is often found contradicted (Dasgupta 1940: 537).
They thus deny that we have any knowledge of order in the universe, whose
workings are essentially fortuitous (Stcherbatsky 1970 (I): 15). As a conse-
quence of the view taken by him of knowledge, the Carvaka cannot speak of
any order or system in the world. He no doubt admits perception as a means of
valid knowledge, but that gives rise only to a piecemeal knowledge of things
without connecting them by means of any necessary relations (Hiriyanna 1932:
191).
Pleasure, therefore, is the sole aim of man and the theory is entirely indi-
vidualistic; social structure seems to be regarded as purely conventional.
There is no need to control passion and instinct, since they are natures leg-
acy to men. While the Upanishads prescribe resignation and severity of life
and development of universal benevolence and love, the materialists pro-
claim the doctrine of uncontrolled energy, self-assertion and reckless disre-
gard of all authority. It is not fair that one man should rule and another
obey, since all men are made of the same stuff. Moral rules are conventions
of men. We forget the essential aim of life, pleasure, when we adopt the
negative methods of fasting and penance to the Buddhist theory that
pleasures are mixed with pain the materialist replies: They conceive that
you ought to throw away the pleasures of life because they are mixed with
pain, but what prudent man will throw away unpeeled rice which encloses
excellent grain because it is covered with the husk?. (Radhakrishnan 1929:
282)
Collective happiness, if it is ever thought of, is regarded as expressible in
terms of individual happiness; and there is no conception of a general good to
which the interests of the individual are to be subordinated (Hiriyanna 1932:
194). It seems clear that the Lokayatas rejected the entire structure of Hindu
society. The Vedas were said to have been written by buffoons and crafty
priests in order to cheat the people. Caste purity was absurd, because of the
universal propensity of mankind to fornication; rites for the dead were a waste
of time, and Sins and virtues have no meaning, they are only the words with
which people are scared to behave in a particular manner advantageous to the
priests (Dasgupta 1940: 550).
While one tends to think of hedonists as too amiable, or as too stupefied by
their excesses, to be a danger to others, nevertheless greed, love of power, and
cruelty can also be sources of gratification. The Gita in chapter 16 probably re-
fers to the Lokayatas e.g. They say: This world has no truth, no moral founda-
tion, no God. (Bh. 16.8). It goes on to refer not only to pursuit of carnal pleas-
ure, but to their greed and love of power: They strive by unjust means to
amass wealth for their own cravings. I have gained this today, and I shall at-
tain this desire. This wealth is mine, and that also shall be mine. I have slain
that enemy, others also shall I slay. I am a Lord, I enjoy life, and I am success-
ful, powerful and happy. (Bh.16.1214). One can see, therefore, that those
with political power might well consider themselves free to use it for their own
interest, and this could have justified a crude realpolitik: The stick, they
The Hedonists 367

maintained, i.e. the penal code, is the law It is a noticeable fact that mate-
rialism was fostered and studied in India especially in schools of political
thought. Political men, thus having freed their conscience from every moral tie,
preached a business-like Machiavellism in politics (Stcherbatsky 1970 I: 1516).
c. The Yangists
Yang Chu as an historical personage is scarcely more substantial than Brhas-
pati. No writings of Yang Chu are listed in the Han bibliography; perhaps one
should not think of an organized school with a book and a founder but rather
of a movement of various teachers, among whom Yang Chu attracted the most
attention outside but not necessarily within the group. This suspicion has be-
come stronger since, with increasing sensitivity to the varied strands of
thought in composite works, scholars have begun to identify a Yangist litera-
ture of the late third century BC. This literature gives firm substance to a phi-
losophy long known only by its slogans and makes it possible to discuss seri-
ously the degree to which the doctrine fits Western conceptions of egoism or
individualism. (Graham 1985: 75).
The moral teachings of Yang Chu were, especially for the Confucians, the
polar antithesis of those of Mo Tzu, and the most celebrated reference to Yang
Chu is by Mencius: Yang Chu was in favour of every one for himself (wei
wo); if he could have benefited the world by plucking out one hair of his body
he would not have done it. Mo Tzu loved everybody; if he could have bene-
fited the world by wearing himself smooth from the crown to the heels he
would have done it (Mencius 7.A.26. Transl. Graham 1985: 73).
There is a long account of a dialogue between Yang Chu and the Mohist
Chin Ku-li preserved in the Lieh Tzu which Graham considers genuine, and
that elaborates on this theme.
Yang Tzu [or Chu] said: Po-cheng-tsi-kao [a Taoist of the time of Yao] would
not part with a hair from his body for the benefit of others. He quitted his
country and became a ploughman. The great Yu [controller of the great
flood, who forgot his own wants] did not profit by his own body which
grew quite emaciated. If the ancients by injuring a single hair could have
rendered a service to the world, they would not have done it; and had the
universe been offered to a single person, he would not have accepted it. As
nobody would damage even a hair, and nobody would do a favour to the
world, the world was in a perfect state. Chin-Tse asked Yang Tzu: If by
pulling out a hair of your body you would aid mankind, would you do it?
Yang Tzu answered: Mankind is surely not helped by a single hair. Chin-
Tse said: But supposing it is possible, would you do it? Yang Tzu gave no
answer. Thereupon Chin-Tse told Meng-sun-Yang, who replied: I will ex-
plain the Masters meaning. Suppose, for tearing off a piece of your skin you
were offered ten thousand gold pieces, would you do it? Chin-Tse said: I
would. Meng-sun-Yang again asked: Suppose, for cutting off one of your
limbs you were to get a kingdom, would you do it? Chin-Tse was silent.
See now, said Meng-sun-Yang A hair is unimportant compared with the
skin, and the skin also unimportant compared with a limb. However, many
hairs put together form a skin, and many skins form a limb. Therefore,
368 Transcendence
though a hair is but one among the many molecules composing the body, it
is not to be disregarded. (Forke 1912: 5254)
One of the most striking features of this dialogue is the emphasis which is
placed on the body and physical well-being, and a kingdom is treated as a kind
of physical pleasure, to be weighed against a physical pain. Grahams recon-
struction of the basic principles of Yangist theory brings this out very well.
These were summarized in the Huai-nan-Tzu (c. 130 BC) as keeping ones na-
ture intact (chan hsing), protecting ones genuineness (pao chen), not letting
ones body be tied by other things, these were the doctrines of Yang Tzu, but
Mencius denied them (Graham 1985: 73). From this and further documents,
the slogans ascribed to Yang Chu
assume a clear meaning. To keep ones nature intact is to look after
health and life; mans nature (hsing
a
) is understood as the principle by
which he is born, grows to fulfil his proper physical shape, and lives out his
term. (It is the nature of man to live long; other things disorder him so that
he fails to live long.) The value of life is taken as central, and this has vari-
ous ramifications. Life is preserved by never going beyond the moderate sat-
isfaction of the essential desires, which are those of the eyes, ears and mouth
for the five colours, five sounds, and five tastes; it is absurd to sacrifice it on
some trivial point of pride or honour, as in the anecdotes of crazy suicides
which comprise the second series in Yielding the Throne and are cited with
derision by Robber Chih. It is absurd, too, as we learn from Discourse on
Swords, for a lord to waste the lives of retainers in sword fighting for sport.
Protecting genuineness, as expounded in Old Fisherman, is preserving the
integrity of the emotions, sorrow, anger, and fellow feeling, from being un-
dermined by Confucian ritualism. As for not letting ones body be tied by
other things, since the body is not replaceable but external possessions are,
the latter must be sacrificed for the former. This is the theme of giving
weight to self: Now as a possession of mine my life benefits me supremely.
Grade them as more or less valuable, and not even the throne of the empire
deserves to be compared with it; grade them as more or less important, and
not even the wealth of being possessor of the empire can be taken in ex-
change for it (Graham 1985: 75).
Just as there was an association between the Lokayatas and some Buddhist
ascetics, so it seems likely that there was link between Yangists and Taoists in
early times. The Taoists drew a fundamental distinction between the conven-
tional moral rules established by men and that of nature, and advocated with-
drawal from society. So Graham suggests (1978: 9) that the Taoist Chuang Tzu
began as a Yangist, and while he came to reject the Yangist exclusive concern
with the body in particular, and with the self as such, Taoist rejection of the
world and its disapproval of Confucian attempts to order peoples lives has
some affinity with that of the Yangists. We shall indeed find that what I call
the Yang Tzu motif is part of the vision of both Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu
(Schwartz 1985: 188 and see pp. 19192).
In another part of the Lieh Tzu the following story is told of three brothers,
that illustrates very well the Yangist attitude towards government and social
responsibilities. One brother, Tzu-chan, is minister of Cheng, his elder brother
is Kung-sun Chou and his younger brother is Kung-sun Mu. The elder brother
The Hedonists 369

is a drunkard; he has a thousand barrels of wine in his house, and was so
much under the influence of wine, that he ignored the feeling of remorse, was
unconscious of the safe and dangerous paths of life; what was present or want-
ing in his house, the near degree of relationship and so on (Forke 1912: 4546).
The youngest brother is a lecher: within the house of Kung-sun Mu there was
a compound of about thirty or forty houses, which he filled with damsels of
exquisite beauty. So much was he captivated by their charms, that he neglected
his relatives and friends, broke off all family intercourse, and retiring to his
inner court turned night into day (ibid., 46). Tzu-chan the Minister is outraged,
and remonstrates with his brothers: That in which man is superior to the
beasts and birds are his mental faculties. Through them he gets righteousness
and propriety and so glory and rank fall to his share. You are only moved by
what excites your sense, and indulge only in licentious desires, endangering
your lives and natures (ibid., 47). His brothers reply:
Long ago we knew it and made our choice. Nor had we to wait for your in-
structions to enlighten us. It is very difficult to preserve life, and easy to
come by ones death. Yet who would think of awaiting death, which comes
so easily, on account of the difficulty of preserving life? You value proper
conduct and righteousness in order to excel before others, and you do vio-
lence to your feelings and nature in striving for glory. That to us appears
worse than death. Our only fear is lest, willing to gaze our fill at all the beau-
ties of this one life, and to exhaust all the pleasures of the present years, the
repletion of the belly should prevent us from drinking what our palate de-
lights in, or the slackening of our strength not allow us to revel with pretty
women. (Ibid., 4748)
According to the brothers performing ones social duties is egocentric inter-
ference with others, who will do better by being left alone: Who calls you
wise? Cheng has been governed by chance, and without merit of yours. It is
also against human nature, which is interpreted in thoroughly physical terms.
While they are separated from us by such gulfs of culture, and by so many
centuries, these ancient hedonists are, nonetheless, familiar figures whose theo-
ries have in some ways more appeal to our modern Western culture than those
of their opponents. They close the circle of our inquiry, and aptly demonstrate
that even in the realm of moral ideas there are only a limited number of possi-
bilities.

Conclusions
1

The relativistic notion of morality as an infinitely variable range of customary
attitudes has collapsed under investigation, since it has been possible to dem-
onstrate that there are a limited number of constraints founded on the basic
parameters of human social life: utility, the social order, the qualities of the
moral agent, and human status. It has also been shown that moral understand-
ing increases in three principal respects the articulate grasp of the social or-
der, the disentangling of the individual from his various roles and statuses, and
the awareness of the inner life and self-knowledge. The social factors that cre-
ate the dilemmas that drive this process also occur again and again throughout
history the increase in societal size, the growth and breakdown of ascriptive
social order, money and trade, conquest warfare, and urbanization; and the
growth of political centralization, law and judicial institutions, and education
and debate, to name some of the most important.
By analysing the underlying structure of morality it has been possible to
develop a theoretical scheme which allows us to make valid cross-cultural
comparisons about levels of moral understanding. So, for example, it is not an
adequate justification of a practice such as human sacrifice or head-hunting to
say that it is our custom, or that everybody does it; some deeper appeal must
be made to more general moral principles that go beyond the traditions of par-
ticular societies. Again, people who do not see that intention is an integral as-
pect of responsibility for our actions have failed to understand an important
ethical point. Guilt is more than just being found out; being able to put oneself
in the position of others is a genuinely important rule about how we should
assess our moral obligations to them; these obligations cannot be based solely
on their social status; and there are more compelling justifications for doing
right than being popular with our neighbours. These ways of looking at moral
issues are not just the expressions of our own cultural values; on the contrary,
it can be claimed that they are widely accepted in our culture because enough
people can understand their validity, just as they can understand the reasons
why the world is round and not flat.
The claim that there is a basic structure of moral thought does not mean, of
course, that all customs and cultural values can be assessed against some objec-
tive scale of moral worth. It can now be seen that the notorious variability of
moral ideas is really of two different types: one involves the different cognitive

1
Readers who wish to obtain a general outline of what this book is about would do bet-
ter not to go straight to these conclusions, but to read Chapter I 1, and Chapter IV 1
and 4.
372 Conclusions
levels at which the core moral issues are understood, and the other a quite un-
derstandable variability of cultural values in different social circumstances.
There is obviously no such thing as a perfect society any more than there could
be a perfect person, because cultural values and personal qualities are to some
extent mutually incompatible, and some values or qualities are also more ap-
propriate in certain circumstances than in others. Some differences of moral
opinion are only to be expected, therefore, and there is no clear way of assess-
ing, for example, whether the punctilious etiquette of one society is better or
worse than the relaxed mores of another, or at what point the concern with
personal honour has become excessive, or whether the life of action is superior
to the life of reflection.
I am not suggesting, however, that moral issues can be neatly divided into
an objective core and a completely relativistic periphery. Circumstances do al-
ter cases, but there are still grounds for challenging such institutions as slavery,
the footbinding of women or, for that matter, abortion, on the basis of justice
and benevolence for example, and these and other general moral considera-
tions are certainly relevant when we consider particular customs or cultural
values, although due to differences of circumstances it may often be hard to
reach a definite conclusion.
But moral systems are about more than the strictly ethical ideas I have been
examining in this book,
1
since they also involve beliefs about the nature of the
cosmos and Man. Here the human imagination has always played a fundamen-
tal part in our representation of the moral, and continues to do so in modern
Western culture. While we have certainly learnt a great deal more about how
society works in the last two hundred years, our views about how we should
order our lives have also been greatly influenced by our ideological beliefs
about how the world is, about human nature, progress, reason, liberty, and so
on, so that Post-Conventional moral thinking, however admirable from the
purely intellectual point of view, cannot by itself show us how we should live.
On the one hand, modern Western liberal ethical theory conforms perfectly
to the criteria of formal operational thinking. Society is represented in thor-
oughly abstract terms and different social models are evaluated; the individual
is contemplated quite independently from his roles and statuses; obligation is

1
I have also deliberately ignored the vital issue of motivation, and of why people
should actually care about one another and trying to behave well. It is notorious, as I
pointed out on the first page of this book, that high civilization is quite compatible with
atrocious cruelty, and that well educated and intelligent people may also be utterly im-
moral. The fact that Nero had been thoroughly instructed in Stoic principles by Seneca
did not make him a good Emperor, although King Finow of Tonga, who was basically a
kindly man, might well have benefited from Senecas instruction. Just because someone
has read Aristotle or can understand the Categorical Imperative does not mean that he
will necessarily be a good person, but the reasons for this discrepancy between what
people are able to understand about moral issues and what they care or do about them
must draw upon a wide range of social factors, such as the corrupting effects of power
and wealth, and of psychological dispositions that are quite outside the specific aims of
this book.
Conclusions 373

discussed in purely ethical terms; and law and custom are clearly distin-
guished from morality; while the self and the inner moral and mental life of the
individual are analysed in a depth and detail never before attained. This level
of moral understanding has been produced by the same sorts of dilemmas that
we have seen associated throughout history with commerce and market forces,
urbanization, conquest warfare and multi-ethnic societies, and opportunities
for philosophical debate. On the other hand, these developments in the society
and culture of the modern Western world have been deeply entwined with
various special features of political organization and ideology, and with certain
beliefs about Man and the cosmos so that, for the first time in a literate civiliza-
tion the Epicureans, as it were, have the upper hand of the Stoics.
The growth of the forces of the market, together with technology, has enor-
mously increased the scope of individualism, in the sense in which we defined
this in Chapter II, and of the satisfaction of human desires. The unprecedented
growth of the natural sciences has been closely involved in the rejection not
only of teleology but of the whole idea of the universe and human existence as
having any meaning or purpose, and the main emphasis of science has been
not only anti-teleological but also atomistic and reductionist. In combination
with an equally unprecedented growth of technology, the idea has also been
fostered that Man can master Nature and become independent of it, and by
consciously planning his own society on rational, scientific lines, can rise supe-
rior to the forces of history as well as those of Nature. The combination of all
these factors has clearly given much more plausibility to the hedonist view of
life than it had in the ancient world. Finally, as the result of these changes, it
has been possible for governments to intervene in the lives of citizens to a de-
gree unparalleled in history, and for citizens to take an active role in large-scale
government to an equally unprecedented degree.
It is here, then, that the resources of a moderate relativism can be deployed
against the claims of the dominant ideology of our culture, because the ques-
tion is therefore raised: have these special features of the modern world ren-
dered the ethical ideas of the ancient world (preserved, of course, into modern
times by religion in particular) obsolete and should Western liberalism there-
fore be a model for mankind or, is it possible that despite our advanced moral
thinking from the cognitive point of view, our understanding of how we
should live has been distorted and confused by these cultural factors and by
our failure properly to assimilate their implications?
The answer to this question cannot be based on any kind of Kohlbergian
tests, because moral and political philosophers and other thinkers of very dif-
ferent persuasions would all score highly, but rather on the sorts of considera-
tions that were discussed in Chapter II, on the nature of man and society. If the
conclusions reached there were correct, then there are a number of ways in
which modern Western ideas about how we should live which are serious dis-
tortions of the truth.
When the old sacred hierarchical order was being challenged in Europe and
the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one competing
model was that of the republic of the Graeco-Roman type, in which all citizens
were equal before the law and where patriotism and civic virtue took the place
374 Conclusions
of submission to traditionally ordained superiors in the feudal manner. While
the republican model was well suited to the small towns of the American
states, it was always vulnerable, as in the ancient world, to growing social size,
economic complexity, and bureaucratic centralization. Nevertheless, the idea of
the rule of law and the obligation of rulers to conform to agreed norms in deal-
ing with their subjects, which it emphasized (although it certainly did not in-
vent), has been a particularly valuable aspect of this model that has general
validity for all modern societies whatever their cultural tradition. While it was
universally accepted in the ancient world that government existed for the bene-
fit of the people, there were no effective social institutions to restrain rulers
from arbitrary and tyrannical conduct, and it can be said that the rule of law as
this has developed in modern Western societies is a contribution to civilization
of the very first importance.
Practical experience also shows that some form of representative govern-
ment by which citizens are involved in the choice of their legislators, where
this is administratively feasible, is a valuable restraining influence that gives
effect to the rule of law, but this justification needs no support from imaginary
notions of the will of the people or a social contract. The rule of law and rep-
resentative government also have no necessary connection with the doctrine of
the rights of man, although historically such an association was very important
in the French and American versions of republicanism. As I pointed out in
Chapter II, there is no objective basis for concluding that egalitarian organiza-
tion is inherently better or worse than hierarchical organization, and it can le-
gitimately be argued that the egalitarian model is simply more appropriate in
the conditions of modern states.
But the republican model, emphasizing liberty, equality, and civic responsi-
bility, has been faced with two different and more powerful models the mar-
ket and the centralized, rationalized bureaucratic state. The market is egalitar-
ian in relation to hierarchies of birth, to be sure, but inequality of wealth is one
of its inherent features, and utilitarianism and hedonism are, apart from com-
petition, its most prominent values. In conjunction with industrial production a
modern economy requires a high level of demand for goods and services, so
that material consumption almost becomes a kind of social duty:
In a rational world things would be made because they were wanted; in the
actual world, wants have to be created in order that people may receive
money for making the things. This is why the distrust or contempt of trade
which we find in earlier societies should not be too hastily set down as mere
snobbery. The more important trade is, the more people are condemned to
and, worse still, learn to prefer what we have called the second kind of job
[whose sole value lies in the money it brings] (Lewis 1969: 115).
Industrial capitalism also greatly augments urbanization yet at the same
time weakens community life by the high division of labour and by accelerat-
ing the geographical mobility of labour. Money itself then becomes the main
link between the atomistic mass of individuals: When all the members of a
community are independent of or indifferent to each other, the co-operation of
each can then be obtained only by paying for it; this infinitely multiplies the
Conclusions 375

