Department of Anthropology and Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021 Nov 22;376(1838):20200288. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0288. Epub 2021 Oct 4.
Cross-cultural research on moral reasoning has brought to the fore the question of whether moral judgements always turn on inferences about the mental states of others. Formal legal systems for assigning blame and punishment typically make fine-grained distinctions about mental states, as illustrated by the concept of , and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less 'mind-minded' than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.
跨文化道德推理研究提出了一个问题，即道德判断是否总是取决于对他人心理状态的推断。分配责任和惩罚的正式法律制度通常会对心理状态进行精细的区分，这一点可以通过 概念来体现，而美国和其他地方的实验研究表明，日常道德判断也会利用这种区分。另一方面，人类学家认为，有些社会的道德观念不考虑心理状态，并提出了民族志和实验证据来支持这一说法。在这里，我们反对一些社会在道德方面比其他社会“更不关心心理状态”的观点。我们提出了一种情境可变性观点，取代了关于心理解读在道德中作用的文化主要效应假说，认为心理状态在道德判断中的作用取决于情境和判断的原因。根据这一观点，对于一个判断来说，哪些心理状态是相关的，哪些是不相关的，这是特定于情境的，而那些似乎是文化主要效应的现象，更好的解释是文化与情境的相互作用。本文是“合作的语言：声誉和诚实信号”主题特刊的一部分。
