The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict

The Culture of Morality examines how explanations of social and moral development inform our understandings of morality and culture. People universally develop judgments that entail deep understandings of issues of welfare, justice, and rights, and such judgments stand alongside people’s conceptions of social systems and realms of personal choice. Drawing on different cultures, the author shows that people in positions of lesser power in the social hierarchy, such as women and minorities, often oppose cultural arrangements and work to subvert and transform the system. Generalizations often made regarding the cultural sources or morality in traditions and general orientations like individualism and collectivism serve to obscure the heterogeneous nature of people’s judgments and interactions. Analyses of the moral and social problems faced in many societies require recognition of people’s multiple moral, social, and personal goals and of the ways social arrangements provoke opposition from those treated unfairly.