purposes to which wealth may be applied and increases its value (de Toc-
queville [1990 (II)]: 228)
Our experience over the last few centuries has shown us that the market is a
more efficient information system than any centralized bureaucracy for decid-
ing what commodities are needed where, and for calculating their relative cost.
To this extent any modern industrial society will achieve greater material effi-
ciency and prosperity by adopting market mechanisms than by attempting to
achieve these ends by rationalistic schemes of central planning. But this does
not imply that therefore the whole of our society is best organized on market
principles and values. On the contrary, there are good empirical grounds for
thinking that they need to be restrained and regulated by wider criteria of the
common good, and we should remember
the insistence of medieval thinkers that society is a spiritual organism, not
an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate
element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and re-
pressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material
means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-
aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which con-
fines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civiliza-
tion, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are
a permanent element in any sane philosophy. (Tawney 1938: 701)
The market and the republican ideal both favoured individual liberty, and
were also hostile to traditional forms of hierarchy; in the second (but not in the
first) they were joined by rationalism, which sought to think about society in
terms of the very powerful models of the natural sciences and of deductive rea-
soning. Since the Renaissance they have combined with the ancient Platonic
ideal of the perfect society, to produce the convictions
in the first place that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have
one true answer, and one only, all the rest being necessary errors; in the sec-
ond place, that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of
these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must nec-
essarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one
truth cannot be incompatible with another that we knew a priori. This kind
of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. In the case of
morals, we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it
would be on a correct understanding of the rules that govern the universe.
(Berlin 1991: 56)
This rationalistic search for perfection is, as Berlin says, the basis for tyr-
anny because perfection is thought to be knowable, at least to the enlightened
minority, and to be attainable through political action. This will inherently be
revolutionary, because this is the only way of beginning afresh, and redesign-
ing society on wholly new and consistent principles that owe nothing to the
irrational and corrupt past, to tradition.
Seeing so many irregular and bizarre institutions, the offspring of another
age, which no one had attempted to harmonize with each other or to adapt
to new needs, and which seemed bound to perpetuate for ever their exis-
tence [the eighteenth century French philosophers] readily conceived a
376 Conclusions
loathing for things ancient and for tradition, and they were naturally led to
wish to rebuild the society of their age according to a plan entirely new,
which each of them traced by the sole light of his reason. (de Tocqueville
1956: 149)
Unfortunately, while the rationality involved here favoured equality, this
was in the sense of uniformity: they not only hated specified privileges, di-
versity itself was hateful to them, they adored equality even in servitude. Any-
thing that impeded them in their plans was fit only to be broken. Contracts in-
spired them with little respect; for private rights they cared nothing, or rather,
to speak correctly, private rights in their eyes no longer existed, but public util-
ity alone (ibid., 168). This contempt for liberty as well as for tradition in the
service of the rationally organized state at once reminds us of the Legalists, and
Chinese society as it was understood in the eighteenth century was explicitly
referred to as a model of a rationally ordered society. Thus The State, accord-
ing to the Economists, has not merely to command the nation but to fashion it
in a certain mould; it is for it to form the mind of the citizens on a certain pre-
determined model; its duty is to fill the citizens minds with certain ideas and
to furnish their hearts with certain feelings judged to be necessary (ibid., 171).
The aim of this rationalistic despotism in the name of the people was No
grades in society, no classes distinct, no fixed ranks; a people composed of in-
dividuals almost alike and wholly equal, this confused mass recognized as the
only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the means which could
enable it to direct or even to superintend its own government (ibid., 172).
Communism, in particular, was strongly influenced by this conception of soci-
ety, which also endorsed the cult of revolution, the total redesigning of society
after all existing institutions had been swept away in a storm of popular vio-
lence.
The history of the last two hundred years does not support the correctness
of such beliefs, and only demonstrates that no group of human beings can
safely be entrusted with what amount to God-like powers. It would be hard,
for example, to think of a single instance where the abolition of monarchy,
even absolute monarchy, has led anywhere in the world to a more civilized
and humane society and in many cases the resulting societies have actually
become notably more barbaric and ill-governed. The abstract rationalistic belief
that all the offices of state should be open to election is immediately challenged
by these realities of life, which have also shown that the sons of the people,
when elected to office, are often more corrupt and brutal than the aristocrats
and gentry they replaced. There is actually no practical reason why modern
industrial society should not be based on a number of different principles in-
cluding not only personal achievement and the popular vote but also heredi-
tary right, family and institutional traditions, nomination, wealth, co-optation,
and so on, depending on the circumstances of the case.
Our scientific culture has treated the belief in a universe that has human
meaning as a myth, but has replaced it with the myth that by the use of reason
Man can liberate himself from the bonds of nature and from the processes of
history themselves, and in some purely autonomous fashion design for himself
a way of life that owes nothing to anything outside Man. This belief in the sov-
Conclusions 377

ereignty of Man, which is central to all the heirs of the Enlightenment from
communism to liberalism, has also tended to deny that there is any biologically
determined human nature, and Man is regarded as a being whose characteris-
tics are solely the product of social influences, of nurture and not nature. If this
were true it would be an extremely important discovery in the ordering of our
lives, but there are in fact good biological and sociological grounds for regard-
ing this belief as a gross over-simplification of the facts that has led to major
distortions of social policy in education and employment.
Again, while there were many attempts in the ancient world, some more
successful than others, to change society, one has a clear impression that their
efforts were made under a very strong sense of constraint: constraints imposed
by human nature, by the inherent requirements of a well-ordered society, and
by the fact that man and his works were only apart of a vastly larger scheme of
things. Whatever philosophical arguments might be made against the notions
of the logos, the tao, or Divine Providence, we would do well to recognize that,
in practice, this world-view encouraged a more realistic sense of human limita-
tions than modern fantasies about our omnipotence. Nor is it likely that the
view of man as a mere accident in a meaningless universe will inspire any new
and worthwhile civilization, or have the same motivating effect as the world
religions in encouraging respect for human dignity, but here we enter those
realms of the imagination that are the subject of a different book.
In fact, our belief in our capacity to redesign our social existence in accor-
dance with abstract schemes of liberty and equality, unrelated to human nature
and its needs, or to the working of the universe, is built on sand. Even if these
schemes were well thought out, we, in the form of a narrow group of national
and international decision-makers, do not have, and cannot have, from the ra-
tional point of view, sufficient information upon which to base adequately in-
formed plans; nor can we foresee all the effects of our decisions on the existing
situation or upon one another, and so the larger the scope of our plans, the less
predictable the outcome must be. We can, of course, bring about conscious
changes in limited areas of our society, but no accumulation of such piecemeal
social engineering can possibly give us any cumulative control over our des-
tiny. We are, in short, as thoroughly embedded in the processes of history as
our ancestors were, and while technology is certainly a human creation, we
have no control over where it will take us. Communism has been the most am-
bitious attempt ever known to apply scientific planning to human society, and
its catastrophic failure has demonstrated the fallacies of Man the master of his
own destiny with remarkable finality. But is there any reason to suppose that
because communism is false, then liberalism must be true? It might well be
concluded that the Western liberal model of a permissive society based on in-
dividual rights, without regard for the family or for tradition, is collapsing just
as surely as communism.
Autonomy is central to the modern concept of Man not only as the collec-
tive designer of his own destiny, but as the individual chooser of what seems
good in his own eyes.
Mill saw independence as a further dimension of equality; he argued that an
individuals independence is threatened, not simply by a political process
378 Conclusions
that denies him equal voice, but by political decisions that deny him equal
respect. Laws that recognize and protect common interests, like laws against
violence and monopoly, offer no insult to any class or individual; but laws
that constrain one man, on the sole ground that he is incompetent to decide
what is right for himself, are profoundly insulting to him. They make him
intellectually and morally subservient to the conformists who form the ma-
jority, and deny him the independence to which he is entitled. (Dworkin
1977: 263)
But while Mill did say that the only truly free society is one where, as indi-
viduals, we have the absolute and unqualified right to pursue our own good
in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs (Mill
[1954]: 73, 75), in the next breath he restricted this absolute and unqualified
right to human beings in the maturity of their faculties, excluding not only
children and young people, but also barbarians for whom despotism is a
legitimate form of government and, by implication, all those who are inca-
pable of free and rational discussion. It is precisely this issue of competence
that modern theorists such as Dworkin ignore: but while traditional systems of
ethics would certainly not regard conformism and mere majority opinion as
having any necessary moral authority this can only come from a knowledge
of what is truly good they would see no value, either, in mere independence
that was not joined with other excellences of intellect and character. What does
it mean to say that we are entitled to independence of choice in how to live
our lives unless this also entails the obligation to try to make those choices
wisely? And to choose wisely means being prepared at least to listen to the ad-
vice and example of those who have gone before us and may have something
worth telling us. As Constable said of someone who claimed to be a self-taught
artist: Then he had a fool for a teacher. The traditional systems of ethics quite
rightly did not suppose that all are equally capable of deciding well on their
own independent initiative, but that most people do best to follow tradition
and accepted moral authority and religious teaching. These are certainly not
infallible, but they will lead the average person right a good deal more often
than his own unaided efforts.
Though neither the state (nor the neighbourhood watch committee) is quali-
fied to dictate to individuals in such matters as their choices of career, or their
spouses, or their hobbies, why then should it be supposed that ordinary people
are capable of resolving those deeper questions of how we should live that
have challenged the greatest thinkers (or even that they really want to do so),
especially in modern Western society, where the individual is subject to a more
conflicting and bewildering range of choices and cultural influences than at
any time in history? But here the ideologies of the market and of popular sov-
ereignty join forces: the customer is always right, and vox populi vox dei both
underlie and sanctify the authority of popular opinion. The result is that tra-
dition and custom have not been replaced by genuine freedom of thought, in
any real intellectual sense of that word, but by fashion, by conformity not to
the teachings of great masters from the past, but to what is currently preferred
by our peers (who are no more sure of their bearings than we are), and it is
hard to see why this should be considered as an improvement. It used to be
known as the blind leading the blind.
Conclusions 379

If people are told, therefore, that they as individuals are the best judges of
what is in their own interests, it is hardly surprising that, especially in a mate-
rialistic and commercial society, their preferences will be strongly hedonistic,
but there are no more reasons for accepting the validity of hedonism as a true
basis of happiness now than there were in the ancient world.
Looking back on the liberal moral theory of his youth at Cambridge in the
circle of Moore, Russell, and Lytton Strachey, Keynes concluded that it was
flimsily based, as I now think, on an a priori view of what human nature is like,
both other peoples and our own, which was disastrously mistaken (1949: 98).
It was a Utopian view, according to which the human race
consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objec-
tive standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of
convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and
left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and re-
liable intuitions of the good We were not aware that civilisation was a
thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and will of a very few,
and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guile-
fully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints
of custom It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplish-
ment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to
have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect
this order. (Ibid., 99100)
But in some Western societies we have reached the point where the very
idea of a social order in the sense of a dominant traditional culture is de-
nounced as oppressive to minorities, and it is demanded that every sub-culture
should be treated as of equal validity with that of the dominant tradition. This
is very different from toleration as it has always been understood, when a
dominant tradition merely allows minority traditions to exist without persecu-
tion. The experience of interacting with members of different cultures has
clearly been of great importance in the development of moral understanding,
and some degree of cultural heterogeneity has proved to be an essential ele-
ment in every advanced civilization. But it is possible to increase heterogeneity
to the point of sheer chaos, at which the diversity of values and norms threat-
ens to overwhelm the social order itself. All over the world we see multicul-
tural societies tearing themselves apart in frenzies of communal violence, and
the idea that a high level of cultural diversity is good in itself must surely be
one of the most irrational beliefs of our age.
This enthusiasm for multiculturalism is only another manifestation of the
liberal illusion that it is possible for the state to be neutral between different
conceptions of the good, because there are no final authorities on right and
wrong, and merely to act as the guarantor of equal rights for all. While some
areas of life are morally neutral, so that the state can indeed be legislatively
indifferent or act out of pure expediency, other areas are not morally neutral.
So, for example, a foetus is either a human life, and entitled to the same sort of
moral consideration as other lives, or it is not, and since the state must either
allow or forbid abortion, it must therefore adopt a particular moral view on
this issue. Again, do we regard marriage as a necessary social institution, spe-
380 Conclusions
cially concerned with the duty of rearing children to be good people and good
citizens, or is it essentially a relationship for the pleasure of two individuals, to
be terminated when one or other of them has tired of it, and in which children
primarily exist to satisfy their parents needs? The acceptability of divorce, and
the ease with which it can be obtained, will obviously depend on which of
these views we take of marriage and this, again, is a moral decision. The state,
by making divorce so easy, and in many other ways diminishing the status of
marriage, has therefore taken a moral stance on this issue, too. Again, if mar-
riage is simply a relationship for the pleasure of two consenting adults, and
children are a secondary consideration, why need it be restricted to hetero-
sexuals at all? And if homosexuals may marry, why should they not be al-
lowed to adopt children if they feel a need to do so, and so on? The claim that
the state, here and elsewhere, is neutral between differing conceptions of the
good is obviously false, and in reality under this cloak of neutrality a powerful
elite is actively engaged in promoting its own views on how we should live.
One would object to this not because it is illiberal, or even hypocritical and self-
contradictory, but because the views being promoted are mistaken, notably in
their obliviousness to the requirements of social order, and their utter confu-
sion about the necessary relations of the individual to this order.
One essential element of this relation between the social order and the indi-
vidual is that the roles and statuses of that order provide the individual with a
clear social identity, a code in terms of whose requirements and ideals his
character may develop sometimes by identifying himself with it and some-
times by rebelling against it. This form of social identity, however, is seen as
restrictive and divisive, and we are increasingly encouraged to relate to one
another on the basis of our feelings which are seen as more genuine and egali-
tarian. But this actually deprives us of an essential basis of integrity and stabil-
ity in our moral lives, and is a major cause of that crisis of personal identity
which has so frequently been noted in modern society.
Indeed, the social order as traditionally conceived is regarded as inherently
hostile to the interests of individuals, as well as to minorities. The language of
rights, for example, has proliferated like tropical vegetation because it is often
a tactical device by which individuals believe they can extract special conces-
sions from everyone else (regardless of the consequences to social order), and
Western society, not only in North America but now also in Europe, is being
increasingly consumed by litigious mania. To take an example that has been
before the courts in North America: does the requirement that university pro-
fessors must retire at age 65 violate their human rights by discriminating
against them on the basis of age? The obvious reasons for such a retirement
policy are to maintain a balanced age distribution and so ensure that universi-
ties are not staffed by an ageing professoriate, to give young academics a
chance of employment (which would also benefit the students), and to ease the
financial strain on universities by not employing too many older professors at
high salaries. These aims are beneficial to the academic profession as a whole,
to the students, and to the taxpayers and the rest of society, who have a legiti-
mate interest in efficient universities, but all these reasonable justifications are
peremptorily silenced by the appeal to rights. Rights are trumps, as Dworkin
Conclusions 381

has put it, but such assertions of rights are actually rhetorical devices by which
a minority of society try to dramatize themselves as the special victims of dis-
crimination and oppression, rather than as having to make a moderate sacrifice
for the general good. In the overheated atmosphere of rights, sensible debate
over social policy in every sphere of life is in danger of being stifled by simplis-
tic moralising of this type.
Not only does the language of rights subvert the sensible discussion of so-
cial policy, but more generally we have to recognize that civilization itself, in
the sense of high culture, is incompatible with liberalism, because it inherently
involves acceptance of inequality of taste, knowledge, and excellence of every
kind; the priority of order over individual preferences; and the leadership of an
acknowledged elite. To the extent that modern liberal society has a cultural
elite, this is dominated by lawyers, who have replaced the clergy as moral au-
thorities. But many of the issues before the courts, such as abortion, euthanasia,
the rights of homosexuals to spousal benefits, or of women to serve in combat,
are not, strictly speaking, legal issues at all, but moral and political dilemmas.
While politicians are no doubt much relieved to find someone else to take these
embarrassing decisions for them, it is well known that liberal and conservative
judges will come to opposite decisions in the same cases, so that their verdicts
are actually political decisions in another form and the objectivity of this aspect
of our public morality is subverted at its roots.
The confusion surrounding rights is paralleled by that surrounding the
whole theory and justification of punishment: the idea of retribution is de-
plored, and it is claimed that the aim of punishment should be to reform the
criminal, and also to protect society and to deter. It is hard to see how confin-
ing large numbers of criminals together in prisons is likely to make them better
people, so it has become fashionable to release them under parole after a frac-
tion of their sentence has been served, which neither protects society nor de-
ters, and is also quite inconsistent with the belief in prisons as reforming insti-
tutions. Retribution is confused by liberalism with vengeance and therefore
condemned, but of course it is a basic aspect of justice, which is why the great
majority of the people quite reasonably expect some concordance between the
severity of the sentence and the gravity of the crime, which they intuitively
realise is a necessary aspect of social order quite apart from any considerations
of deterrence or reform. (Retribution and the demands of justice are, of course,
the only justifications for prosecuting aged war criminals, who present no dan-
ger to the public and will certainly not be reformed by their punishment, which
will not deter any other potential war criminals either.)
Liberal embarrassment about punishment is understandable, because it is
here that the sovereignty of the individual is most clearly challenged by the
requirements of the general good, and it is very noticeable that the choosing,
willing, autonomous, responsible individual of liberal theory tends to lose all
these attributes as soon as he is accused of a serious crime. At this point all the
resources of psychology and sociology are employed to diminish the responsi-
bility of the criminal as far as possible. So we constantly hear that serial rapes
or murders or other atrocious offences are a cry for help, or else that the of-
fender is simply the product of his society, so that we are all guilty. Not much
382 Conclusions
willingness here for our rugged individual to face the consequences of his
freely chosen acts and accept the appropriate punishment!
It might well be concluded from all this that the liberal Western theory of
how we should live is in many respects unrealistic, confused, and incoherent,
and that its claim to be a model for the rest of the human race is an ethnocentric
illusion. I would suggest that the fallacious analysis of human nature and soci-
ety on which liberalism rests should restrain us from trying to impose our
views on the rest of the world, and that many of the traditional precepts of the
great civilizations, embodied in the major religious and ethical traditions, pro-
vide a challenge that Western liberalism is required to answer.

Bibliography
The following ancient texts are listed here under the translators name:
Analects of Confucius Soothill 1937
Arthashastra Shamasastry 1967
Bhagavadgita Mascaro 1962
Dhammapada Mascaro 1973
Doctrine of the Mean Chan 1963
Lao Tzu Lau 1963
Laws of Manu Doniger and Smith 1991
Mencius Lau 1970
All other ancient texts are listed under the authors name (e.g. Aristotle).

