The causal cognition of wrong doing: incest, intentionality, and morality

Abstract

The paper concerns the role of intentionality in reasoning about wrong doing. Anthropologists have claimed that, in certain non-Western societies, people ignore whether an act of wrong doing is committed intentionally or accidentally. To examine this proposition, we look at the case of Madagascar. We start by analyzing how Malagasy people respond to incest, and we find that in this case they do not seem to take intentionality into account: catastrophic consequences follow even if those who commit incest are not aware that they are related as kin; punishment befalls on innocent people; and the whole community is responsible for repairing the damage. However, by looking at how people reason about other types of wrong doing, we show that the role of intentionality is well understood, and that in fact this is so even in the case of incest. We therefore argue that, when people contemplate incest and its consequences, they simultaneously consider two quite different issues: the issue of intentionality and blame, and the much more troubling and dumbfounding issue of what society would be like if incest were to be permitted. This entails such a fundamental attack on kinship and on the very basis of society that issues of intentionality and blame become irrelevant. Using the insights we derive from this Malagasy case study, we re-examine the results of Haidt’s psychological experiment on moral dumbfoundedness, which uses a story about incest between siblings as one of its test scenarios. We suggest that the dumbfoundedness that was documented among North American students may be explained by the same kind of complexity that we found in Madagascar. In light of this, we discuss the methodological limitations of experimental protocols, which are unable to grasp multiple levels of response. We also note the limitations of anthropological methods and the benefits of closer cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co‐operation

“…It brings anthropologists together from across the breadth of the discipline and, teasing out the methodological challenges of comparative research, affords the further possibility of contributing to interdisciplinary large‐scale inquiry (cf. Astuti & Bloch 2010; 2015; Luhrmann 2017; 2020; Luhrmann, Padmavati, Tharoor & Osei 2015). Though the form of debate lends itself to splitting, between lumping and splitting, perhaps a lumpier and fairer conclusion is that most good anthropology does a bit of splitting and a bit of lumping too.…”

Diversity as Asset

“…The work presented here was either directly based on such fieldwork or based on data collected during such fieldwork. Ethnographic fieldwork, which is the core method of most anthropological work, is often perceived as purely subjective, and hence disregarded as “unscientific.” But ethnographic fieldwork, and the participant observation and open interviewing on which it is based, is much more than collecting anecdotes and telling stories; it is a long‐term engagement with a group of people during which the ethnographer “learns to move, speak, eat, sleep, dance, trade, fish, plant, tend animals, attend births and funerals, and so on, competently, as if she was a member of that community” (Astuti & Bloch, , p. 2).…”

“…If one takes seriously the insight that considerable proportions of knowledge are implicit and that cognition is situated, distributed, embodied, and grounded in various other ways, then this type of “cultural apprenticeship” provides privileged access to comprehension and an indispensable foundation for any kind of serious (cross‐) cultural research. It is essential for arriving at reasonable hypotheses (e.g., Agar, ; Astuti & Bloch, ), for understanding how participants interpret the tasks they are asked to do (Stenning, ), for ensuring ecological validity (Astuti & Bloch, ; Hutchins, ), and ideally even for coming up with new research questions and paradigms (Nersessian, ; Nersessian, Kurz‐Milcke, Newstetter, & Davies, ; Osbeck, Nersessian, Malone, & Newstetter, ).…”

Campos Relacionales De Las Experiencias De Conocimiento Ritual Entre Los Huicholes De México

“…Nuestro propósito principal es explorar las diversas formas en que el acto del conocer implica entrelazamientos de intencionalidades con el potencial de comprometer seres, artefactos y fenómenos. Investigaciones antropológicas acerca de la religión y el pensamiento (Astuti y Bloch 2015;Berliner y Sarró 2008;Bloch 1998Bloch , 2012Severi 2002Severi , 2014 han demostrado que el aprendizaje y la transmisión ocurren a menudo en contextos de interacción social y no solo dependen de las capacidades cognitivas de la mente humana. En esta perspectiva, el estudio de las dimensiones performativas de los fenómenos sociales (Bauman 2012;Bauman y Briggs 1990;Goffman 1981;Zigon 2015) abre un camino para comprender cómo las experiencias de conocimiento pueden constituir campos relacionales de acciones (Bateson 1936;Houseman y Severi 1998).…”