As far as anthropologists know, people in most places conceive of
some supernatural agents as having some interest in their decisions.
This can take all sorts of forms. Christians for instance consider that
God expects some particular kinds of behavior and will react to depar-
tures from the norm. People who interact with their ancestors, like the
Kwaio, have a much less precise description of what the ancestors want,
but it is part of their everyday concerns that the adaloare watching
them. In either case, people do not really represent whythe ancestors or
gods would want to sanction people's behavior. It is just assumed that
they will. When I say that this way of thinking about morality is "domi-
nant" I simply mean that it is constantly activated and generally implicit. [173]
It is the most natural way people think of the connection between pow-
erful agents and their own behavior. The "legislator" and "model" rep-
resentations are icing on the cake, as it were. Why is that so?
A first reason may well be that both the "legislator" and "paragon"
accounts of morality are by nature insufficient. For instance, religious
codes like the Christian Commandments specify a simple list of pre-
scriptions and prohibitions. But the range of situations about which
people have moral intuitions or uncertainties is far greater than this.
This is true regardless of how many prescriptions and prohibitions
you add to the list, even if you have the 613 mitzvothof the Torah. The
problem with all religious "codes" is that they must be general enough
to be applicable without change to all possible situations. This is why
in most places where you find such religious codes (generally in liter-
ate cultures), you also find a whole literature that adds nuances to their
application. This happened in Christianity, in Judaism with the develop-
ment of Talmudic scholarship, and in Islam as well, where the various
prescriptions of the Qur'an are supplemented by a vast compilation of
the Prophet's specific pronouncements. In a paradoxical way, as the
divinely sanctioned code is expanded and specified in this way by spe-
cialized scholars, we also observe that many believers have only the
vaguest knowledge of even the original laws. It is a source of some sur-
prise to outsiders that many devout Christians cannot remember the
list of Commandments and that many Muslims have a rather hazy
grasp of what the Qur'an actually recommends. But all this should not
be too surprising. What matters to people is what is relevant to practi-
cal concerns, that is, to particular situations; and that is precisely
where the codes lose much of their relevance.
The same problem besets paragon-inspired morality, for symmetri-
cal reasons. The models are always too specific. The stories mention
WHYDOGODSANDSPIRITSMATTER?