Ackroyd, P. (1968). Exile and restoration: Hebrew Thought in the Sixth Century B.C. London:
SCM Press.
Adelson, J., and ONeil, R.P. (1966). Growth of political ideas in adolescence: the sense
of community, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4. 295306.
Adkins, A.W.H. (1960). Merit and Responsibility. A study in Greek values. Oxford: Claren-
don Press.
Alexander, R.D. (1987). The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Allen, C.K. (1958). Law in the Making. 6th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Andrewes, A. (1965). The growth of the city state, in The Greek World. Ed. H. Lloyd-
Jones, 2665. London: Penguin.
Annas, J. and Barnes, J. (1985). The Modes of Scepticism. Ancient texts and modern interpre-
tations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anshen, R.N. (ed.) (1952). Moral Principles of Action. Mans ethical imperative. New York:
Harper.
Aquinas (1945). Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (2 vols). ed. A.C. Pegis. New
York: Random House.
Aristotle (1984). Complete Works. Revised Oxford Translation. Ed. J. Barnes. Bollingen
Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Arkoun, M. (1971). Insaf, Encyclopdia of Islam, 3. 12361237. Leiden: Brill.
Asch, S.E. (1958). The metaphor: a psychological inquiry. In Person Perception and Inter-
personal Behaviour. Eds. R. Tagiuri and L. Petrullo, 8893. Palo Alto: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
Ayer, A.J. (1971). Language, Truth and Logic. (first pub. 1936). London: Pelican.
Bailey, C. (1976). A note on the Bedouin image of adl as justice, The Muslim World, 66.
133135.
Baldry, H.C. (1965). The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
384 Bibliography
versity Press.
Balicki, A. (1970). The Netsilik Eskimo. New York: Natural History Press.
Banks, J.S. (1899). Justice, Dictionary of the Bible, 2. 82526. Ed. J. Hastings. Edinburgh:
T. & T. Clark.
Barnes, B. and Bloor, D. (1982). Relativism, rationalism and the sociology of knowl-
edge, in Rationality and Relativism, eds. M. Hollis and S. Lukes, 2147. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Barry, H., Child, I. and Bacon, M.K. (1959). The relation of child training to subsistence
economy. American Anthropologist 61. 5163
Barton, R.F. (1919). Ifugao Law. University of California Publications in American Ar-
chology and Ethnology, no. 15. Reprinted 1969, University of California Press.
Bascom, W.R. (1975). African Dilemma Tales. The Hague: Mouton.
Basson, A.H. (1958). David Hume. London: Penguin.
Beidelman, T.O. (1986). Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Bellah, R.N. (1970). Beyond Belief. Essays on religion in a post-traditional world. New York:
Harper and Row.
Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Miflin.
Benedict, R. (1967). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture. Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Benveniste, E. (1973). Indo-European Language and Society. Transl. E. Palmer. Miami Lin-
guistics Series no. 12. Miami: University of Miami Press.
Berkowitz, L. (1962). Aggression. A social psychological analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Berlin, I. (1990). The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Chapters in the history of ideas. London:
Fontana.
Berndt, R.M. and C.H. (1964). The World of the First Australians. An introduction to the
traditional life of the Australian Aborigines. London: Angus & Robertson.
Bernstein, R.M. (1980). The development of the self-system during adolescence, Journal
of Genetic Psychology, 136: 23145.
Best, E. (1923). The Maori School of Learning. Its objects, methods, and ceremonies. Dominion
Museum Monograph no. 6. Wellington: Government Printer.
Bidney, D. (1968). Cultural Relativism, International Encyclopdia of Social Science. Ed.
D.L. Sills. New York: Macmillan and Free Press.
Binchy, D.A. (1970). Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship. ODonnell Lectures for 19678. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press.
Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Boas, F. ([1896] 1988). The limitations of the comparative method of anthropology, in
High Points in Anthropology (2nd edn.), eds. P. Bohannan & M. Glazer, 85100. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Boas, F. (1932). Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: W.W. Norton.
Bodde, D. (1981). Basic concepts of Chinese law: the genesis and evolution of legal
thought in traditional China, in Essays on Chinese Civilization. Eds. C. le Blanc and D.
Borei, 17194. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bodde, D. (1991). Chinese Thought, Society, and Science. The intellectual and social back-
ground of science and technology in pre-modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Bodde, D. and Morris, C. (1967). Law in Imperial China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
Bibliography 385

versity Press.
Boecker, H.J. (1980). Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and the An-
cient Near East. Transl. J. Moiser. Minneapolis: Augsburg.
Bohannan, P. (1957). Justice and Judgement among the Tiv. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Borowitz, E.B. (1987). Judaism: an overview in The Encyclopaedia of Religion. Ed. M. Eli-
ade, 8. 12749. New York: Macmillan.
Boyce, M. (1975). A History of Zoroastrianism (vol. I). Leiden: Brill.
Brandt, R.B. (1954). Hopi Ethics. A theoretical analysis. University of Chicago Press.
Bray, F. (1984). Science and Civilisation in China vol. VI pt. 2: Agriculture (with J.
Needham). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Breasted, J.H. (1935). The Dawn of Conscience. New York: Charles Scribners Sons.
Broad, C.D. (1930). Five Types of Ethical Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Brown, D.E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bruce, W.S. (1909). The Ethics of the Old Testament. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
Bruner, J.S. (1966). On cognitive growth II, in Studies in Cognitive Growth. Eds. J. Bruner
et al., 3067. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Bhler, G. (tr.) (1886). Laws of Manu. Sacred Books of the East vol. 25. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Burridge, K.O.L. (1969). Tangu Traditions. A study of the way of life, mythology, and develop-
ing experience of a New Guinea people. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bury, J.B. (1932). The Idea of Progress. An inquiry into its origin and growth. London:
MacMillan.
Butterworth, G., and Light, P. (eds) (1982). Social Cognition. Studies of the development of
understanding. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Campbell, J.K. (1964). Honour, Family and Patronage. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Campbell, J.K. (1965). Honour and the Devil, in Honour and Shame. Ed. J. Peristiany,
14170. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Carrithers, M. (1985). An alternative history of the self, in The Category of the Person.
Eds. M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes, 23456. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Carritt, E.F. (1930). The Theory of Morals. An introduction to ethical philosophy. 2
nd
edn. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press.
Chan, Wing-tsit (1963). Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Chaney, W.A. (1970). The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England. The transition from
paganism to Christianity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cheyne, T.K. (1903). Truth, in Encyclopdia Biblica. Eds. T.K. Cheyne and J.S. Black.
London: Charles Black.
Cicero (1913). De Officiis. Transl. W. Miller. Loeb Classical Texts. London: Heineman.
Cicero (1931). De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. Transl. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Texts.
2
nd
edn. London: Heineman.
Cicero (1942). De Fato. Transl. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Texts. London: Heineman.
Cicero (1948). De Legibus. Transl. C.W. Keyes. Loeb Classical Texts. London: Heineman.
Clements, R.E. (ed.) (1989). The World of Ancient Israel. Sociological, anthropological and
political perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
386 Bibliography
Cohen, M.N. (1985). Prehistoric hunter-gatherers: the meaning of social complexity, in
Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers. Eds. T.D. Price and J.A. Brown, 99110. New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Cohen, M.N. (1989). Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Cole, M., Gay, J., Glick, J., and Sharp, D. (1971). The Cultural Context of Learning and
Thinking. An exploration in experimental anthropology. London: Methuen.
Cohen, M.N. and Scribner, S. (1974). Culture and Thought: a psychological introduction.
New York: Wiley.
Collingwood, R.G. (1939). An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Connell, R.W. (1971). The Childs Construction of Politics. Melbourne: Melbourne Univer-
sity Press.
Cranfield, C.E.B. (1951). Love in Theological Word Book of the Bible. Ed. A. Richardson,
13136. London: SCM Press.
Crawford, S.C. (1974). The Evolution of Hindu Ethical Ideals. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Muk-
hopadhay.
Creel, A.B. (1972). Dharma as an ethical category relating to freedom and responsibility,
Philosophy East and West, 22. 15568.
Creel, H.G. (1970). The Origins of Statecraft in China. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Crenshaw, J.L. and Willis, J.T. (eds.) (1974). Essays in Old Testament Ethics. New York:
Ktav Publishing House.
Damon, W. (1980). Structural-development theory and the study of moral develop-
ment, in Windmiller, Lambert and Turiel, 3568.
Damon, W. (1981). Exploring childrens social cognition on two fronts, in Social Cogni-
tive Development. Eds. J.H. Flavell and L. Ross, 15475. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Damon, W. (1983). The nature of social-cognitive change in the developing child, in
The Relationship between Social and Cognitive Development. Ed. W.F. Overton, 10341.
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Damon, W. (1988). The Moral Child. New York: Free Press.
Damon, W. and Hart, D. (1988). Self-Understanding in Childhood and Adolescence. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danto, A.C. (1972). Role and rule in oriental thought: some metareflections on dharma
and li, Philosophy East and West, 22. 213220.
Dasgupta, S. (1932a). History of Indian Philosophy. vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Dasgupta, S. (1932b). History of Indian Philosophy. vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Dasgupta, S. (1940). History of Indian Philosophy. vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Dasgupta, Surama (1965). Development of Moral Philosophy in India. New York: Frederick
Ungar.
de Palma, D., and Foley J. (eds) (1975). Moral Development. New York: Lawrence Erl-
baum Associates.
Derrett, J.D.M. (1978). The concept of duty in ancient Indian jurisprudence: the prob-
lems of ascertainment. in The Concept of Duty in South Asia. Eds. W.D. OFlaherty
Bibliography 387

and J.D.M. Derrett, 1865. London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
Devlin, P. (1959). The Enforcement of Morals. Maccabean Lecture in Jurisprudence of the
British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dodd, C.H. (1951). Gospel and Law. New York: Columbia University Press.
Doise, W., and Mugny, G. (1979). Individual and collective conflicts of centration in
cognitive development, European Journal of Social Psychology, 9. 105108.
Donniger, W., and Smith, B.K. (trs ) (1991). The Laws of Manu. London: Penguin.
Dougherty, J.W.D., and Keller, C.M. (1982). Taskonomy: a practical approach to knowl-
edge structures, American Ethnologist, 9. 76374.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger. An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Lon-
Douglas, M. (1986). How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Driver, G.R., and Miles, J.C. (transl. and eds.) (1952). The Babylonian Laws. vol. 1. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Dubuisson, D. (1975). LIrlande et la thorie des trois ordres, Revue de lHistoire des
Religions, 188. 3563.
Dumzil, G. (1970). The Destiny of the Warrior. Transl. A. Hiltebeitel. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Dumont, L. (1962). Kingship in ancient India, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 6. 4877.
Dumont, L. (1970). Homo Hierarchicus. The caste system and its implications. Transl. M.
Sainsbury. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Dumont, L. (1977). From Mandeville to Marx. The genesis and triumph of economic ideology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dworkin, R. (1977). Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Eberhard, W. (1967). Guilt and Sin in Traditional China. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Edel, M., and Edel, A. (1959). Anthropology and Ethics. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Tho-
mas.
Edel, A. (1962). Anthropology and ethics in common focus, Journal of the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute, 92. 5572.
Edwards, C. (1904). The Hammurabi Code. Reprinted 1971. Texas: Kennikat Press.
Edwards, C.P. (1975). Societal complexity and moral development: a Kenyan study,
Ethos, 3. 50528.
Edwards, C.P. (1981). The comparative study of the development of moral judgment
and reasoning, in Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development. Eds. D.A. Wagner
and H.W. Stevenson, 24879. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman Press.
Edwards, C.P. (1985). Cross-cultural research on Kohlbergs stages: the basis for con-
sensus, in Lawrence Kohlberg: Consensus and Controversy. Eds. S. Modgil and C.
Modgil, 41950.
Eliade, M. (1987). Yoga, in Encyclopdia of Religion. Ed. M. Eliade, 15. 51923. New
York: Macmillan.
Elias, T.O. (1956). The Nature of African Customary Law. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
Emler, N. (1992). Childhood origins of beliefs about institutions of authority, in the
Development of Political Understanding. Eds. H. Haste and J. Torney-Purta, 6577. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
388 Bibliography
Endicott, K. (1979). Batek Negrito Religion. The world-view and rituals of a hunting and gath-
ering people of Peninsular Malaysia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
dEntrves, A.P. (1951). Natural Law. An introduction to legal philosophy. Hutchinsons
University Library. London: Hutchinson.
Erskine, A. (1990). The Hellenistic Stoa. Political thought and action. New York: Cornell
University Press.
van Ess, J. (1987). Mutazilah, Encyclopdia of Religion, Ed. M. Eliade, 10. 22029. New
York: MacMillan.
Euripides (1954). The Trojan Women. Transl. Gilbert Murray, in Collected Plays of Eurip-
ides. London: Allen & Unwin.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1956). Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fakhry, M. (1970). A History of Islamic Philosophy. Columbia University.
Fakhry, M. (1991). Ethical Theories in Islam. Leiden: Brill.
Fauconnet, P. (1928). La Responsabilit. Etude de sociologie. 2nd edn. Paris: Alcan.
Feil, D.K. (1987). The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ferguson, J. (1958). Moral Values in the Ancient World. London: Methuen.
Fest, J. (1970). The Face of the Third Reich. Portraits of the Nazi leadership. Transl. M. Bul-
lock. New York: Pantheon Books.
Finley, M.I. (1972). Introduction and notes to Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War.
London: Penguin Books.
Finnis, J. (1980). Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Finnis, J. (1983). Fundamentals of Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Firth, R. (1936). Bond friendship, in Custom is King. Essays presented to R.R. Marrett. Ed.
L.H. Dudley-Buxton. Reprinted in Tikopia Ritual and Belief (1967), 108115. London:
Allen & Unwin.
Firth, R. (1967). Tikopia Ritual and Belief. London: Allen & Unwin.
Flavell, J.H. (1963). The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget. New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold Co.
Flavell, J.H. and Ross, L. (eds.) (1981). Social Cognitive Development. Frontiers and possible
futures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fletcher, J. (1966). Situation Ethics. The new morality. London: SCM Press.
Flew, A. (1967). Evolutionary Ethics. London: Macmillan.
Foot, P. (1978). Virtues and Vices and other essays in moral philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Forke, A. (tr.) (1912). Yang Chus Garden of Pleasure. Introd. H. Cranmer-Byng. London:
Murray.
Forrest, W.G. (1966). The Emergence of Greek Democracy. The character of Greek politics, 800
400 BC. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Fortes, M. (1938). Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland. Supple-
ment to Africa, 11(4). Also Memorandum XVII of Int. Inst. of African Languages and
Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fortes, M. (1945). The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fortes, M. (1949). The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bibliography 389

Fowler, J. (1981). Stages of Faith: The psychology of human development and the quest for
meaning. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Fowler, J., and Vergote, A. (eds) (1980). Toward Moral and Religious Maturity. Morris-
town, N.J.: Silver-Burdett.
Frankfort, H. and H.A. (1949). Before Philosophy. The intellectual adventure of ancient man.
London: Penguin.
Frazer, J.G. (1923). Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. Studies in comparative religion, legend,
and law. Abridged edn. London: Macmillan.
von Fritz, K. (1952). Relative and absolute values, in Moral Principles in Action. Ed. R.N.
Anshen, 94121. New York: Harper.
Fung, Yu-lan (1952). A History of Chinese Philosophy (2 vols) Transl. D. Bodde. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
von Frer-Haimendorf, C. (1967). Morals and Merit. A study of values and social controls in
South Asian societies. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Gabrieli, F. (1960). Adab, Encyclopdia of Islam, 1. 1756. Leiden: Brill.
Gardner, P.M. (1966). Symmetric respect and memorate knowledge, Southwestern J.
Anthrop., 22: 389415
Garelli, P. (1975). The changing facets of conservative Mesopotamian thought, Dda-
lus, 104(2). 4755.
Gay, J., and Cole, M. (1967). The New Mathematics and an Old Culture. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Geach, P. (1977). The Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gellner, E. (1985). Relativism and the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Transl. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee. Lon-
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Psychological theory and womens development. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Ginsberg, M. (1944). Moral Progress. Frazer Lecture. Glasgow: Glasgow University Press.
Ginsberg, M. (1956). On the Diversity of Morals. London: Heineman.
Ginsburg, H., and Opper, S. (1969). Piagets Theory of Intellectual Development. An intro-
duction. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Glick, J. (1978). Cognition and social cognition: an introduction, in The Development of
Social Understanding. Eds. J. Glick and K.A. Clarke-Stewart, 19. New York: Gardner
Press.
Gluckman, M. (194950). Social beliefs and individual thinking in primitive society,
Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 91. 7398.
Gluckman, M. (1965). The Ideas of Barotse Jurisprudence. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Gluckman, M. (1967). The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).
2nd. edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gokhale, B.G. (1966). Early Buddhist kinship, Journal of Asian Studies, 26(1). 1522.
Goldman, R. (1964). Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Gomez, L.O. (1987). Buddhism in India, Encyclopdia of Religion, 2. 35185. Ed. M. Eli-
ade. New York: Macmillan.
Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
390 Bibliography
sity Press.
Goody, J. (1986). The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge Univ.
Press.
Goody, J. (1987). The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Goody, J., and Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy, Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. 5.
30445).
Gorsuch, R.L. and Barnes, M.L. (1973). Stages of ethical reasoning and moral norms of
Carib youths, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 4. 283301.
Graham, A.C. (1978). Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science. Hong Kong: Chinese Univer-
sity Press.
Graham, A.C. (1985). The right to selfishness: Yangism, later Mohism, Chuang Tzu, in
Individualism and Holism. Ed. D. Munro, 7384. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Gray, J. (1992). Against the new liberalism. Rawls, Dworkin, and the emptying of po-
litical life, Times Litt. Supp. 3rd July, 1315.
Green, T.H. (1884). Prolegomena to Ethics. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Greenstein, F. (1965). Children and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Griffin, J.G. (1986). Well Being. Its meaning, measurement, and moral importance. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Grotius (1646). De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Transl. F.W. Kelsey The Law of War and Peace. 1925.
New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Guthrie, W.K.C. (1969). A History of Greek Philosophy. vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Hallpike, C.R. (1972). The Konso of Ethiopia. A study of the values of a Cushitic people. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press. (Revised edition in press.)
Hallpike, C.R. (1975). Two types of reciprocity, Comp. Stud. Soc. and Hist., 17. 11319.
Hallpike, C.R. (1977). Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. The generation of
conflict in Tauade society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. (1979). The Foundations of Primitive Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. (1983). Reply to Shweders On savages and other children, American
Anthropologist, 85. 65660.
Hallpike, C.R. (1984). Reply to Biersacks The logic of misplaced concreteness, Ameri-
can Anthropologist, 86. 41316.
Hallpike, C.R. (1985). Reply to Shweders Has Piaget been upstaged?, American An-
thropologist, 87. 14446.
Hallpike, C.R. (1986a). The Principles of Social Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. (1986b). Social and biological evolution II: some basic principles of social
evolution, J. Social Biol. Struct., 9. 531.
Hallpike, C.R. (1986c). Letter Maps and wayfaring, Man (n.s.), 21. 34243.
Hallpike, C.R. (1986d). Review of J.F. Hurley Sorcery, Man (n.s.), 21. 15455.
Hallpike, C.R. (1987). Letter Maps and wayfaring, Man (n.s.), 22. 175.
Hallpike, C.R. (1992a). Review of J.F. Hamill Ethno-Logic. The anthropology of human
reasoning, Anthropologica, 34. 263
Hallpike, C.R. (1992b). Is there a primitive society?, Cambridge Anthropology, 16. 2944
Hallpike, C.R. (1998). Moral development from the anthropological perspective, ZiF
Bibliography 391

Mitteilungen 2/98, 418.
Halpern, B. (1991). Jerusalem and the lineages in the seventh century BCE: kinship and
the rise of individual moral liability, in Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel. Eds. B.
Halpern and D. Hobson, 11107. Sheffield: JSOT Press.
Halverson, J. (1992). Goody and the implosion of the literacy thesis, Man (n.s.), 27. 301
17.
Hansen, C. (1972). Freedom and moral responsibility in Confucian ethics, Philosophy
East and West, 22. 16986.
Hansen, C. (1985a). Individualism in Chinese thought, in Individualism and Holism.
Studies in Confucian and Taoist values. Ed. D.J. Munro, 3555. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Hansen, C. (1985b). Punishment and dignity in China, in Individualism and Holism.
Studies in Confucian and Taoist values. Ed. D.J. Munro, 35983. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Hardie, W.F.R. (1980). Aristotles Ethical Theory. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hare, R.M. (1952). The Language of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hare, R.M. (1963). Freedom and Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hare, R.M. (1981). Moral Thinking, Its Levels, Methods and Point. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Harkness, S., Edwards, C.P., and Super, C.M. (1981). Social roles and moral reasoning: a
case study in a rural African community, Developmental Psychology, 17(5). 595603.
Harris, M. (1988). Culture, People, Nature. 5th edn. New York: Harper Row.
Harris, P., and Heelas, P. (1979). Cognitive processes and collective representations,
Arch. Europ. Sociol., 20. 21141.
Harris, W.V. (1989). Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Harrod, R. (1951). The Life of John Maynard Keynes. London: Macmillan.
Hart, H.L.A. (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hartshorne, H., and May, M.A. (192830). Studies in the Nature of Character. (3 vols) New
York: Macmillan.
Haste, H., and Torney-Purta, J. (eds) (1992). The Development of Political Understanding. A
new perspective. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hatch, E. (1983). Culture and Morality. The relativity of values in anthropology. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Havelock, E.A. (1978). The Greek Concept of Justice. From its shadow in Homer to its sub-
stance in Plato. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Herodotus (1972). The Histories. Transl. A. de Selincourt, revised with Introduction by
A.R. Burn. London: Penguin.
Herskovits, M.J. (1972). Cultural Relativism. Perspectives in cultural pluralism. Ed. F.
Herskovits. Introd. D.T. Campbell. New York: Random House.
Hesse, M. (1980). Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science. Brighton:
Harvester Press.
de Heusch, L. (1985). Sacrifice in Africa. A structuralist approach. transls. L. OBrien and A.
Morton. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hiriyanna, M. (1932). Outlines of Indian Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin.
Hirsch, E.G. (1905). Right and righteousness, Jewish Encyclopdia, 10. 42024.
Ho, A. (1991). Sedek and Sedaka in the Hebrew Bible. American University Studies Series
VII. New York: Peter Lang.
392 Bibliography
Hobbes, Leviathan ([1651] 1909). W.G. Pogson Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobbs, T.R. (1989). A Time for War. A study of warfare in the Old Testament. Delaware:
Glazier.
Hobhouse, L.T. ([1906] 1929). Morals in Evolution. 6th edn. London: Chapman & Hall.
Hoebel, E.A. (1954). The Law of Primitive Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Hoffman, M.L. (1983). Empathy, guilt, and social cognition, in The Relationship between
Social and Cognitive Development. Ed. W.F. Overton, 151. New Jersey: Lawrence Erl-
baum Associates.
Hogbin, H.I. (1934). Law and Order in Polynesia. London: Christophers.
Hollis, M., and Lukes, S. (eds) (1982). Rationality and Relativism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Holmberg, A. (1969). Nomads of the Long Bow. The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia. New York:
Natural History Press.
Honigman, J.J. (1968). Interpersonal relations in atomistic communities, Human
Organization, 27. 22029. (Bobbs-Merrill Reprint A-453).
Horton, R. (1967). African traditional thought and Western science, Africa, 37. 5071,
15587.
Horton, R. and Finnegan, R. (eds) (1973). Modes of Thought. Essays on thinking in Western
and non-Western societies. London: Faber & Faber.
Hourani, G.F. (1971). Islamic Rationalism. The ethics of Abd al-Jabbar. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Hourani, G.F. (1985). Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Houston, R.F.V. (1965). Salmond on the Law of Torts. 14th edn. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
Howell, P.P. (1954). A Manual of Nuer Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press for Interna-
tional African Institute.
Howell, S. (1989). Society and Cosmos. The Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. 2nd edn. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press.
Hsu, Cho-yun (1965). Ancient China in Transition. An analysis of social mobility 722222
BC. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Hume, D. (1740). A Treatise of Human Nature. London.
Humphreys, S.C. (1975). Transcendence and intellectual roles: the Ancient Greek
case, Ddalus, 104(2). 91118.
Hurley, J.F. (1985). Sorcery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hussey, E. (1972). The Presocratics. London: Duckworth.
Huxley, J. (1947). Evolution and Ethics 18931943. London: Pilot Press.
Huxley, T.H. (1894). Evolution and Ethics, and other essays. London: Macmillan.
Ingold, T. (1987). The Appropriation of Nature. Essays on human ecology and social relations.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Inhelder, B. (1969). Discussion following The gaps in empiricism in Beyond Reduction-
ism. The Alpbach Symposium. Eds. A. Koestler and J.R. Smythies. London: Hutchin-
son.
Inhelder, B. and Piaget, J. (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adoles-
cence. New York: Basic Books.
Irwin, W.A. (1977). The Hebrews, in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. Eds. H.
Bibliography 393

