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

Frontiers in Psychology
Rita Astuti, Maurice Bloch

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...Continue Reading

References

Feb 23, 2008·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Maurice Bloch
May 4, 2011·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Scott Morrison, Kevin Walker
Aug 16, 2011·American Journal of Physical Anthropology·Kenneth D RoseJonathan I Bloch
May 16, 2012·Topics in Cognitive Science·Rita Astuti, Maurice Bloch

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Citations

Mar 5, 2016·Frontiers in Psychology·Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller
Sep 10, 2015·Topics in Cognitive Science·Andrea BenderNancy J Nersessian
Oct 7, 2015·Frontiers in Psychology·Paulo SousaLauren Swiney
Apr 20, 2016·Frontiers in Psychology·Paulo Sousa, Lauren Swiney
May 6, 2016·Frontiers in Psychology·Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller
May 13, 2017·Experimental Psychology·Alex Wiegmann, Magda Osman
May 31, 2019·The Behavioral and Brain Sciences·Samuel P L VeissièreLaurence J Kirmayer
Nov 19, 2015·Frontiers in Psychology·Olivier Le GuenPenelope Brown
Oct 18, 2019·Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science·Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller
Oct 5, 2021·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·H Clark Barrett, Rebecca R Saxe

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