Oliver Scott Curry discusses the relationship between morality and cooperation. Topics include the importance of kinship and mutualism, reciprocity and moral strategies, contests and displays of power, types of cooperation and morality, and analyzing cooperative moral traits in 60 cultures.
Morality is all about cooperation and consists of various strategies designed to promote different types of cooperation and the common good.
Ethnographic data analysis shows that cooperative behaviors are universally considered morally good in different cultures around the world, supporting the idea of universal moral goodness.
Deep dives
Morality as Cooperation
According to this podcast, morality is all about cooperation. The speaker argues that morality consists of various strategies designed to promote different types of cooperation and the common good. These strategies come in different forms, such as instincts, intuitions, institutions, and cultural norms, but collectively they motivate social cooperation and altruistic behavior. The speaker emphasizes that when people think about what is right or wrong, they are essentially considering the cooperative move to make in a given situation. The podcast highlights the idea that morality and cooperation are inseparable, with moral principles serving as the criteria to evaluate others' behavior. This perspective aligns with the views of various scholars, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers who recognize the importance of cooperation in moral systems.
Morality as Universally Good
The podcast provides evidence from an analysis of ethnographic data that supports the idea of morality as universally good. The speaker and their colleagues examined paragraphs from the Human Relations Area Files, which contain ethnographic accounts from different cultures around the world. The research focused on seven cooperative behaviors: kin altruism, mutualism, reciprocity, mutual assistance, division, deference to prior possession, and ritual contests. The findings indicate that these cooperative behaviors were consistently considered morally good, with no examples of them being morally bad in any of the cultures analyzed. The podcast highlights that these cooperative moral values are present in most societies, regardless of geographical location. While there may be some variation in the emphasis placed on different moral values, the overall trend supports the notion of universal moral goodness.
Ethics in Cultural Context
The podcast acknowledges that moral systems are not identical across cultures but rather reflect the value of different types of cooperation in different contexts. The analysis of diverse cultures revealed that moral values align with the social and ecological conditions of each society. For example, cultures with strong kinship ties place greater emphasis on family values, while societies with more fleet interactions prioritize reciprocity and fairness. The podcast also recognizes that the dataset used for the analysis was not exhaustive and limitations exist in terms of serendipity, variations in data collection, and constraints of the codes used to evaluate moral valence. Nonetheless, the findings challenge extreme versions of moral relativism, suggesting that moral values are not fundamentally different or completely arbitrary across cultures.
Future Research and Implications
The podcast concludes by discussing future research directions and the need to gather new data from contemporary populations to test the theory of morality as cooperation. The speaker highlights the importance of investigating additional moral values and behaviors, exploring cultural variations in moral emphasis, and leveraging statistical methods to control for non-independence of observations. By treating morality as a scientific endeavor and applying rigorous scientific methods, the podcast suggests that we can gain a deeper understanding of human nature and what it means to be moral.