and H.A. Frankfort, 223360. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Isocrates (1928). Works. Transl. Norlin and van Hook. Loeb Classical Texts. London:
Heineman.
Itard, J. (1972). The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Ed. L. Malson. New York and London: Monthly
Review Press.
Izutsu, T. (1966). Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Quran. Montreal: McGill University
Press.
Jackson, M. (1982). Allegories of the Wilderness. Ethics and ambiguity in Kuranko narratives.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jahoda, G. (1982). Psychology and Anthropology. A psychological perspective. London: Aca-
demic Press.
Jaspers, K. (1953). The Origin and Goal of History. Transl. M. Bullock. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Johnson, A.R. (1964). The Vitality of the Individual in the Thought of Ancient Israel. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press.
Johnson, A.R. (1967). Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel. 2nd edn. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press.
Johnson, G.A. (ed.) (1982). Organizational structure and scalar stress, in Theory and
Explanation in Archaeology, 389421. New York: Academic Press.
Jolowicz, H.F. (1961). Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law. 2
nd
edn. Cam-
Jones, J.W. (1956). The Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
de Jouvenel, B. (1957). Sovereignty. An inquiry into the political good. Transl. J.F. Hunting-
ton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaiser, W.C. (1983). Toward Old Testament Ethics. Michigan: Academic Books.
Kant, I. (1946). Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics. 10th edn. Transl. T.K.
Abbott. London: Longmans, Green.
Karlgren, B. (1957). Grammata Serica Recensa. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiq-
uities.
Keynes, J.M. (1949). Two Memoirs. Dr Melchior; a defeated enemy, and My early beliefs. Lon-
don: Hart-Davis.
King, P.M. (1986). Formal reasoning in adults: a review and critique, in Adult Cognitive
Development. Eds. R.A. Mines and K.S. Kitchener, 121. New York: Praeger.
Kirk, G.S., and Raven, J.E. (1971). The Presocratic Philosophers. A critical history with a selec-
tion of texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kitchener, K.S. (1986). The reflective judgment model; characteristics, evidence, and
measurement, in Adult Cognitive Development: Methods and Models. Eds R. Mines and
K.S. Kitchener, 7691. New York: Praeger.
Kitchener, R.F. (1986). Piagets Theory of Knowledge. Genetic epistemology and scientific rea-
son. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kitto, H.D.F. (1954). The Greeks. London: Pelican Books.
Kluckhohn, C. (1943). Covert culture and administrative problems, American
Anthropologist, 45: 213-227.
Kluckhohn, C. (1960). The moral order in the expanding society, in City Invincible. A
Symposium in urbanization and cultural development in the ancient Near East. Eds.
C.H. Kraeling and R.M. Adams, 391404. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kluckhohn, C. and Leighton, D. (1974). The Navaho. 2nd edn. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
394 Bibliography
vard University Press.
Kneale, W., and Kneale, M. (1962). A History of Logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Koch, K.-F. (1974). War and Peace in Jalemo. The management of conflict in Highland New
Guinea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). The Philosophy of Moral Development. Moral stages and the idea of jus-
tice. Essays on Moral Development vol. 1. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Kohlberg, L. (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development. The nature and validity of moral
stages. Essays on Moral Development vol. 2. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Koller, J.M. (1972). Dharma: an expression of universal order, Philosophy East and West,
22(2). 13144.
Kroeber, A.L. (1948). Anthropology. 2nd edn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Kroll, J.L. (198587). Disputation in early Chinese culture, Early China, 1112. 11845.
Kuhn, D., Langer, J., Kohlberg, L., and Haan, N. (1977). The development of formal
operations in logical and moral judgments, Genetic Psychology Monographs, 95. 97
188.
Kuper, A. (1988). The Invention of Primitive Society. Transformations of an illusion. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ladd, J. (1957). The Structure of a Moral Code. A philosophical analysis of ethical discourse
applied to the ethics of the Navaho Indians. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Ladd, J. (1965). Introduction to Kants The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. New York:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Langness, L.L. (1973). Ethics, in Anthropology in Papua New Guinea. Ed. Ian Hogbin,
187206. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Larson, G.J. (1972). The trimurti of dharma in Indian thought: paradox or contradiction?,
Philosophy East and West, 22. 14553.
Laslett, P. (1988). Introduction to Lockes Two Treatises of Government (student edn), 3
126. Cambridge University Press.
Lau, D.C. (tr.) (1963). Lao Tzu. With introduction. London: Penguin.
Lau, D.C. (tr.) (1970). Mencius. With introduction. London: Penguin.
Leach, E.R. (1964). Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal
abuse, in New Directions in the Study of Language. Ed. E.H. Lenneberg, 2363. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Leach, E.R. (1968). A Runaway World?. 1967 Reith Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Leach, E.R. (1976). Culture and Communication. The logic by which symbols are connected.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leach, E.R. (1982). Social Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leacock, E., and Lee, R. (1982). Introduction to Politics and History in Band Societies. Eds.
E. Leacock and R. Lee, 120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leaman, O. (1985). An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lee, D. (1950). Notes on the conception of the self among the Wintu Indians, Journ.
Abnorm. and Soc. Psychol., 45. 53843.
Lee, R.B. (1979). The !Kung San. Men, women and work in a foraging society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lee, R.B. (1984). The Dobe !Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Bibliography 395

Lvy-Bruhl, L. (1926). How Natives Think. Transl. L. Clare. London: Allen & Unwin.
Lewis, C.S. (1969). The Abolition of Man. Fount.
Lienhardt, G. (1961). Divinity and Experience. The religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Lindblom, J. (1962). Prophecy in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Blackwell.
Linton, R. (1952). Universal ethical principles: an anthropological view, in Moral Prin-
ciples of Action. Ed. R.N. Anshen, 64560. New York: Harper.
Lloyd, G.E.R. (1979). Magic, Reason and Experience. Studies in the origin and development of
Greek science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd, G.E.R. (1990). Demystifying Mentalities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, J. (1988). Two Treatises of Government. Ed. P. Laslett, with introduction. Cam-
Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London.
Long, A.A. (1986). Hellenistic Philosophy. Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. 2nd edn. London:
Duckworth.
Lucretius (1975). De Rerum Natura. Transl. W.H.D. Rouse, Ed. M.F. Smith. Loeb Classical
Texts.London: Heineman.
Lukes, S. (1973). Individualism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lukes, S. (1982). Introduction in Rationality and Relativism. Eds. M. Hollis and S. Lukes,
120. Oxford: Blackwell.
Luria, A.R. (1976). Cognitive Development: its cultural and social foundations. trs. M. Lopez-
Morillas and S. Solotaroff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
MacBeath, A. (1949). The Relationship of Primitive Morality and Religion. Frazer Lecture,
University of Glasgow, 1948. Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Co.
MacBeath, A. (1952). Experiments in Living. A study of the nature and foundation of ethics or
morals in the light of recent work in social anthropology. London: Macmillan.
MacDowell, D.M. (1963). Athenian Homicide Law in the Age of the Orators. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1966). A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Ho-
meric Age to the twentieth century. New York: Macmillan.
MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue. A study in moral theory. 2nd edn. Notre Dame: Notre
Dame University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? London: Duckworth.
Mackie, J.L. (1977). Ethics, Inventing Right and Wrong. London: Penguin.
MacPherson, C.B. (1962). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Maine, H.S. ([1861] 1931). Ancient Law. Its connection with the early history of society and its
relation to modern ideas. Introd. C.K. Allen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Malinowski, B. (1926). Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Malinowski, B. (1936). The Foundations of Faith and Morals. An anthropological analysis of
primitive beliefs and conduct with special reference to the fundamental problems of religion
and ethics. Riddell Memorial Lecture, Durham University. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
396 Bibliography
Malson, L. (1972). Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature. New York and Lon-
don: Monthly Review Press.
Man, E.H. (1885). On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. London.
Maqsud, M. (1977). The influence of social heterogeneity and sentimental credibility of
moral judgments of Nigerian Muslim adolescents, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychol-
ogy, 8. 11322.
Marcus Aurelius (1928). The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antonius. Transl. J. Jackson.
Worlds Classics Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marshall, L. (1976). Sharing, talking, and giving: relief of social tension among the
!Kung, in Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers. Eds. R.B. Lee and I. De Vore, 34971. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Martin, J. (1827). An Account of the Tonga Islands from the extensive communications of
Mr. William Mariner. 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Constable.
Martin, J.D. (1989). Israel as a tribal society, in The World of Ancient Israel. Ed. R.E.
Clements, 95117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mascaro, J. (tr.) (1962). Bhagavad Gita. With introduction. London: Penguin.
Mascaro, J. (tr.) (1973). Dhammapada. With introduction. London: Penguin.
Matilal, B.M. (1987). Carvakas, Encyclopaedia of Religion. Ed. M. Eliade, 3. 1056. New
York: Macmillan.
Mauss, M. (1985). A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of
self, in The Category of the Person. Eds. M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes, tr.
W.D. Halls, 125. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maybury-Lewis, D. (1992). Millennium. Tribal wisdom and the modern world. New York:
Viking.
Mayer, A.E. (1987). Islamic law, Encyclopaedia of Religion. Ed. M. Eliade, 7. 43146. New
York: Macmillan.
Mead, M. (1935). Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow.
Meek, C.K. (1937). Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Meigs, A.S. (1978). A Papuan perspective on pollution, Man (n.s.), 13. 30418.
Middleton, J. (1960). Lugbara Religion. Ritual and authority among an East African people.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mill, J.S. ([1863] 1954 ). Utilitarianism. Everyman edn. with introd. A.D. Lindsay. Lon-
don: Dent.
Mill, J.S. ([1859] 1954). On Liberty. Everyman edn. with introd. A.D. Lindsay. London:
Dent.
Misch, G. (1950/1973). A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. (2 vols) tr. E.W. Dickes.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted 1973 Greenwood Press, Westport,
Conn.
Misra, G.S.P. (1972). The Age of the Vinaya. A historical and cultural study. New Delhi.
Misra, G.S.P. (1984). Development of Buddhist Ethics. Delhi: Munshiram Mandharlal Pub-
lishers.
Momigliano, A. (1975). Alien Wisdom. The limits of Hellenization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Monier-Williams, M. (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Montaigne, M. (1632). The Essayes, or Morall, Politike and Militarie Discourses. Transl. Flo-
rio. London.
Bibliography 397

Moore, G.E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moore, S.F. (1978). Legal liability and evolutionary interpretation: some aspects of strict
liability, self-help, and collective responsibility, in Law as Process. An anthropological
approach. Ed. S.F. Moore, 83134. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Morenz, S. (1973). Egyptian Religion. Transl. A.E. Keep. London: Methuen.
Morenz, S. (1991). Western Conceptions of the Individual. New York: Berg.
Morris, B. (1976). Whither the savage mind? Notes on the natural taxonomies of a hunt-
ing and gathering people. Man (n.s.) 11. 54257.
Morris, B. (1991). Western Conceptions of the Individual. New York:Berg.
Morris, C. (1972). The Discovery of the Individual 10501200. London: SPCK.
Mugny, G., and Doise, W. (1978). Socio-cognitive conflict and structuration of individ-
ual and collective performances, European Journal of Social Psychology, 8. 18192.
Mulhall, S., and Swift, A. (1992). Liberals and Communitarians. Oxford: Blackwell.
Munro, D.S. (1969). The Concept of Man in Early China. Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press.
Munro, D.S. (1985). Introduction in Individualism and Holism. Studies in Confucian and
Taoist values. Ed. D.S. Munro, 132. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Murdoch, I. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Nasr, S.H. (1987). Science and Civilization in Islam. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Islamic Text So-
ciety.
Needham, J. (1956). Science and Civilisation in China: Vol. 2. History of Scientific Thought.
Needham, R. (1981). Circumstantial Deliveries. University of Berkeley: California Press.
Newman, K.S. (1983). Law and Economic Organization. A study of preindustrial societies.
Nowell-Smith, P. (1954). Ethics. London: Penguin Books.
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nussbaum, M. (1992). Virtue revived. Habit, passion, reflection in the Aristotelian tra-
dition, Times. Lit. Supp., 3rd July, 911.
OFlaherty, W.D. (1978). The clash between relative and absolute duty: the dharma of
demons, in The Concept of Duty in South Asia. Eds. W.D. OFlaherty and J.D.M. Der-
rett, 96106. London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
Ogden, C.K., and Richards, I.A. (1949). The Meaning of Meaning. 10th edn. London:
Ong, W.J. (1986). Writing restructures thought, in The Written Word. Literacy in transi-
tion. Ed. G. Baumann, 2350. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Onians, R.B. (1954). The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the
World, Time and Fate. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Opie, I., and P. (1959). The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Oppenheim, A.L. (1975). The position of the intellectual in Mesopotamian society, Dae-
dalus, 104(2). 3746.
Osgood, C.E., May, W.H., and Miron, M.S. (1975). Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective
Meaning. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Overing, J. (ed.) (1985a). Reason and Morality. ASA Monographs 24. London: Tavistock.
Overing, J. (1985b). Introduction to Reason and Morality. Ed. J. Overing, 128. ASA
398 Bibliography
Monographs 24. London: Tavistock.
Overton, W.F. (ed.) (1983). The Relationship between Social and Cognitive Development. New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Parker, R. (1983). Miasma, Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Parkin, D. (ed.) (1985). The Anthropology of Evil. Oxford: Blackwell.
Paton, L.B. (1927). Early Hebrew Ethics, E.H. Sneath (ed.) The Evolution of Ethics as Re-
vealed in the Great Religions, 15998. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Peerenboom, R.P (1993). Law and Morality in Ancient China. The silk manuscripts of Huang-
Lao. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Peristiany, J.G. (ed.) (1965). Honour and Shame. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Perles, P. (1914). Law, Jewish, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Ed. J.J. Hastings, 7.
85558. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Peters, R.S. (1956). Hobbes. London: Pelican Press.
Peters, R.S. (1971). Moral development: a plea for pluralism, in Cognitive Development
and Epistemology. Ed. T. Mischel, 23767. New York: Academic Press.
Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. Transl. M. Gabain. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J. (1952). The child and moral realism, in Moral Principles of Action. Ed. R.N.
Anshen, 41735. New York: Harper.
Piaget, J. (1971). Structuralism. Transl. C. Maschler. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J. (1972). Insights and Illusions of Philosophy. Transl. W. Mays. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J. (1974). Need and significance of cross-cultural studies in genetic psychology,
in Culture and Cognition: Readings in cross-cultural psychology. Eds. J.W. Berry and P.R.
Dasen, 299310. London: Methuen.
Piaget, J. and Weil, A-M. (1951). The development in children of the idea of the home-
land and of relations with other countries, Internat. Soc. Science Bulletin (Journal), 3.
56171.
Piers, G., and Singer, M.B. (1971). Shame and Guilt. New York: W.W. Norton.
Pitt Rivers, J. (1965). Honour and social status, in Honour and Shame. The values of Medi-
terranean society. Ed. J.G. Peristiany, 1977. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Plato Collected Dialogues. Ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Bollingen Series 71. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pocock, D.F. (1986). The ethnography of morals, Int. Journ. Moral and Soc. Sciences, 1. 3
20.
Pollock, F., and Maitland, F.W. (1923). The History of English Law before the Time of Edward
I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Popper, K.R. (1945). The Open Society and its Enemies. (2 vols) London: Routledge & Ke-
gan Paul.
Putnam, P. (1948). Pygmies of the Ituri forest. In Coon, C.S., Reader in General Anthropol-
ogy, New York: Holt, pp.322342.
Rackham, H. (1931). Introduction to translation of Ciceros De Finibus 2nd edn. Loeb
Classical Texts. London: Heineman.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1922). The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Radding, C.M. (1985). A World Made by Men. Cognition and Society 4001200. Chapel Hill:
Bibliography 399

University of North Carolina Press.
Radhakrishnan, S. (1929). Indian Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin.
Raju, P.T. (1954). The concept of the spiritual in Indian thought, Philosophy East and
West, 4.
Randall, J.H. (1960). Aristotle. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rasmussen. K. (1929). Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule
Expedition, vol. VII, Copenhagen.
Rawls, J.B. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Raz, J. (1986). The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Read, K.E. (1955). Morality and the conception of the person among the Gahuka-
Gama, Oceania, 25(4). 23382.
Read, K.E. (1966). The High Valley. London: Allen & Unwin.
Redfield, R. ([1953] 1968). The Primitive World and its Transformations. London: Peregrine
Books.
Reichard, G.A. (1963). Navaho Religion. A study of symbolism. 2nd edn. New York:
Bollingen Foundation.
Renteln, A.D. (1988). Relativism and the search for human rights, American Anthropolo-
gist, 90. 5672.
Rhys Davids, T.W. (1955). Buddhist India. Calcutta: Susil Gupta.
Rhys Davids, T.W. and Stede, W. (1959). Pali-English Dictionary. London: Pali Text Soci-
ety.
Robinson, H.W. (1956). The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament. 2nd edn. London:
Duckworth.
Russell, B. (1946). History of Western Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin.
Russell, B. (1954). Human Society in Ethics and Politics. London: Allen & Unwin.
Sahlins, M. (1965). On the sociology of primitive exchange in The Relevance of Models for
Social Anthropology. Ed. M. Banton. London: Tavistock.
Sandel, M.J. (1982). Liberalism and the Limits of Tolerance. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Schmidt, P.H. (1955). Some criticisms of cultural relativism, Journal of Philosophy.
Schwartz, B.I. (1975). The age of transcendence, Daedalus, 104(2). 17.
Schwartz, B.I. (1985). The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Scribner, S., and Cole, M. (1981). The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Selman, R. (1976). Social-cognitive understanding: a guide to educational and clinical
practice, in T. Lickona (ed.) Moral Development and Behavior. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Selman, R. (1980). The Growth of Interpersonal Understanding. New York: Academic Press.
Selman, R. and Damon, W. (1975). Social perspective taking and justice, in Moral Devel-
opment. Eds. D. de Palma and J. Foley, 5773. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associ-
ates.
Seneca (1928a). De Constantia tr. J.W. Basore. Senecas Moral Essays vol. 1. Loeb Classical
Texts. London: Heinemann.
Seneca (1928b). De Ira tr. J.W. Basore. Senecas Moral Essays vol. 1. Loeb Classical Texts.
London: Heinemann.
400 Bibliography
Seneca (1932). De Vita Beata tr. J.W. Basore. Senecas Moral Essays vol. 2. Loeb Classical
Seneca (1935). De Beneficiis tr. J.W. Basore. Senecas Moral Essays vol. 3. Loeb Classical
Seneviratne, H.L. (1987). Samgha and society, The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eli-
ade. 13. 407. New York: Macmillan.
Serjeant, R.B. and Ghul, M.A. (1983). History of Arabia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1.
104351.
Service, E.R. (1971). Primitive Social Organization. 2nd edn. New York: Random House.
Shamasastry, R. (tr.) (1967). Arthashastra of Kautilya. 8th edn. Mysore: Mysore Printing
and Publishing House.
Shastri, H.P. (1925). Lokayata. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shastri, M.H. (1982). Lokayata and Vratya. Calcutta: Sree Durga Press.
Sidgwick, H. (1893). The Methods of Ethics. 5th edn. London: Macmillan.
Simmonds, N.E. (1984). The Decline of Juridical Reason. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
Singh, J.A.L. and Zingg, R.M. (1966). Wolf-Children and Feral Man. Hamden, Conn.: Ar-
chon Books.
Snarey, J.R. (1985). Cross-cultural universality of social-moral development: a critical
review of Kohlbergian research, Psychological Bulletin, 97. 20232.
Snell, B. (1960). The Discovery of the Mind. The Greek origins of European thought. Transl.
T.G. Rosenmeyer. New York: Harper & Row.
Soothill, W.E. (1937). The Analects of Confucius. Worlds Classics Series. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Speiser, E.A. (1954). Authority and law in Mesopotamia, Supplement 17 of Journal of
the American Oriental Society, 815.
Spencer, B., and Gillen, F.J. (1938). The Native Tribes of Central Australia. 2nd edn. Lon-
don: Macmillan.
Spencer, H. (1897). The Principles of Ethics. (2 vols) London: Williams & Norgate.
Sperber, D. (1982). Apparently irrational beliefs, in Rationality and Relativism. Eds. M.
Hollis and S. Lukes, 14980. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Stcherbatsky, T. (1961). The Central Conception of Buddhism and the meaning of the word
dharma. 3rd edn. Calcutta: Gupta.
Stcherbatsky, T. (1970). Buddhist Logic. (2 vols) Bibliotheca Buddhica XXVI. Osnabruck:
Biblia Verlag.
Stevenson, C.L. (1944). Ethics and Language. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stevenson, C.L. (1963). Facts and Values. Studies in the ethical analysis. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Tamas, G.M. (1989). The old regime of revolution, Spectator, 9th December, 1617.
Tambiah, S.J. (1976). World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A study of Buddhism and polity
in Thailand against a historical background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarn, W.W. (1948). Alexander the Great. (2 vols) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tawney, R.H. (1938). Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. London: Pelican.
Thapar, R. (1975). Ethics, religion, and social protest in the first millennium BC in
Northern India, Daedalus, 104(2). 11932.
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. Transl. Rex Warner. Introd. and notes by
Bibliography 401

