this is relevant to our social mind inference systems. Whether the
banknote was crumpled or not and whether it is in your left- or your
right-hand pocket are nonstrategic pieces of information and there-
fore do not enter into these thought processes.
Now remember that supernatural agents are tacitly represented as
having full access to strategic information. That is, people who have
thoughts about these agents and represent a particular situation tend
to assume that the agents represent all the strategic information, all
the aspects of the situation that are relevant to the social mind. As an
illustration, consider the example above. In such a case, people who
[190] have a concept of god or spirit will probably not wonder whether the
god/spirit knew that the banknote was crumpled. But they will proba-
bly assume that the god/spirit knows who has the banknote, knows
that they took it and knows why they did that.
This is why supernatural agents are quite naturally connected to
moral judgements. If you have a concept of agent that has all the strate-
gic information, then it is quite natural to think of your own moral intu-
ition as identical to that particular agent's view of the situation. This is
the way religious moral judgements work in practice. To Christians for
instance it is obvious that in situation (b) above, God knows all the rele-
vant facts and thereforeknows that it is a (partly) justified theft. But the
situation would work in the same way in other places. The Kwaio con-
sider it a major moral violation to defile other people's shrines, in partic-
ular to utter words that are abu(forbidden) in these shrines. Whenever
this happens, ancestors know about it and therefore know that it is a bad
action. Moral intuitions suggest that if you could see the whole of a situ-
ation without any distortion you would immediately grasp whether it
was wrong or right. Religious concepts are just concepts of persons with
an immediate perspective on the whole of a situation.
So concepts of gods and spirits are made more relevant by the
organization of our moral understandings, which by themselves do
not especially require any gods or spirits. What I mean by relevant is
that the concepts, once put in this moral context, are easy to repre-
sent and that they generate many new inferences. For instance, most
people feel some guilt when acting in a way that they suspect is
immoral. That is, whatever their self-serving justifications, they may
have the intuition that an agent with a full description of the situation
would still classify it as wrong. Now thinking of this intuition as
"what the ancestors think of what I did" or "how God feels about
what I did" provides an easy way of representing what is otherwise
RELIGION EXPLAINED