Jamie

2019-03-12 12:55:42

This morning, I came across a Quartz article discussing Oliver Scott Curry, an anthropologist who lectured at Oxford in 2012 on what he called the "universal rules of morality."

Curry’s group studied ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, across over 600 sources. The universal rules of morality are:

• Help your family
• Help your group
• Return favors
• Be brave
• Defer to superiors
• Divide resources fairly
• Respect others’ property

This list may not be comprehensive. For instance, the article notes that Paul Bloom published a critique of Curry's work that "that the authors of the Current Anthropology study do not sufficiently explain the way we come to moral judgements—that is, the roles that reason, emotions, brain structures, social forces, and development may play in shaping our ideas of morality." Then again, Bloom is a psychologist, and it follows that he would be looking for the "why" in analyzing these matters, when what Curry and his team offered was a matter of "what," without regard to the formations of these behaviors.

I did take interest in the last point in particular. The seven principles are universal across all studied groups, yet the use of the word "property" can be misleading: what Curry is really citing here would be better termed personal possessions, a notion that extends into all tribal environments and contrasts with what we might call "titled" property under the legal codes of civilizations. Not only do many tribal societies not "respect" property rights in the sense of land or water ownership, they in fact may reject the very idea of such arrangements. This is sharply contrasted with the possessions of a particular person, items to which ownership is readily attributed and whose loss is generally unquestioned as theft unless a trade is made.

In any case, I find the list at least a valid starting point, if not the end-all of moral definition.

An Oxford researcher says there are seven moral rules that unite humanity

"Everyone everywhere shares a common moral code. All agree that cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do."

^qz.com