M.I. Finley (1972). London: Penguin.
de Tocqueville, A. ([1853] 1956). De Tocquevilles LAncien Rgime. Transl. M.W. Patter-
son. Oxford: Blackwell.
de Tocqueville, A. ([1835, 1840] 1990). Democracy in America. New York: Vintage Clas-
sics.
Tomlinson-Keasy, C., and Keasy, C.B. (1974). The mediating role of cognitive develop-
ment in moral judgment, Child Development, 45. 29198.
Tuden, A., and Marshall, C. (1972). Political organization: cross-cultural codes 4, Eth-
nology, 11. 43664.
Turiel, E. (1975). The development of social concepts, in Moral Development. Eds. D. de
Palma and J. Foley, 737. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Turiel, E. (1978). The development of concepts of social structure, in The Development of
Social Understanding. Eds. J. Glick and K.A. Clarke-Stewart, 25107. New York: Gard-
ner Press.
Turiel, E. (1980). The development of social conventions and moral concepts, in Moral
Development and Socialization. Eds. M. Windmiller, N. Lambert, and E. Turiel, 6906.
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Turnbull, C. (1965). The Mbuti Pygmies: an ethnographic survey. New York: American Mu-
seum of Natural History.
Tyan, E. (1960). Adl, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1. 21516. Leiden: Brill.
Tylor, E.B. (1871). Primitive Culture. Researches into the development of mythology,
philosophy, religion, art, and custom. London: John Murray.
Tylor, E.B. (1881). Anthropology. London: Macmillan.
Ullmann, W. (1967). The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen.
Voyat, G. (1978). Cognitive and social development: a new perspective, in The Devel-
opment of Social Understanding. Eds. J. Glick and K.A. Clarke-Stewart, 1124. New
York: Gardner Press.
Wake, C.S. (1878). The Evolution of Morality. London.
Waley, A. (1934). The Way and Its Power. A study of the Tao Te Ching and its place in Chinese
thought. London: Allen & Unwin.
Waley, A. (1937). The Book of Songs. London: Allen & Unwin.
Waley, A. (1938). The Analects of Confucius. With Introduction. London: Allen & Unwin.
Walzer, R., and Gibb, H.A.R. (1960). Akhlak, Encyclopaedia of Islam 1. 32527. Leiden:
Brill.
Warner, W.L. (1937). A Black Civilization. A study of an Australian tribe. New York:
Harper.
Watt, W.M. (1953). Muhammad at Mecca. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Weil, E. (1975). What is a breakthrough in history?, Daedalus, 104(2). 2136.
Westermarck, E. (1906). The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. London: Macmil-
lan.
Westermarck, E. (1932). Ethical Relativity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
White, C.B. (1975). Moral development in Bahamian schoolchildren. A cross-cultural
examination of Kohlbergs stages of moral reasoning, Developmental Psychology, 11.
53536.
White, C.B., Bushnell, N., and Regnemer, J.L (1978). Moral development in Bahamian
schoolchildren. A 3-year examination of Kohlbergs stages of moral development,
Developmental Psychology, 14. 5865.
402 Bibliography
Whitelam, K.W. (1989). Israelite kingship. The royal ideology and its opponents, in The
World of Ancient Israel. Ed. R.E. Clements, 11939. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Whitelam, K.W. (1979). The Just King. Monarchical judicial authority in ancient Israel. Shef-
field: JSOT Press.
Whiting, J.W.M. (1968). Discussion in Man the Hunter. Eds. R. Lee and I. De Vore, 336
38. Chicago: Aldine.
Whitman, C. (1985). Privacy in Confucian and Taoist thought, in Individualism and Ho-
lism. Ed. D. Munro, 85100. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Whybray, R.N. (1973). The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Whybray, R.N. (1989). The social world of the wisdom writers, in The World of Ancient
Israel. Ed. R.E. Clements, 22750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wieger (1927). English translation of E.J.C. Werner, Histoire des croyances religieuses et des
opinons philosophiques en Chine depuis lorigine jusqu nos jours (1917). Hsienhsien:
Mission Press.
Williams, B. (1983). Evolution, ethics, and the representation problem, in Evolution from
Molecules to Men. Ed. D.S. Bendall, 55566. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana.
Wilson, B. (ed.) (1970). Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, G. (1936). An African morality, Africa, 9. 7599.
Wilson, J.A. (1949). Egypt, in Before Philosophy. Eds. H. and H.A. Frankfort, 39132.
London: Pelican.
Wilson, J.A. (1954). Authority and law in Ancient Egypt, in Supplement 17, Journal of
the American Oriental Society, 17.
Wilson, R.R. (1980). Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Winch, P. (1958). The Idea of a Social Science, and its Relation to Philosophy. London:
Windmiller, M., Lambert, N. and Turiel, E. (eds) (1980). Moral Development and Socializa-
tion. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Witkowski, S.R., and Brown, C.H. (1978). Lexical universals, Annual Review of Anthro-
pology, 7. 42751.
Wolfram, S. (1982). Anthropology and morality, Journ. Anthrop. Soc. of Oxford, 13. 262
74.
Woodburn, J. (1968). Discussion in Man the Hunter. Eds. R. Lee and I. De Vore, 91. Chi-
cago: Aldine.
Woodburn, J. (1982). Egalitarian societies, Man (n.s.) 17, 43151.
Woodburn, J. (1998). Sharing is not a form of exchange: an analysis of property-
sharing in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, in Property Relations: renew-
ing the anthropological tradition. Ed. C.M. Hamm, 4863. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Woodfield, A. (1976). Teleology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, A.F. (1953). Studies in Chinese Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yang, Lien-sheng (1957). The concept of pao as a basis for social relations in China, in
Chinese Thought and Institutions. Ed. J.K. Fairbank, 291309. Chicago: Chicago Uni-
versity Press.
Yoshinori, T., and Keenan, P. (1987). Buddhist philosophy, in Encyclopaedia of Religion.
Ed. M. Eliade, 2. 54047. New York: Macmillan.
Bibliography 403

Young, R. (1961). Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible. London: Lutterworth Press.
Zaehner, R.C. (1956). The Teachings of the Magi. London: Allen & Unwin.
Zaehner, R.C. (1962). Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index of Names

Achebe, C., 247
Ackroyd, P., 281, 383
Acton, Lord, 44
Adams, R.M., 393
Adelson, J., 110, 383
Adhurbadh, 349
Adkins, A.W.H., 237, 238,
285, 320, 348, 383
Akbar, Emperor, 294
Alexander the Great, 287,
288
Alexander, R.D., 50, 383
al-Farabi, 336
al-Isfahani, 358
Allen, C.K., 338, 383, 395
Anaxagoras, 330
Anaximander, 330
Anaximenes, 326
Andrewes, A., 281, 383
Annas, J., 33, 309, 383
Anshen, R.N., 383
Aquinas, Thomas, 89, 90,
294, 358, 383; Summa
Theologiae, 86, 91
Aristobulus, 283
Aristophanes, 286
Aristotle, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46,
47, 48, 50, 66, 77, 79, 84,
85, 86, 129, 163, 176, 248,
290, 294, 296, 297, 306,
308, 309, 312, 313, 316,
318, 322, 327, 336, 337,
338, 341, 345, 348, 350,
351, 356, 360, 363, 372,
383; Nicomachean Ethics,
356; Rhetoric, 338
Arkoun, M., 339, 349, 383
Asch, S.E., 26, 383
Asoka, Emperor, 333, 342
Augustine, 340
Ayer, A.J., 43, 383
Bailey, C., 279, 383
Baldry, H.C., 286, 288, 329,
330, 383
Balicki, A., 192, 193, 194,
195, 197, 199, 201, 203,
384
Banks, J.S., 277, 384
Barnes, B., 17, 18, 384
Barnes, J., 33, 309, 383
Barnes, M.L., 141, 142, 143,
390
Barry, H., 201, 384
Barton, R.F., 245, 384
Bascom, W.R., 255, 384
Basson, A.H., 42, 384
Beidelman, T.O., 230, 233,
235, 256, 257, 384
Bellah, R.N., 287, 302, 305,
307, 308, 384
Benedict, R., 187, 188, 266,
267, 384
Bentham, J., 70, 77, 93
Benveniste, E., 167, 243,
260, 275, 277, 278, 327,
384
Bergson, H., 16
Berkowitz, L., 227, 384
Berlin, I., 375, 384
Berndt, R.H. & C.H., 193,
199, 384
Bernstein, R.M., 384
Best, E., 159, 384
Bettelheim, B., 239
Bidney, D., 31, 384
Binchy, D.A., 275, 384
Bloor, D., 17, 18, 23, 384
Boas, F., 18, 145, 146, 166,
384
Bodde, D., 280, 300, 306,
311, 315, 321, 325, 332,
343, 344, 346, 347, 360,
361, 384, 389
Boecker, H.J., 347, 385
Bohannan, P., 273, 384, 385
Borowitz, E.B., 359, 385
Boyce, M., 283, 385
Brandt, R.B., 253, 260, 263,
265, 385
Bray, F., 332, 385
Breasted, J.H., 89, 90, 173,
274, 284, 385
Brhaspati, 362, 367
Broad, C.D., 59, 385
Brown, C.H., 16, 402
Brown, D.E., 34, 385
Bruce, W.S., 352, 385
Bruner, J.S., 156, 160, 385
Buddha and Buddhism,
14, 177, 178, 267, 282,
283, 289, 290, 293, 294,
296, 297, 301, 302, 303,
306, 307, 308, 310, 311,
316, 317, 318, 321, 322,
328, 333, 334, 342, 344,
349, 350, 352, 357, 362,
365, 366, 368; Zen, 19
Bhler, G., 385
Burridge, K.O.L., 210, 214,
215, 216, 385
Bury, J.B., 288, 385
Bushnell, N., 141, 142, 401
Butterworth, G., 385
Campbell, J.K., 171, 239,
385, 391
Carrithers, M., 177, 385,
396
Carritt, E.F., 66, 70, 385
Chan, W., 311, 314, 317,
350, 351, 383, 385
406 Index of Names
Chaney, W.A., 275, 385
Cheyne, T.K., 385
Chrysippus, 234
Chuang Tzu, 310, 328, 368
Cicero, 176, 296, 297, 340,
348, 351, 385; De Fato,
360; De Finibus, 67; De
Officiis, 312, 353, 355; De
Republica, 340
Clarke-Stewart, K.A., 389,
401
Clements, R.E., 385, 396,
402
Cohen, M.N., 147, 148, 149,
150, 151, 188, 205, 386
Cole, M., 159, 160, 161,
162, 163, 254, 386, 389,
399
Collingwood, R.G., 40, 386
Collins, S., 385, 396
Confucius and
Confucianism, 14, 177,
271, 283, 289, 291, 292,
297, 301, 302, 306, 307,
309, 310, 314, 315, 316,
317, 318, 319, 320, 322,
328, 332, 337, 339, 343,
344, 348, 350, 351, 354,
355, 356, 357, 359, 360,
367, 368; Analects, 306,
307, 310, 314, 315, 317,
318, 319, 322, 349, 350,
354, 383
Connell, R.W., 107, 108,
110, 111, 112, 133, 257,
386
Constable, J., 378
Coon, C.S., 398
Cranfield, C.E.B., 75, 386
Crawford, S.C., 277, 278,
386
Creel, A.B., 352, 361, 386
Creel, H.G., 276, 280, 345,
386
Crenshaw, J.L., 386
Damon, W., 104, 112, 113,
114, 128, 386, 399
Danto, A.C., 356, 386
Dasgupta, S., 279, 293, 309,
327, 353, 355, 362, 365,
366, 386
Dasgupta, Surama, 278,
386
David, King, 74, 281
De Vore, I., 396, 402
Democritus, 363
Demosthenes, 345
Derrett, J.D.M., 300, 386,
397
Deutero-Isaiah, 283
Devlin, P., 82, 387
Diogenes the Cynic, 290
Dodd, C.H., 75, 387
Doise, W., 114, 387, 397
Donniger, W., 383
Dougherty, J.W.D., 160,
387
Douglas, M., 223, 387;
Purity and Danger, 131,
233
Driver, G.R., 276, 387
Dubuisson, D., 157, 387
Dumzil, G., 237, 387
Dumont, L., 49, 53, 55, 216,
222, 229, 234, 270, 275,
387
Durkheim, E., 18, 131, 138,
173
Dworkin, R., 378, 380, 387
Eberhard, W., 311, 387
Edwards, C., 274, 387
Edwards, C.P., 135, 141,
143, 144, 226, 242, 273,
286, 387
Eliade, M., 308, 385, 387,
388, 396, 400, 402
Elias, T.O., 242, 245, 248,
387
Emler, N., 109, 387
Endicott, K., 191, 193, 195,
196, 198, 202, 388
Entrves, A.P. d, 89, 388
Epicurus and
Epicureanism, 68, 290,
297, 301, 362, 36365,
363, 364, 373
Erskine, A., 288, 341, 388
Ess, J. van, 294
Euripides, 330, 388; Trojan
Women, 322
Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 21,
22, 30, 134, 250, 257, 388
Ezekial, 283, 304
Fakhry, M., 312, 313, 336,
357, 358, 388
Fauconnet, P., 10, 13, 170,
388
Feil, D.K., 207, 388;
Evolution of Highland
Papua New Guinea
Society, 206
Ferguson, J., 176, 260, 388
Fest, J., 87, 388
Finley, M.I., 339, 388, 401
Finnegan, R., 138, 392
Finnis, J., 40, 46, 47, 65, 76,
85, 89, 388
Finow, King, 151, 240, 245,
269, 273, 372
Firth, R., 220, 388
Flavell, J.H., 97, 100, 116,
118, 386, 388
Fletcher, J., 69, 75, 80, 388
Flew, A.N., 14, 388
Foley, J., 386, 399, 401
Foot, P., 40, 86, 388
Forke, A., 368, 369, 388
Forrest, W.G., 281, 303, 388
Fortes, M., 159, 168, 248,
249, 388
Fowler, J., 135, 389
Frankfort, H. and H.A.,
389, 393, 402
Frazer, J.G., 184, 185, 389
Freud and Freudianism,
266
Fritz, K. von, 33, 389
Fung, Y-L., 335, 389
Frer-Haimendorf, C. von,
10, 13, 191, 192, 193, 195,
196, 202, 205, 219, 221,
232, 238, 241, 242, 243,
244, 246, 250, 252, 261,
265, 267, 389
Index of Names 407

Gabrieli, F., 361, 389
Gahuku-Gama, the, 215
Gardner, P.M., 189, 192,
196, 199, 200, 213, 389
Garelli, P., 284, 295, 389
Gay, J., 159, 254, 386, 389
Geach, P., 73, 85, 389
Geertz, C., 16
Gellner, E., 19, 20, 389
Gennep, A. van, 389; The
Rites of Passage, 235
Ghul, M.A., 281, 400
Gibb, H.A.R., 361, 401
Gillen, F.J., 199
Gilligan, C., 124, 125, 389
Ginsberg, M., 10, 13, 31,
32, 35, 166, 173, 174, 175,
183, 225, 389
Ginsburg, H., 97, 99, 101,
103, 389
Glazer, M., 384
Glick, J., 106, 386, 389, 401
Gluckman, M., 132, 136,
170, 220, 221, 225, 243,
246, 247, 248, 251, 267,
273, 276, 337, 389
Gokhale, B.G., 333, 342,
389
Goldman, R., 135, 389
Gomez, L.O., 281, 389
Good Samaritan, 67
Goody, J., 161, 162, 389,
390
Gorsuch, R.L., 141, 142,
143, 390
Graham, A.C., 293, 331,
351, 359, 362, 367, 368,
390
Gray, J., 40, 390
Green, T.H., 166, 390;
Prolegomena to Ethics,
166
Greenstein, F., 110, 390
Griffin, J.G., 69, 390
Grotius, H., 390; The Law of
War and Peace, 90
Gulliver, P.H., 273
Guthrie, W.K.C., 363, 364,
390
Haan, N., 114, 394
Hallpike, C.R., 22, 26, 29,
97, 103, 104, 132, 135,
137, 146, 148, 159, 160,
162, 171, 206, 207, 208,
227, 251, 284, 390; , 104;
Foundations of Primitive
Thought, The, 9, 10, 97,
103, 104; Principles of
Social Evolution, The, 9;
Konso of Ethiopia, The,
227
Halpern, B., 281, 347, 391
Halverson, J., 162, 391
Hammond, N.G.L., 288
Hammurabi, 274
Hansen, C., 300, 344, 354,
356, 391
Hardie, W.F.R., 86, 391
Hare, R.M., 41, 44, 47, 69,
93, 391
Harkness, S., 141, 144, 226,
242
Harris, M., 205, 391
Harris, P., 104, 105, 134,
391
Harris, W.V., 162, 391
Harrod, R., 42, 391
Hart, D., 104, 112, 113, 386
Hart, H.L.A., 40, 80, 81, 82,
89, 391
Hartshorne, H., 128, 129,
391
Haste, H., 107, 387, 391
Hatch, E., 18, 391
Havelock, E.A., 161, 259,
260, 391
Heelas, P., 104, 105, 134,
391
Hegel, G.W.F., 62
Heinz's Dilemma. See
Kohlberg, L.
Heraclitus, 326, 328, 330
Herodotus, 283, 391; The
Histories, 54
Herskovits, M.J., 15, 31,
391
Hesiod: Works and Days,
356
Hesse, M., 19, 391
Heusch, L. de, 250, 391
Hillel, 348
Himmler, H., 87
Hiriyanna, M., 279, 349,
366, 391
Hirsch, E.G., 277, 391
Hitler, A., 87, 90
Ho, A., 391
Hobbes, T., 50, 51, 53, 55,
59, 61, 89, 96, 392;
English Works, 51;
Leviathan, 51, 52
Hobbs, T.R., 323, 392
Hobhouse, L.T., 10, 13,
166, 173, 183, 392
Hobson, D., 391
Hoebel, E.A., 195, 203, 273,
392
Hoffman, M.L., 106, 392
Hogbin, H.I., 273, 392, 394
Hollis, M., 138, 384, 392,
395, 400
Holmberg, A., 192, 199,
200, 392
Homer, 84, 175, 237, 238,
259, 329; Iliad, 168;
Odyssey, 275
Honigmann, J.J., 187, 188
Horton, R., 22, 138, 157,
392
Hourani, G.F., 279, 294,
357, 358, 392
Houston, R.F.V., 81, 392
Howell, P.P., 245, 246, 392
Howell, S., 191, 200, 392
Hsu, C-Y., 281, 392
Hsun Tzu, 331, 332
Huang Lao, 325
Hume, D., 41, 42, 43, 362,
384, 392
Humphreys, S., 271, 286,
287, 294, 295, 296, 392
Huntingford, G.W.H., 258
Hurley, J.F., 135, 392
Hussey, E., 326, 392
408 Index of Names
Huxley, J., 14, 392
Huxley, T.H., 14, 48, 392
Indra, 237, 325
Ingold, T., 149, 392
Inhelder, B., 98, 103, 392
Irwin, W.A., 328, 392
Isaiah, 327
Isocrates, 349, 393
Itard, J., 55, 393
Izutsu, T., 16, 238, 261, 279,
281, 308, 309, 320, 322,
323, 393
Jackson, M., 221, 225, 239,
251, 252, 256, 257, 258,
263, 267, 268, 393
Jahoda, G., 104, 393
Jaspers, K., 271, 282, 283,
393
Jeremiah, 283, 304, 347
Jesus Christ, 42, 91, 176,
282, 284, 301, 302, 307,
318, 319, 323, 348, 357
Job, 277, 291, 318
John, St, 318, 357
Johnson, A.R., 180, 275,
393
Johnson, Dr Samuel, 74, 75
Johnson, G.A., 148, 393
Jolowicz, H.F., 338, 341,
346, 393
Jones, J.W., 57, 337, 345,
393
Jouvenel, B. de, 78, 79, 393
Jung, C.J., 306
Justinian: Institutes, 85
Kaiser, W.C., 361, 393
Kant, I., and Kantianism,
40, 65, 73, 74, 83, 84, 86,
93, 115, 125, 137, 268,
348, 393
, 279, 280, 393
Kautilya, 333
Keasy, C.B., 114, 401
Keller, C.M., 160, 387
Kemp Allen, C., 337
Keynes, J.M., 42, 379, 393
King, P.M., 100, 102, 393
Kirk, G.S., 326, 393
Kitchener, K.S., 103, 393
Kitchener, R.F., 138, 393
Kitto, H.D.F., 303, 393
Kluckhohn, C., 10, 36, 173,
174, 183, 223, 233, 253,
261, 264, 267, 393
Kneale, W. & M., 293, 394
Koch, K.-F., 394
Koch, K-F., 210
Kohlberg, L., 37, 38, 39, 56,
97, 104, 107, 112, 114,
118, 125, 135, 141, 142,
143, 176, 183, 189, 190,
216, 226, 227, 272, 300,
301, 394; Heinzs
Dilemma, 122, 123, 140,
141, 152, 353; on moral
development, 11825; vs
Piaget, 12529
Koller, J.M., 277, 355, 394
Kraeling, C.H., 393
Kroeber, A.L., 182, 394
Kroll, J.L., 281, 291, 292,
394
Kuhn, D., 114, 394
Kuper, A., 394
Lactantius, 364
Ladd, J., 74, 221, 227, 243,
260, 261, 262, 394
Lambert, N., 386, 401
Langer, J., 114, 394
Langness, L.L., 205, 206,
394
Lao-tzu, 322, 368
Larson, G.J., 325, 394
Laslett, P., 52, 394, 395
Lau, D.C., 335, 383, 394
Leach, E.R., 16, 17, 33, 34,
394
Leacock, E., 147, 188, 394
Leaman, O., 294, 394
Lee, D., 180, 394
Lee, R., 147, 188, 394, 402
Lee, R.B., 191, 193, 194,
197, 198, 201, 394, 396
Leighton, D., 223, 233, 253,
261, 264, 267, 393
Lvi-Strauss, C., 16
Lvy-Bruhl, L., 138, 395
Lewis, C.S., 374, 395
Lienhardt, G., 178, 395
Light, P., 385
Lindblom, J., 291, 395
Linton, R., 33, 34, 395
Lloyd, G.E.R., 138, 290, 395
Lloyd-Jones, H., 383
Locke, J., 35, 50, 51, 52, 53,
54, 55, 56, 59, 89, 96, 395
Long, A.A., 308, 309, 326,
351, 363, 364, 395
Lucretius, 395; De Rerum
Natura, 364
Luke, St, 352
Lukes, S., 21, 138, 305, 306,
384, 385, 392, 395, 396,
400
Luria, A.R., 178, 395
MacBeath, A., 10, 65, 166,
174, 395
MacDowell, D.M., 247,
248, 395
MacIntyre, A., 42, 44, 50,
66, 76, 84, 395
Mackie, J.L., 41, 395
MacPherson, C.B., 51, 53,
395
Maine, H.S., 225, 395
Maitland, F.W., 247, 346,
398
Malinowski, B., 174, 180,
395
Malson, L., 55, 393, 396
Man, E.H., 198, 396
Manu, Laws of Manu, 319,
332, 333, 334, 346, 383
Maqsud, M., 144, 396
Marcus Aurelius, 177, 310,
320, 324, 396
Mariner, J., 136, 151, 240,
244, 253, 259, 263, 265,
273
Marshall, L., 191, 194, 195,
196, 198, 200, 284, 396,
401
Martin, J., 136, 151, 240,
245, 252, 253, 259, 264,
Index of Names 409

