Why do moral rules exist

Many claim that there is a necessary connection between morality and religion, such that, without religion in particular, without God or gods there is no morality, i. Divine Command Theory is widely held to have several serious flaws.

Most think that right and wrong are not arbitrary -- that is, some action is wrong, say, for a reason. Aristotle, and most of the ancient Greeks really had nothing to say about moral duty, i.

All action leads to some end. This is pleasure or happiness. Jeremy Bentham -- the first to formulate Utilitarianism -- did not distinguish between kinds of pleasures. Crucially, there were no counter-examples — no societies in which any of these behaviours were considered morally bad.

So, among the Amhara, 'flouting kinship obligation is regarded as a shameful deviation, indicating an evil character'. In Korea, there exists an 'egalitarian community ethic [of] mutual assistance and cooperation among neighbors [and] strong in-group solidarity'. Among the Maasai, 'Those who cling to warrior virtues are still highly respected', and 'the uncompromising ideal of supreme warriorhood [involves] ascetic commitment to self-sacrifice…in the heat of battle, as a supreme display of courageous loyalty'.

The Kapauku 'idea of justice' is called 'uta-uta, half-half…[the meaning of which] comes very close to what we call equity'. And among the Tarahumara, 'respect for the property of others is the keystone of all interpersonal relations'. The study also detected 'variation on a theme' — although all societies seemed to agree on the seven basic moral rules, they varied in how they prioritised or ranked them. The team has now developed a new moral values questionnaire to gather data on modern moral values, and is investigating whether cross-cultural variation in moral values reflects variation in the value of cooperation under different social conditions.

According to co-author Professor Harvey Whitehouse, anthropologists are uniquely placed to answer long-standing questions about moral universals and moral relativism. Future work will be able to test more fine-grained predictions of the theory by gathering new data, even more systematically, out in the field.

The full paper ' Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies ,' can be read in Current Anthropology.

Skip to main content. One day, he organized a debate among his students about whether morality was innate or acquired. One side argued passionately that morality was the same everywhere; the other, that morals were different everywhere. Morality, he says, is meant to promote cooperation. All agree that cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do.

The universal rules of morality are:. The team found that these seven cooperative behaviors were considered morally good in Curry is careful to note that people around the world differ hugely in how they prioritize different cooperative behaviors. But he said the evidence was overwhelming in widespread adherence to those moral values.

Plenty of studies have looked at some rules of morality in some places, but none have attempted to examined the rules of morality in such a large sample of societies.