266, 274, 396
Martin, J.D., 281, 396
Mascaro, J., 317, 383, 396
Matilal, B.M., 396
Matthew, St, 259, 262, 310,
348
Mauss, M., 177, 178, 396
May, M.A., 128, 129, 391
May, W.H., 26, 397
Maybury-Lewis, D., 396
Mayer, A.E., 357, 396
Mead, M., 35, 396
Meek, C.K., 243, 396
Meigs, A.S., 234, 396
Menander, 286
Mencius, 306, 309, 315,
316, 317, 335, 344, 347,
354, 357, 360, 367, 368,
383
Micah, 319
Middleton, J., 231, 396
Miles, J.C., 276, 387
Mill, J.S., 68, 69, 305, 377,
378, 396
Mines, R.A., 393
Miron, M.S., 26, 397
Misch, G., 303, 396
Miskawayh, 313, 349
Misra, G.S.P., 281, 303, 308,
311, 321, 350, 396
Mo Ti. See Mo Tzu
Mo Tzu and Mohism, 292,
293, 296, 297, 301, 310,
315, 317, 320, 334, 344,
348, 355, 357, 358, 359,
360, 367
Momigliano, A., 283, 330,
396
Monier-Williams, M., 278,
396
Montaigne, M., 54, 396
Moore, G.E., 39, 42, 43, 56,
93, 379, 397
Moore, S.F., 247, 249, 397
Morenz, S., 276, 397
Morris, B., 188, 189, 203,
216, 397
Morris, C., 287, 305, 346,
384, 397
Mugny, G., 114, 387, 397
Muhammad, 177, 285, 294,
297, 301, 302, 304, 309,
357
Mulhall, S., 40, 60, 397
Munro, D.S., 281, 285, 305,
310, 314, 328, 331, 357,
390, 391, 397, 402
Murdoch, I., 86, 397
Murray, G., 322, 388
Nasr, S.H., 325, 397
Needham, J., 281, 325, 328,
331, 339, 385, 397
Needham, R., 167, 233,
249, 397
Nero, 372
Newman, K.S., 151, 397
Nowell-Smith, P., 70, 397
Nozick, R., 60, 397
Nussbaum, M., 40, 397
OFlaherty, W.D., 300, 352,
355, 386, 397
ONeil, R.P., 110, 383
Ogden, C.K., 42, 397
Ong, W.J., 161, 163, 397
Onians, R.B., 180, 397
Opie, L. & P., 227, 397
Oppenheim, A.L., 284, 295,
397
Opper, S., 97, 99, 101, 103,
389
Osgood, C.E., 26, 397
Overing, J., 137, 138, 397
Overton, W.F., 386, 392,
398
Palma, D. de, 386, 399, 401
Panaetius, 353
Parker, R., 234, 236, 398
Parkin, D., 173, 398
Paton, L.B., 304, 398
Paul, St, 312
Peerenboom, R.P., 325,
335, 343, 398
Peristiany, J.G., 238, 239,
385, 398
Perles, P., 339, 398
Peters, R.S., 51, 65, 128,
129, 398
Philo of Alexandria, 33,
283, 359
Piaget, J., 24, 37, 38, 39,
105, 107, 110, 113, 114,
118, 119, 120, 122, 123,
125, 138, 139, 153, 154,
157, 160, 183, 225, 227,
249, 251, 300, 301, 392,
398; on cognitive
development, 97105;
on moral development,
11418; The Childs
Conception of Causality,
154; The Childs
Conception of the World,
154; The Moral Judgment
of the Child, 114; vs
Kohlberg, 12529
Piers, G., 266, 398
Pindar, 286
Pitt Rivers, J., 238, 239, 398
Plato and Platonism, 71,
85, 96, 248, 297, 308, 312,
313, 335, 336, 357, 358,
363, 375, 398; Crito, 323;
Laws, 324, 337, 345;
Phaedo, 307; Republic, 65,
80, 176, 270, 312, 335,
339, 348, 364
Pocock, D.F., 173, 398
Pollock, F., 346, 398
Popper, K., 268, 269, 270,
398
Putnam, P., 191, 398
Pyrrho of Elis, 33
Rackham, H., 318, 385, 398
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 192,
194, 195, 197, 198, 203,
398
Radding, C.M., 398
Radhakrishnan, S., 279,
365, 366, 399
Radin, P., 174
Raju, P.T., 361, 399
Randall, J.H., 327, 399
Rasmussen, K., 199
Raven, J.E., 326, 393
410 Index of Names
Rawls, J., 59, 60, 66, 78, 83,
84, 93, 119, 125, 127, 128,
137, 298, 300, 348, 351,
399; A Theory of Justice,
59
Raz, J., 58, 63, 85, 91, 399
Read, K.E., 10, 168, 169,
178, 180, 181, 182, 212,
214, 215, 225, 239, 244,
399
Redfield, R., 399
Regnemer, J.L., 141, 142,
401
Reichard, G.A., 249, 262,
267, 399
Renteln, A.D., 34, 399
Rhys Davids, T.W., 281,
290, 342, 399
Richards, I.A., 42, 397
Robinson, H.W., 296, 399
Ross, L., 386, 388
Russell, B., 56, 62, 379, 399
Sahlins, M., 171, 172, 189,
399
Samuel: Book of, 334
Sandel, M.J., 79, 80, 84, 399
Sapir, E., 16
Schmidt, P.H., 30, 399
Schwartz, B.I., 280, 283,
289, 291, 292, 301, 310,
314, 316, 318, 319, 331,
357, 368, 399
Scribner, S., 161, 162, 163,
386, 399
Selman, R., 143, 399
Seneca, 372, 399, 400; De
Beneficiis, 322; De
Constantia, 310, 324; De
Ira, 320; De Vita Beata,
320, 322
Seneviratne, H.L., 304, 400
Serjeant, R.B., 281, 400
Service, E.R., 190, 219, 400
Sextus Empiricus, 33
Shakespeare, W.: Merchant
of Venice, 52
Shamasastry, R., 383, 400
Shang Yang, 335
Shastri, H.P., 365, 400
Shastri, M.H., 365, 400
Shaw, G.B., 54
Shylock, 52, 88
Sidgwick, H., 59, 68, 82, 86,
400
Simmonds, N.E., 40, 83,
400
Singer, M.B., 266, 398
Singh, J.A.L., 55, 400
Smith, B.K., 383, 387
Snarey, J.R., 135, 141, 142,
400
Snell, B., 78, 169, 175, 177,
273, 322, 400
Socrates, 163, 176, 282, 296,
307, 314, 320, 323, 330,
357, 358, 364
Solomon, King, 281
Soothill, W.E., 306, 383,
400
Speiser, E.A., 276, 400
Spencer, B., 199, 400
Spencer, H., 42, 43, 400
Sperber, D., 23, 400
Stcherbatsky, T., 317, 366,
367, 400
Stevenson, C.L., 43, 387,
400
Strachey, L., 42, 379
Super, C.M., 226, 242
Swift, A., 60, 397
Tamas, G.M., 84, 400
Tambiah, S.J., 333, 342, 400
Tarn, W.W., 288, 400
Tawney, R.H., 49, 50, 52,
53, 375, 400
Thapar, R., 281, 332, 365,
400
Thucydides, 339, 340, 400
Tocqueville, A. de, 375,
376, 401
Tomlinson-Keasy, C., 114,
401
Torney-Purta, J., 107, 387,
391
Trito-Isaiah, 319
Tsou Yen, 292
Tuden, A., 284, 401
Turiel, E., 112, 114, 125,
126, 128, 129, 386, 401
Turnbull, C., 191, 192, 196,
202, 401
Tyan, E., 279, 401
Tylor, E.B., 20, 35, 166, 172,
314, 401
Ullmann, W., 53, 336, 401
Varuna, 237, 277, 325
Vergote, A., 135, 389
Voyat, G., 113, 114, 401
Waite, R.G.L., 87
Wake, C.S., 10, 401
Waley, A., 306, 307, 314,
318, 322, 401; Book of
Songs, 313
Walzer, R., 361, 401
Warner, W.L., 199, 401
Watson, J.B., 206, 207, 215
Watt, I, 161, 390
Watt, W.M., 281, 285, 304,
401
Weber, M., 287
Weil, A.M., 227, 398
Weil, E., 288, 324, 401
Werner, E.J.C., 402
Westermarck, E., 10, 15,
43, 166, 401
White, C.B., 141, 142, 401
Whitelam, K.W., 275, 281,
334, 402
Whiting, J.W.M., 201, 402
Whitman, C., 310, 402
Whorf, B.L., 16
Whybray, R.N., 291, 327,
402
Wieger, L., 314, 402
Williams, B., 40, 47, 65, 83,
402
Willis, J.T., 386
Wilson, B., 138, 402
Wilson, G., 174, 402
Wilson, J.A., 274, 276, 402
Wilson, R.R., 291, 402
Winch, P., 20, 402
Windmiller, M., 386, 401
Witkowski, S.R., 402
Index of Names 411

Witkowsky, S.R., 16
Wittgenstein, L., 20
Wolfram, S., 173, 402
Woodburn, J., 172, 188,
191, 197, 198, 200, 201,
203, 204, 402
Woodfield, A., 45, 402
Wright, A.F., 361, 402
Yahweh, 304, 327, 352
Yang Chu and Yangism,
297, 317, 357, 359, 360,
362, 36769, 367, 368
Yang, L.-S., 281, 323, 402
Young, R., 31, 277, 403
Zaehner, R.C., 277, 283,
294, 349, 403
Zeno of Citium, 234, 290
Zingg, R.M., 55, 400
Zoroaster and
Zoroastrianism, 283,
294, 302, 349

Index of Topics
Very general topics such as morality, obligation, law and justice are not in-
dexed individually. However, many sub-topics such as injustice and justice,
immanent are indexed, and all these concepts are extensively cross-indexed
under other entries.
Books of the Bible are indexed individually. Books that take the name of a
person (eg, certain books of the Bible or the Mencius) are listed in the Index of
Names. Schools that take their name from an individual (eg, Buddhism, Epicu-
reanism) are indexed under that individuals name.

!Kung. See Kung
Aborigines, Australian, 88,
147, 190, 193, 198, 199,
203, 213, 384
abortion, 88, 372, 379, 381
Abyssinia, 247
Acts of the Apostles, 318,
357
adl, 278, 279
adultery, 192, 194, 197,
202, 208, 214, 216, 223,
250, 252, 253
afterlife, 174, 225, 253
agape, 69, 75, 348, 359
agathos, 175, 237
Agganna Suttanta, 333
agriculture, 9, 25, 51, 135,
139, 146, 14851, 153,
160, 172, 184, 187, 201,
203, 204, 205, 206, 207,
219
altruism, 60, 61, 17072,
171, 172, 183, 196, 199
202, 317, 365
Amhara, the, 232, 265
Andamanese, the, 192, 194,
195, 197, 198, 203
Anglo-Saxons, 247
Apa Tanis, the, 219, 241,
261
Arabs and Arabic, 140,
161, 163, 165, 238, 252,
285, 290, 291, 304, 307,
308, 309, 319, 357, 361,
See also Islam
number system, 27
Arthashastra, 334, 383
Arunta, the, 199
asceticism, 282, 290, 297,
305, 307, 308, 353, 355,
357, 368
Athens, ancient, 248, 290,
339
atman, 327, 349
atomism, 50, 51, 52, 363,
365, 373
atomistic society, 52, 112,
155, 185, 187217, 219,
220, 221, 222, 224, 225,
236, 239, 244, 249, 374
definition, 187
authority, 50, 53, 107, 115,
116, 117, 121, 136, 137,
153, 274
abuse of, 258
and authoritarianism,
89, 112, 126, 139, 188
and hierarchy, 130
and knowledge, 17, 28
and logic, 18
and popular opinion,
378
and relativism, 31
and respect, 118, 210
and rules, 123
and social awareness,
95
childs understandng,
115
conventional, 137
formal, 109, 134
in atomistic societies,
19193
institutional, 18, 189,
191, 210, 219, 271, 273
judicial, 147, 149, 151,
189, 210, 222, 24143,
273, 278
moral, 34, 47, 211, 378,
381
parental, 116, 118, 126,
127, 136, 138, 144,
226, 231, 249, 251, 262
personal, 108, 134
political, 59, 64, 108,
130, 134, 146, 147,
149, 154, 155, 174,
187, 191, 209, 220,
222, 224, 283, 287, 299
rational, 117
religious, 56, 89, 90, 155,
211, 301
resistance to, 238, 366
Index of Topics 413

royal, 295, 343
social, 112, 135, 189, 205,
231, 295, 325
social, 137
traditional, 139, 266,
299, 301
autonomy, 54, 63, 64, 83,
117, 148, 153, 192, 195,
200, 216, 377, 381, See
also morality
Axial Age, 271, 28196,
308, 326
Azande, the, 21, 22, 30,
231, 257
Aztecs, the, 13, 146, 284
Babylon, 274, 295, 324
balance and equilibrium,
32, 70, 76, 77, 78, 84, 124,
216, 240, 242, 245, 247,
252, 272, 276, 279, 281,
320, 326, 380, See also
reciprocity
Barotse, the, 221, 242, 247,
251
Batek, the, 191, 193, 195,
196, 198, 202
Bedouin, the, 279, 358
benevolence, 32022
Bhaghavad Gita, 318, 321,
349, 350, 357, 366, 383
Bhakti movement, 355
Bible, 72, 74, 180, 234, 277,
See also individual
books and Ten
Commandments
big man, 164, 180, 197,
20611, 212, 214, 236,
239, 258
Black Caribs, 142
Borana, the, 232
brahman, 167, 325, 326, 327,
328
Brahmins, 290, 297, 302,
350, 355
calendar, 149, 213, 222
cannibalism, 88, 231, 234
capitalism, 374
Carvaka, 362, 365, 366
caste, 65, 169, 230, 235, 296,
332, 334, 341, 342, 347,
350, 355, 366
categorical imperative, 73,
268, 298, 348, 350, 351,
372
Catholicism, 33
character, 44, 45, 51, 66, 75,
76, 83, 84, 86, 92, 95, 112,
124, 129, 164, 204, 260,
274, 290, 298, 299, 309,
320, 356, 360, 378, 380
moral, 80, 177, 309
chastity, 14, 237, 259
and femininity, 224
Chenchu, the, 192, 193,
195, 196, 202
Chewong, the, 191, 200
Chi-hsia academy, 292
China, 139, 140, 162, 165,
178, 271, 27981, 285,
287, 290, 29193, 296,
297, 300, 301, 306, 307,
309, 310, 311, 313, 316,
317, 318, 320, 324, 325,
331, 332, 339, 347, 350,
351, 359, 362
and the Axial Age, 282
Christianity, 50, 52, 55, 69,
73, 80, 178, 180, 249, 258,
261, 262, 271, 281, 284,
287, 294, 297, 301, 306,
308, 312, 315, 318, 321,
357, 359
Chronicles, First Book, 74
Chronicles, Second Book,
352
class, social, 32, 52, 60, 83,
84, 92, 110, 141, 155, 223,
225, 268, 272, 274, 281,
282, 284, 285, 287, 292,
299, 313, 329, 331, 344,
376, 378
educated, 291
leisure, 289
ruling, 272, 288
classification, 9, 16, 20, 22,
24, 25, 27, 91, 96, 97, 100,
101, 110, 140, 149, 155,
158, 160, 161, 184, 213,
222, 223, 225, 231, 232,
234, 250, 269, 330, 338,
363
cognition. See also formal
operations, concrete
operations, pre-
operational cognition
and sensorimotor
cognition
and compensation, 99,
100, 107
and conservation, 99,
103, 105, 106, 107
commerce, 230, 232, 341,
374
and conflict, 184
and corporate order,
221
and development, 136,
139, 144, 145, 146,
152, 162, 285, 373
and hedonism, 379
and individualism, 38,
285, 286, 303, 304
and Islam, 304
and justice, 78
and luxury, 288
and morality, 136
and other cultures, 286,
287, 289
and self-awareness, 303,
371
and social complexity,
140, 144, 175, 184
and social disruption,
221, 224, 265, 281, 330
and social order, 285
and the division of
labour, 286
and the state, 153, 155,
271
and tradition, 152, 285
and writing, 163
institutions, 154
values, 92, 285
communism, 58, 71, 110,
414 Index of Topics
376, 377
compassion, 62, 87, 129,
172, 202, 277, 300, 314,
315, 320, 321, 322, 342
and femininity, 224
compensation, 58, 81, 164,
189, 204, 208, 209, 210,
211, 213, 220, 245, 246,
247, 248, 249, 255, 273,
323
concrete operations, 99
112, 113, 133, 162
confession, 244, 266, 268
conformity, 29, 82, 153,
190, 195, 252, 272, 306,
324, 378
and development, 159
and fear, 64
and heteronomy, 225
and moral
development, 121
and rebellion, 177
and social pressure, 80,
95, 148, 195, 299
and social structure, 150
and tradition, 254, 378
and virtue, 183
irrational, 125
to rules, 115, 118, 278
conquest. See warfare
conscience, 82, 118, 121,
126, 173, 176, 177, 226,
267, 272, 320
and conformity, 299
and politics, 367
and shame, 214
and Stoicism, 309
internalization, 183
Post-Conventional, 301
social, 84
conscientiousness, 306, 310
conservation. See cognition
conservatism, 126, 381
constitutions, 53, 62, 134
democratic, 112, 134
US Constitution, 89
constructivism, 104, 105
contextualism, 104, 105,
128, 216
contract
legal, 73, 106, 122, 152,
268, 346, 376
social, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60,
73, 76, 78, 95, 122,
141, 300, 364, 374
convention, 31, 47, 52, 63,
67, 112, 114, 125, 126,
130, See also custom
and Conventional
reasoning, 121, 123,
127
and knowledge, 9, 15,
24, 25, 27, 28, 91, 96,
97, 107, 112
and morality, 32, 33, 35,
124, 125, 126, 127
and order, 71
and politics, 58
and Post-Conventional
127
and Pre-Conventional
127
and rules, 118
corporate order, 145, 147,
153, 155, 172, 185, 219
70, 271
and atomistic societies,
188, 193, 208, 210
and corporate liability,
347
and descent, 147
and exchange, 205
and individualism, 216
and moral authority,
271
and morality, 282
and property, 203
and religion, 301
and solidarity, 147
and status, 152, 303
and transcendence, 284
and virtue, 311
cosmology, 149, 154, 167,
189, 203, 219, 222, 223,
224, 228, 269, 271, 301,
302, 315, 324, 325
courage, 35, 65, 75, 83, 85,
129, 175, 176, 177, 196,
238, 256, 285, 298, 299,
31118, 314, 320, 355,
356
and masculinity,
223
and justice, 312
and virtue, 312, 313, 364
custom, 13, 54, 127, 135,
221, 227, 230, 258, 266,
286, 289, 330, 339, 343,
372
and authority, 136, 193
and character, 360
285
and culture, 20, 21
and dharma, 277
and duty, 351
and fashion, 378
and government, 334
and habit, 18
and individual right, 35
and justice, 78, 274
and knowledge, 158
and language, 264
and law, 81, 140, 152,
225
and logic, 18
and morality, 13, 93,
135, 150, 173, 174,
176, 183, 214, 231,
249, 266, 344, 361,
371, 373
and obligation, 173
and reason, 35, 92, 107,
125, 153, 157, 262,
265, 268, 301
and relativism, 31, 284
and reputation, 130
and right, 125, 224
and rights, 254
and social order, 63,
130, 135, 225, 379
and status, 87
Index of Topics 415

Cynicism, 234, 290, 297
Daflas, the, 205, 252
Darwinism, 50
social, 89
debate and cognition, 145,
157, 158, 161, 222, 289,
357, 358, 371, 373
dcalage, 103, 105
Deuteronomy, 277, 321,
347, 357
developmental
psychology, 10, 14, 23,
24, 37, 39, 97, 98, 103,
125, 131, 135, 138, 139
Dhammapada, 310, 322, 349,
383
dharma, 277, 279, 322, 341,
342, 352, 355, 361
dike, 243, 260, 278, 286, 312
Dinka, the, 178
dirt
and disorder, 233, 234
disinterestedness, 51
and ethical discourse,
262
and generosity, 199
and justice, 60
and morality, 50
religious, 91
dispute settlement, 139,
150, 19395, 211, 212,
219, 220, 224, 225, 236,
241, 242, 243, 245, 272,
273, 275, 337, 338, 339,
343, See also mediation
and justice, 76, 78
by adjudication, 148
by authority, 135, 147,
150, 189, 192, 193
by avoidance, 191, 204
by compensation, 204,
210, 211
by confrontation, 164
by mediation, 192
by negotiation, 210
in agricultural societies,
148, 153
division of labour, 27, 136,
145, 146, 153, 156, 159,
184, 188, 286, 335, 374
Doctrine of the Mean, 311,
314, 315, 316, 317, 351,
383
domestication of crops
and animals, 9, 25, 146,
148, 149, 153
duty, 39, 66, 7276, 80, 150,
166, 16869, 229, 263,
275, 277, 360, 376
and appetite, 256
and justice, 76, 77
and moral obligation,
34857
82, 173, 298
and religion, 298
and rules, 66, 262
and status, 286, 341
and taboo, 269
and tradition, 295
and utility, 59, 69, 70, 71
and vengeance, 247
and virtus, 176
Biblical, 165, 361
definition, 164
economic, 374
147
in traditional societies,
258
legal, 82
of rulers, 331, 334, 342
social, 65, 130
to family, 261, 380
to self and others, 59
Ecclesiastes, 352
education. See school and
schooling
egoism, 53, 59, 60, 152, 304,
305, 306, 317, 359, 364,
367
Egypt, 162, 173, 271, 274,
276, 281, 284, 286, 295,
321, 324
elders, 29, 130, 136, 140,
147, 149, 150, 155, 157,
175, 189, 191, 192, 193,
205, 208, 210, 211, 220,
228, 230, 231, 236, 255,
258, 273, 334, 360
England, medieval, 346
Enlightenment, the, 363,
377
equality, 38, 51, 52, 55, 58,
59, 60, 64, 70, 78, 83, 84,
118, 119, 123, 168, 188,
189, 279, 32933, 339,
374, 376, 377, 381
equilibrium. See balance
and equilibrium
equity, 118, 33639
Eskimo, the, 141, 188, 193,
194, 199, 203
ethics
evolutionary, 14
Europe, medieval, 53, 66,
140, 157, 160, 271, 281,
284, 287, 305, 333, 336,
375
Europe, Western, 141
euthanasia, 381
evaluation, nature of, 9, 38,
41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,
67, 69, 92, 96, 114, 132,
164, 179, 214, 215, 225,
295, 305, 310, 332
exchange
220
and competition, 171
205
161
and politics, 53
morality, 189, 216
and social status, 209
and tribute, 220
balanced, 171
ceremonial, 206
generalised, 172
147, 153
416 Index of Topics
of gifts, 147, 164, 183,
189, 198, 208, 213, 220
reciprocal, 130, 147, 148,
164, 171, 213
Exchange
Exodus, 352
exogamy, 146, 219, 229,
231
and incest, 222, 235
fact and value, 4145
fecundity, 287
and femininity, 223
feral children, 55
feudalism, 53, 83, 112, 374
feudism, 334
feuds and feuding, 193,
248, 275, 284, 347
foragers
and shifting cultivators,
203, 216
foraging, 9, 147, 152
and fishing, 148
and morality, 201
190, 203
and social sanctions,
202
and supernatural
beliefs, 202
formal operations, 100
114, 123, 133, 134, 135,
138, 140, 161, 257, 300
free will, 63, 178
freedom, 31, 76, 187, 188,
197, 269
and autonomy, 63
and equality, 60
and formal operations,
101
and morality, 64
and property, 52
and social participation,
64
and the self, 178
definition, 31
moral significance, 63
of thought, 378
personal, 196, 205
sexual, 231
Gahuku-Gama, the, 168,
180, 181, 212, 214, 215,
244
generosity, 35, 44, 51, 58,
67, 75, 79, 80, 85, 116,
147, 169, 173, 175, 196
99, 200, 209, 210, 221,
261, 262, 266, 285, 311,
314, 351, 353
Genesis, Book of, 318
Germany, ancient, 275
gerontocracy. See elders
and morality
gifts, 27, 35, 78, 194, 196,
198, See also exchange
and reciprocity, 171,
172, 198
and social prestige, 173
Gobai, the, 201
Golden Mean, 177, 317
Golden Rule, 93, 97, 119,
121, 152, 169, 183, 227,
262, 348, 349, 350, 353,
354
Gond, the, 241
Great Britain
Victorian, 13
Great Learning, 350
Greece and the Greeks
and balance, 316
and courage, 316
and cultural awareness,
297, 303, 330, 337
and equality, 331
and ethics, 297, 360
and formal reasoning,
293
and harmony, 177, 317
and hedonism, 297, 362
and hierachy, 333
and honour, 239, 285
and human nature, 331
and humility, 320
and individual rights,
300
and individuality, 303
and justice, 165, 278
and law, 260, 342, 343
and mental states, 345
165, 176, 292, 297,
311, 342, 357
and natural rights, 56
and purity, 311
and rationality, 293, 325
and relativism, 286
and religion, 297
and renunciation, 297,
307
and self-awareness, 178,
180, 311
and social contract, 364
and sophism, 290
and Stoicism, 309, 310
and the Axial Age, 271,
281, 282, 283, 290
and transcendence, 288,
296
and urbanization, 287,
288
and vengeance, 247
and virtue, 85, 312, 314,
316
and war, 340, 344
guilt, 62, 250, 266
and heteronomy, 115,
226
and mental states, 345,
346
and obligation, 263
and pollution, 234
and shame, 92, 173, 179,
182, 183, 195, 206,
210, 214, 225, 238,
239, 253, 256, 26668,
315, 343
190, 242
Hadza, the, 191, 197, 198,
200, 201
happiness, 49, 70, 90, 324,
See also utility and
utilitarianism
and character, 298
Index of Topics 417

and duty, 350
and goodness, 42, 43,
266
and natural right, 56
and pleasure, 68, 379
and purity, 263
and religion, 363
and Stoicism, 324
and unhappiness, 226,
363
and utility, 70, 73
and virtue, 86
and wisdom, 177, 300,
308, 312, 327, 330
Aristotle on, 48, 308
collective, 366
individual, 366
Islamic conception of,
312
hedonism, 217, 297, 300,
305, 317, 357, 36269,
373, 374, 379
Hereros, the, 201
hierarchy, 64
and cognition, 108, 109,
110, 111, 112, 120
and complementarity,
222
and egalitarianism, 64,
374
and markets, 49, 374
and power, 205
and religion, 271
134, 145, 146, 149,
150, 166, 224, 284,
332, 333, 373
and the state, 55
cosmic, 325
definition, 222
generational, 228, 258
traditional, 375
Hinduism, 159, 178, 235,
267, 297, 300, 301, 306,
308, 311, 318, 322, 327,
333, 334, 341, 342, 347,
349, 350, 352, 355, 361,
366
Hokhma, 325, 32728
Holiness Code, 304
honour, 23639
Hopi, the, 253, 260, 263,
265, 385
Hosea, 321
hospitality, 136, 166, 262
Huai-nan-Tzu, 368
human nature, 35, 67, 300
and biology, 23, 377
and constraint, 377
and culture, 28, 52, 106
and development, 54, 55
and equality, 32933,
377
and free will, 63
and hierarchy, 51
and individuality, 49,
311
and liberty, 377
166, 169, 359
and natural right, 56
and personal character,
298
and private property, 58
and social order, 51, 55,
56, 63, 88, 93, 166,
169, 182, 314, 325, 377
and teleology, 4548
and the state, 51, 333
and virtue, 176
definition, 24, 27, 28, 45,
52, 89, 152, 166, 264,
300, 324, 329, 330
development, 315
Kants conception, 83
human rights, 38, 57, 58,
84, 88, 123, 125, 132, 141,
374, 380
human/animal
distinction, 45, 47, 55,
67, 68, 69, 71, 83, 85, 86,
87, 88, 96, 201, 202, 222,
229, 230, 233, 234, 235,
251, 256, 329, 330, 331,
332, 351, 357
humility, 31820
hunter-gatherer societies,
9, 25, 135, 14648, 153,
187, 188, 189, 190203,
204, 205, 207, 210, 250,
282
Hutterites, 135
Ibo, the, 247
ideology, 130, 270, 373
and conflict, 134
110, 111, 134, 291, 372
127
and popular
sovereignty, 378
and principle, 126
and self-concept, 112
market, 71, 378
totalitarian, 270
utilitarian, 71
Ifugao, the, 245
immortality. See afterlife
Incas, the, 146, 284
incest, 33, 88, 196, 202, 205,
231, 234, 241, 250
and exogamy, 222, 235
India, 32, 139, 140, 141,
165, 192, 203, 219, 271,
275, 281, 282, 283, 287,
290, 292, 293, 294, 296,
297, 300, 303, 307, 308,
311, 325, 327, 328, 332,
339, 341, 342, 343, 352,
355, 361, 362, 367
indifference
and happiness, 68, 215,
324
362
divine, 301, 362
mutual, 199202, 374
individualism, 4864, 65,
178, 188, 305, 367, See
also liberty
and atomistic society,
147, 190, 196, 201,
418 Index of Topics
204, 205, 221, 226
and commercialism, 38,
285, 304, 373
216, 270, 303
and hedonism, 297, 357,
366
and individuation, 306,
307
and justice, 78
and originality, 306
morality, 189
and reciprocity, 200
and relativism, 31
and religious
experience, 304
and tribal solidarity, 285
and Utilitarianism, 69
liberal, 40, 71, 78, 84,
126, 300
Indo-Europeans, the, 167,
213, 237, 243, 275, 277,
288
Indo-Iranian society, 159
Industrial Revolution, the,
153
infanticide, 88
initiation, 149, 205, 208,
231, 236
injustice, 76, 78, 79, 240,
274, 279, 289
and law, 338
and sin, 177
and virtue, 313
as good, 364
259
social, 152, 299
inner states, 239, See also
self-awareness
and action, 106
and conscience, 226, 268
239, 241, 249, 270, 272
116
and guilt, 173
and individuality, 303
11, 357
and language, 179
and law, 82
and moral
development, 152
182, 253
and motivation, 116
and religion, 175
and responsibility, 170
and rules, 62
and the self, 183
and virtue, 176, 318
awareness of, 102, 113,
122, 130, 176, 177,
180, 183, 190, 217,
225, 239, 272, 299,
371, 373
harmony of, 86, 300
167, 170, 175, 179,
180, 190
insult, 27, 35, 165, 200, 210,
214, 322, 332, 378
intellectual class, 21, 22,
29, 140, 145, 158, 162,
165, 222, 257, 264, 282,
28996, 301, 305, 329,
373
intention, 117, 118, 130,
135, 140, 167, 170, 175,
180, 181, 182, 183, 190,
212, 223, 225, 226, 227,
238, 239, 240, 241, 251,
253, 263, 299, 301, 305,
338, 345, 346, 360, 371,
See also responsibility
and excellence, 84
and judgement, 116
and law, 80, 81, 82
and moral heteronomy,
115
82
and punishment, 78
and responsibility, 13,
93, 24449
and virtue, 91
interest, 17, 79, 360
and crime, 241
and identity, 84
and law, 378
and moral pressure, 82
and others, 190
and self-interest, 47, 48,
49, 50, 52, 58, 60, 61,
75, 77, 86, 91, 142,
172, 187, 190, 200,
216, 226, 260, 305,
339, 340, 359, 364, 366
and the good, 270, 305
collective, 142, 197, 226,
232, 243, 269, 270,
333, 366
conflicts of, 143, 240
of others, 121
reconciliation of, 240
shared, 287
social and economic,
171, 375
intuitionism, 19, 38, 39, 41,
42, 66, 95, 165, 352, 358,
379, 381
Inuit
Copper, 194
East Greendlanders, 194
Iglulik, 194
Iran
Ireland, ancient, 275
irrationality. See also
rationality
and conformity, 125
and disinterestedness,
50, 61
and human/animal
distinction, 234
and primitive thought,
136
Platonic, 312
Index of Topics 419

Islam, 14, 16, 33, 271, 279,
281, 284, 287, 288, 289,
294, 296, 297, 301, 304,
306, 308, 312, 313, 315,
320, 322, 323, 325, 333,
339, 349, 352, 357, 358,
359, 360, 361, See also
Arabs and Arabic
and the pre-Islamic
period, 238, 261
Israel, 91, 122, 135, 140,
180, 271, 274, 281, 282,
283, 287, 290, 291, 296,
297, 304, 307, 311, 321,
323, 324, 327, 347
ius gentium and ius civile,
152, 243, 341
Jains, the, 32, 297, 302, 317
Japan, 141
Judaeo-Christian tradition,
75, 249
Judaism, 178, 294, 301, 306,
311, 338, 347, 358
jurisprudence, 165, 341
justice, 7680, 176
70
and virtue, 312, 313, 364
Hebrew, 277
immanent, 115, 117, 226,
251
Kaguru, the, 230, 231, 233,
235, 256, 257, 262, 384
karma, 317, 365
Kavirondo, the, 245
Kenya, 141, 143, 144, 226,
242, 245
kibbutzim, 135
kings and kingship, 65,
108, 136, 151, 275, 333
241, 242, 269
and inequality, 289
343
and regicide, 354
and righteousness, 275
and social class, 299
Buddhist, 333, 334, 342
Chinese, 276, 325, 333,
334
Egyptian, 274, 275, 276,
336
Hindu, 333, 334, 342,
355
Homeric, 275
Israelite, 274, 277, 334
judicial function, 170,
272, 273, 274, 275
Mesopotamian, 274
Western, 325
Kipsigis, the, 144, 226, 242
Konso, the, 132, 134, 137,
153, 154, 155, 156, 180,
181, 221, 22732, 235,
236, 237, 242, 244, 245,
247, 251, 253, 258, 259,
260, 261, 262, 263, 264,
265, 286, 289
Koran, 56, 163, 307, 323,
339, 352, 361
Kpelle, the, 254
Kshatriyas, 350, 355
Kukukuku, the, 29
Kung, the, 191, 19398,
200, 201, 349
Kuranko, the, 221, 225,
239, 252, 256, 257, 262,
263, 267, 268
Lambert, N., 402
language, 20, 34
academic, 17
analysis, 140
and duty, 73
and duty, 352
and classification, 24
and concrete
operations, 101
and culture, 20
133, 184
101
and isolation, 230
and knowledge, 15, 16,
17, 22, 24, 97
and logos, 326
and moral concepts, 27
and pre-operational
cognition, 98
and relativism, 22
and social definition,
263
and speech, 158
and status, 87
and the State of Nature,
54
Austronesian, 249
European, 238
evaluative, 44, 46, 96
foundations, 364
Hebrew, 352
history, 73
264
Indo-European, 213, 277
juridical, 277
Konso, 259, 260, 264
Kuranko, 263
Latin, 361
moral, 46, 66, 72, 95,
16365, 179, 206, 213,
238, 249, 259, 260,
264, 277, 361
natural, 54
poetic, 301
primitive, 174
social functions, 157
Tauade, 207, 213
Tongan, 259, 263
Last Judgment, 304
law. See also natural law
and morality, 8082
international, 31, 334,
341
rule of, 64, 374
Legalism, 281, 297, 332,
335, 343, 344, 347, 359,
360, 376
Leviticus, 233, 277, 321
lex talionis, 323
420 Index of Topics
liability
and accident, 247
and fault, 345
and intention, 346
and negligence, 345
and resentment, 247
and vengeance, 241
civil, 81
corporate, 347
legal, 248, 346
liberalism, 381
and autonomy, 63
and colonialism, 30
372
and holism, 49
and individualism, 40,
49, 50, 59, 61, 64, 71,
78, 84, 126, 377
and justice, 78
126, 379
and permissiveness, 377
and personhood, 83
and privacy, 306
and punishment, 381
and rules, 84
and the market, 50
and the social contract,
76
liberty, 377, See also
individualism
and child development,
63
and equality, 60, 78
and hierarchy, 375
55
and justice, 60
and liberalism, 59, 78
and liberty of others, 60
and natural right, 56, 58,
122, 372
and republicanism, 374,
375
and social contract, 59,
78
and Stoicism, 324
and the Enlightenment,
376
and the market, 375
individual, 300, 375
Lieh Tzu, 367, 368
literacy, 146, 152, 233, See
also school and
schooling and writing
and cognitive
development, 9, 143,
15963
and collective
representations, 139
and conscience, 173
222
and development, 9, 373
100, 161
and individual liberty,
22, 269
and intellectual class,
21, 145, 165
and moral
development, 39, 89,
165, 169, 172, 175,
176, 185, 271, 302
morality, 185
and self-awareness, 178
166, 167
and social development,
269
in the Axial Age, 283
litigation, 292, 337, 338,
380
logos, 138, 167, 301, 325,
32627, 328, 329, 330,
348, 351, 377
Lokayatas, 297, 317, 362,
36567, 368
Lokayata-shastra, 362
love
and altruism, 61
and cognitive
development, 101
and disinterestedness,
91
and hate, 322
and moral conduct, 91
and moral
development, 115
and morality, 91, 124
and vengeance, 323
as good will, 75
Biblical concept of, 75,
91, 321
Buddhist concept of,
321
Confucian concept of,
314, 320
Hindu concept of, 321,
366
Mohist concept of, 320,
359
of enemies, 196
of humanity, 61, 322
of others, 61, 196, 314,
323, 348
representation of, 180
universal, 355
Lozi, the, 136, 225, 246,
276, 337
Lugbara, the, 231
luxury, 282, 288
lying, 89, 196, 216, 333, 358
maat, 274, 276
magic, 138, 173, 180, 182,
185, 201, 203, 231, 255,
257, 268, 269, 292, 308
Maori, the, 159
market, 49, 50, 53, 61, 71,
79, 152, 221, 230, 373,
374, 375, 378
Marxism, 131
masculinity, 23639
materialism, cultural, 131
matricide, 234
Mbuti, the, 191, 193, 196
mediation, 178, See also
dispute settlement
conventional, 15
divine, 50
Index of Topics 421

211, 220
in corporate societies,
254
informal, 191, 192
institutional, 77, 143,
145, 146, 164, 189,
191, 207, 210, 224,
241, 273
mental, 10, 101, 106,
130, 178, 181
social, 155
merit, 74, 79, 84, 86, 92,
119, 202, 252, 259, 261,
267, 270, 369
Mesopotamia, 162, 271,
284, 295, 324
microcosm and
macrocosm, 325
modal language, 73, 213
modal reasoning, 104, 185
moral objectivity
and universality, 35
moral philosophy, 65
and anthropology, 37
41, 92
and cognitive
development, 95, 96
and duty, 348
and egoism, 86
and good and evil, 67
and moral
understanding, 13
and order, 49, 72
and the categorical
imperative, 73
and the Naturalistic
Fallacy, 42
morality, 6589, See also
autonomy
and religion, 206
autonomous, 119, 120,
123, 125, 126, 183,
239, 300, 301
commercial, 136
heteronomous, 119, 120,
121, 123, 125, 183
Post-Conventional, 372
principled, 123, 127,
17274, 257
religion, 17475
Mutazilites, 294, 358
multicultural societies,
136, 145, 286, 379
murder, 88, 223
245
and homicide, 245, 248,
346
and manslaughter, 212,
244, 245, 247, 345, 346
and pollution, 235, 247,
248
and self-defence, 57
and strangers, 244
and vengeance, 150,
189, 194, 245, 247, 249
attempted, 81
punishment, 81
Murngin, the, 199
Nagas, the, 221, 232, 238,
242, 243, 244, 246, 252
Nakanai, the, 215
Nandi, the, 258
natural law, 55, 56, 131
and cognitive
development, 153
265
and cosmology, 32426
and ethics, 301, 329
and morality, 33645
and religion, 8991
299
natural right, 52, 55, 56, 57,
58, 83, See also human
nature and liberty
Naturalistic Fallacy, 42
Navaho, the, 221, 223, 233,
243, 249, 253, 260, 261,
262, 265, 267
Nazirites, the, 297
necrophilia, 88
Netsilik Eskimo, the, 192,
194, 195, 197, 201, 203
New Guinea. See Papua
New Guinea
New Testament, 56, 75,
312, 318, 321, 352
Nigeria, 144, 243
Nirvana, 317, 318, 357
noblesse oblige, 169
nomos, 337
Nuer, the, 245, 246, 250
obedience, 55, 89, 95, 168
and cognitive
development, 126
and cooperation, 118
and femininity, 224
and heteronomy, 129
and moral realism, 117
and morality, 338
morality, 120, 121
and rank, 150
286, 295
147, 210
Piagets theory, 127
to convention, 126, 127
to divine authority, 173,
315
to parental authority,
135, 251
to rules, 276
Old Testament, 56, 75, 165,
291, 296, 308, 309, 311,
315, 318, 319, 321, 323,
325, 327, 334, 347, 352,
357, 361
Ontong Java, 273
opinion, public, 82, 167,
173, 183, 191, 193, 195,
239, 252, 269
oracles, 21, 30, 257
Palestine
Roman, 281
Paliyans, the, 189, 192, 196,
199, 200
Pandaram, the, 203
Papua New Guinea, 29,
422 Index of Topics
141, 164, 168, 180, 181,
185, 205, 20616, 266,
385
parricide, 234
Peloponnesian War, 330,
339
personality, 379
and feral children, 55
and happiness, 49
and leadership, 205
and social relationships,
287
and transcendance, 296
and virtue, 85
147, 180, 201
structure, 85, 92, 140,
180, 301, 318
Piaroa, the, 136, 137
pollution, 182, 202, 223,
227, 23336, 251, See also
purity
and birth, 236
and blood, 236, 247, 248
and death, 229, 236
and homicide, 247, 248,
249
and symbolism, 229
Chinese, 311
Post-Conventional
reasoning, 122, 123, 127,
183, 185, 300, 301, 372,
See also morality
Prabodhacandrodaya, 365
Pre-Conventional
reasoning
and individalism, 121
pre-operational cognition,
98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104,
106, 107, 111, 113, 123,
133, 153, 160
prescription, 39, 41, 42, 43,
44, 57, 92, 112, 125, 126,
154, 166, 170, 190, 221,
251, 258, 278, 342, 350,
351, 352, 356, 361, 366
pre-Socratic philosophers,
324, 330
prestige, 60
and affiliation, 345
and civilization, 288
and competition, 205
and convention, 261
and equality, 188
and gifts, 173
and killing, 209
and knowledge, 193
chiefly, 192, 205
priests and priesthood, 50,
155, 174, 175, 271
220
and law, 225
and pollution, 235, 247
and the accumulation of
knowledge, 158, 295
as intermediaries with
God, 245, 327
functions, 223, 295, 302,
352
in the Axial Age, 319
inherited, 222
status, 332
primitive
defined, 22
privacy, 148, 305
prohibition, 194, 195, 202,
214, 338
and law, 338
and moral realism, 116
and pollution, 311
and punishment, 202,
203
Chinese, 311
functions, 177, 250
moral, 32
of killing, 81
sexual, 34, 250
promises, 65, 73, 74, 76, 80,
82, 90, 259, 268, 318, 321,
323, 353
property, 27, 35, 51, 52, 53,
141, 165
and cognitive
development, 184
203, 221, 254
and labour, 53
and litigation, 292
121
and natural right, 57, 58
morality, 123
and rights, 55
and social life, 58
and social structure,
139, 148, 153
communal, 58, 190
148, 190, 191, 198,
201, 204
in China, 343
rights, 56, 58
social definitions, 71
theory of, 54, 58
proscription, 234
Protestantism, 50, 89
Proverbs, 277
Providence, 377
Psalms, 277, 357
punishment, 170, See also
responsibility
and civil law, 81
and compensation, 213
and conscience, 226
and Conventional
morality, 273
and deserts, 150
and expiation, 117, 127
and guilt, 77
and intention, 117
and justice, 170, 276,
281, 297
and law, 82, 164, 241
43, 297, 337
and legalism, 91
Index of Topics 423

and liberalism, 381, 382
and moral autonomy,
118, 126
115
and moral realism, 117,
226
and order, 77
morality, 120, 121,
123
and prohibitions, 202,
203
and reform, 381
and responsibility, 78,
117, 126, 24449
and rules, 72, 77
and sin, 24953
and social healing, 241
43
and taboo, 213
Biblical conceptions of,
91, 304
Chinese, 297, 343, 354
collective, 117, 347
Confucian, 343
divine, 91
expiatory, 226
fear of, 21, 91
functions, 381
164, 191, 192, 194,
195, 202
in corporate order, 224
in the afterlife, 225
institutionalisation, 77,
78, 145, 164
Piaget and Kohlbergs
theories, 125, 126
proportional, 77, 170
proportionality, 334
shame and self-
punishment, 267
supernatural, 24953
purity, 182, 223, 227, 229,
23336, 269, 283, 299,
310, 311, 342, 353, See
also pollution
Qu'ran. See Koran
rationality. See also
irrationality
and logos, 326
and primitive thought,
138
and social structure,
137, 294
human, 55, 136, 328
Islamic, 357, 358
of authority, 117
of nature, 45, 46, 56
rationalization
of morality, 173, 349
of religion, 302
of society, 145, 155, 269
realism
conceptual, 101, 102,
106, 111, 116, 117,
154, 363
moral, 11418, 126, 225,
242, 251
reciprocity, 27, 35, 221, See
also exchange and
Golden Rule
and conflict, 199
261
and Darwinism, 50
and distribution, 119
and individualism, 200
and justice, 76, 77, 119,
164, 169, 247
and kinship, 168, 171
130, 174, 214
and punishment, 118
and scientific reasoning,
137
and social structure, 64,
71, 92, 172
balanced, 171, 199, 200,
205, 220, 224, 264
classification, 171
development of, 171,
172, 183
generalized, 171, 172,
189, 220, 224, 232, 244
143, 147, 164, 199,
202, 214
negative, 171
relativism, 1336
cultural, 1530, 37, 41,
91, 92, 124, 128, 138,
158, 164, 215, 216, 286
moral, 96, 124, 150, 164,
216, 371, 372
strong and weak, 18, 30,
373
relatvism
moral, 3036
religion, 8991
and brotherhood, 172
and civilization, 377
and conflict, 52
222
and hierarchy, 222
and knowledge, 222
and law, 225
and morality, 17475,
206, 249, 361
and order, 234
and rationalization, 302
and renunciation, 308
and spirituality, 267
and taboo, 203
and transcendence, 300,
301
174, 205, 206, 249, 308
Renaissance, 38, 45, 50, 84,
140, 375
renunciation, 29799, 305,
308
repentance, 86, 267
representation
collective, 17, 18, 20, 22,
23, 26, 29, 93, 130,
131, 138, 143, 154,
158, 160, 161, 184, 302
424 Index of Topics
representations
collective, 132
republicanism, 373, 374
and ethics, 296
and liberty, 374, 375
and virtue, 176
respect, 27, 194, 226, 250,
290, 377
and deference, 120
and duty, 73
and mediation, 192, 211,
273
for authority, 115, 123,
225
for convention, 126
for dogma, 90
for elders, 139, 147, 191,
192, 193, 195, 208,
210, 211
for individuals, 123,
188, 192, 378
for law, 117, 141
for morally right, 141
for other cultures, 31
for others, 197
for parents, 226
for rules, 82, 115, 116,
123, 268
for social institutions, 62
for tradition, 139
for virtue, 128
mutual, 118, 119, 121,
169
social, 64
vs instrumentalism, 120
responsibility, 66, 201, 345
241, 269
and democracy, 348
and free will, 63
and goodness, 210
and intention, 13, 80, 82,
93, 130, 24449, 371
and justice, 16970
and law, 80, 82
and liberalism, 381
and property, 53
and punishment, 78, 126
collective, 117, 202, 224,
227, 269, 347
development of, 183
legal, 130, 345
moral, 81, 82, 115, 182
objective, 115, 117, 167,
177, 190, 226, 241, 251
personal, 50, 135, 268,
347
republican, 374
social, 92, 181
subjective, 118, 130, 167,
177
retribution
supernatural, 224
revelation, 90, 297, 308
and doubt, 91
and Islam, 357, 358, 359
and Judaism, 359
and reason, 357, 358
and supernatural
authority, 301, 352,
358
and world-views, 91
reward, 27, 61, 78, 79, 91,
116, 119, 150, 172, 177,
213, 225, 237, 255, 261,
284, 285, 307, 322, 350
supernatural, 91, 253,
323, 325
Rg-Veda, 327
right and wrong, 15, 82,
129, 132, 216, 225, 232,
265, 273, 307, 315, 358,
360, 379
Rome and the Romans, 13,
140, 165, 178, 260, 278,
287, 288, 297, 300, 310,
312, 322, 330, 333, 340,
341, 342, 343, 344, 360
rubbish man, 208, 209, 210,
239
sacred, 301
law, 341
objects, 147, 198, 230,
235, 258
order, 241, 373
persons, 236
places, 33, 222, 229, 234,
235, 237
texts, 159, 351
vs secular, 341
sacrifice, 149, 222, 280, 321,
327, 359, 368
and purification, 235
animal, 149, 182, 222,
229, 355
human, 13, 146, 182,
252, 371
religious, 149
ritual, 275, 327
self-, 50, 59, 60, 61, 172,
177, 237
salvation, 67, 296, 300, 302,
308, 321, 324, 332
sangha, 297, 342
Sarakatsani, the, 239
scalar stress, 148, 158, 222
Scandinavia, ancient, 275
Sceptics, 33, 309
school and schooling
and abstract thought,
158
and authority, 109, 144
and cognitive
development, 142,
15963
and conflict, 109
220, 222
100
and moral
development, 144
108, 157
self, the, 17782
self-awareness, 18, 93, 113,
140, 153, 173, 178, 239,
299, 300, 304, See also
inner states
self-control, 86, 261, 308,
313
and harmony, 318
Index of Topics 425

and morality, 342
and virtue, 75, 177
development, 129
sensorimotor cognition, 98
sex
and modesty, 34
and pollution, 311
and sexual freedom, 231
and sexual relations, 27,
72, 88, 128, 231, 235,
250, 256
and status, 210
prohibitions, 34, 177,
202, 250
shamanism, 137, 174, 222,
244, 292
shame. See guilt
Shang dynasty, 275, 276,
345, 354
shariah, 352, 357
shifting cultivators, 9, 189,
20316
simplification, social, 150,
15356, 160, 302
sin, 32, 91, 117, 177, 237,
24953, 266, 267, 317,
318, 319, 320, 321, 324,
347, 355, 356, 366
and pollution, 235
sincerity, 263, 328
Siriono, the, 192, 199, 200
socialism, 60, 84
Sophism, 301, 357, 363
soul, 67, 175, 177
and body, 307
and God, 304, 326
and human/animal
distinction, 331
and immortality, 253
and morality, 253
and salvation, 300
and sin, 346
and social structure, 240
and the world, 307
and vice, 312
Buddhist, 317
Epicurean, 363
existence of, 362
Greek, 312
Hindu, 327
Islamic, 357
Lokayata, 365
Protestant, 50
structure, 180, 312, 313
tranquillity, 309, 310
specialisation. See division
of labour
spirituality, 112
and ethics, 174
and merit, 267
and renunciation, 305
and self, 130, 178, 239
and society, 375
303, 333
Buddhist, 342
Spring and Autumn
Period, 281, 291
state of nature, 48, 5058
state, the, 51, 55, 58, 62, 65,
107, 108, 139, 140, 146,
15056, 157, 169, 175,
226, 265, 271, 272, 273,
274, 284, 285, 286, 292,
295, 299, 333, 336, 337,
342, 343, 347, 350, 354,
360, 376, 378, 379
theories of, 33336
stealing, 27, 34, 35, 56, 65,
71, 74, 86, 91, 117, 123,
129, 135, 166, 171, 174,
189, 194, 196, 197, 202,
205, 207, 209, 211, 214,
215, 216, 223, 241, 242,
244, 261, 267, 333, 353
Stoicism, 45, 176, 287, 288,
290, 297, 301, 306, 309,
312, 320, 324, 325, 326,
348, 350, 351, 353, 362,
372, 373, See also Cicero
Sudras, 350, 355
suffrage, universal, 58
Sufism, 297
suicide, 253, 346, 368
Sumbanese, the, 233
supernatural, 91, 173, 174,
175, 182, 189, 205, 213,
219, 222, 223, 224, 301
retribution, 24953
sanctions, 2023, 269
symbolism, 149
and analysis, 153
and boundaries, 235,
236, 250
and classification, 250
and collective
representation, 184
219, 224, 228, 257, 264
and institutions, 153,
227, 22829
and monuments, 150
and order, 251
and property, 52
and rights, 52
257
development, 98, 156
158
religious, 305
social and natural, 154,
213, 219, 222, 224
sympathy, 55, 116
and ethics, 262
and the Golden Rule,
349
Confucian, 320, 349
188, 200
Taiwan, 141
Tale, the, 160, 248
Tallensi, the, 168
Talmud, 338, 359
Tangu, the, 210, 214, 215,
216, 385
tao, Taoism, 167, 292, 297,
301, 307, 310, 323, 325,
32829, 344, 357, 359,
367, 368, 377, See also
Way, the
Tauade, the, 164, 165, 180,
181, 20616, 207, 215,
426 Index of Topics
227, 236, 239, 259, 265
teleology
48
and method, 38, 43, 363,
373
and moral philosophy,
96
temperance, 85, 86, 129,
176, 312, 313, 316, 351,
355, 356
and justice, 312
Ten Commandments, 82,
89, 128, 173, 261, 352
tenderness, 237, 314
termperance
and virtue, 312
theft. See stealing
Tikopia, the, 220
Tonga, 136, 151, 240, 244,
252, 253, 259, 263, 265,
269, 273, 372
Torah, 165, 297, 323, 338,
348, 352
totalitarianism, 64, 269
and corporate, 270
trade. See commerce
Trobrianders, the, 180
truth
and authority, 307
and consistency, 277
and convention, 337
267, 269
and harmony, 317
and honesty, 34, 65, 73,
74, 116, 117, 214, 216,
251, 263
and justice, 272
300
and order, 72, 225, 263,
264, 277
and peace, 264
and prejudice, 34, 35
and reason, 358
and relativism, 15, 19,
21, 33
and revelation, 358
and self-evidence, 56
and social context, 216
and thought, 78
and wisdom, 312
awareness of, 35
Chinese, 361
Christian, 357
Egyptian, 276
ethical, 35, 38, 41, 263,
301, 358
Hebrew, 277
Hindu, 353
Lokayata, 366
Lozi, 276
Mesopotamian, 276
moral, 36
pursuit of, 50
scientific, 17, 35
Socratic, 307
universal, 329
Vedic, 277
Western, 375
Tswana, the, 194, 201
Turiel, E., 402
Turkey, 122
United States of America,
122, 141
universals, 165, 363
and human rights, 38
299, 300
conceptual, 39
cultural, 22, 26, 33, 34,
88, 92, 96, 146, 178
developmental, 9, 24,
133
experiential, 26
human, 362, 366
legal, 337, 338
linguistic, 213
moral, 14, 27, 31, 34, 35,
59, 73, 77, 102, 122,
123, 169, 206, 217,
272, 278, 300, 314,
334, 342, 345, 358
near-, 34
rational, 52
religious, 250
social, 27, 52, 72, 244,
270, 298, 329
statistical, 34
Upanishads, 308, 327, 349,
366
urbanization, 145, 146, 152,
162, 184, 221, 273, 281,
286, 287, 288, 289, 290,
371, 373, 374
utilitarianism, 49, 6571,
74, 77, 82, 84, 88, 96, 126,
127, 228, 234, 296, 300,
351, 374
utility, 59, 65, 6771, 122,
298, 310, 348, 355, 376
Vai, the, 161, 162
Vaisyas, 350
values, cultural, 14, 31, 37,
48, 92, 343, 371, 372
Vedas, 277, 308, 325, 327,
365, 366
vengeance, 32, 80, 147, 183,
189, 191, 194, 195, 204,
208, 210, 211, 212, 241,
245, 247, 248, 32224,
340, 346, 381
and balance, 77
vice, 282
violence, 34, 35, 53, 58, 164,
188, 196, 202, 205, 210,
211, 214, 216, 223, 232,
238, 260, 265, 270, 278,
342, 355, 376, 378, 379
virility, 223, 314
virtue, 8286, 17577, 311
24
cardinal, 85, 176, 312,
313, 315, 316, 322, 355
Wales, 247
warfare, 136, 145, 146, 152,
Index of Topics 427

184, 205, 221, 224, 232,
265, 281, 284, 287, 288,
340, 344, 371, 373
and morality, 136
Warring States period,
281, 291, 292, 331
Way, the, 177, 292, 307,
317, 352, 356, 357, 359,
See also tao
Middle, 317, 357
Noble Eightfold, 357
Windmiller, M., 402
Wintu, the, 180
wisdom, 176
and authority, 261
and character, 75, 298
and education, 159
and elders, 210
and happiness, 308, 330
and humility, 319
and intellectuals, 291
and justice, 312
and moderation, 326
and Taoism, 310
and the Good, 85
and tranquillity, 309,
310, 312
and virtue, 75, 177, 183,
308, 312, 313, 314,
315, 316, 364
Old Testament, 32728
philosophical, 312
practical, 312
wisdom literature, 291,
296, 308
witches and witchcraft, 21,
30, 35, 147, 241, 244, 253,
257
wolf children. See feral
children
writing, 29, 132, 146, 161
and administration, 163
and calculation, 28
and cognitive
development, 161,
162
and law, 163, 337
and legalism, 356
163, 337
wrong. See right and
wrong
yoga, 308, 318

Evolution of Moral Understanding

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Evolution of Moral Understanding

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Evolution of

You might also like