gods and the mental instincts that create them 249of judging people’s behavior and choosing a course of action, the interested-
party model is largely dominant. 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. The Christians, for instance,
consider that God expects some particular kinds of behavior and will react to
departures 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 theadaloare watching them. In either
case, people do not really represent why the 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 dominant I simply
mean that it is constantly activated and generally implicit. It is the most natural
way people think of the connection between powerful agents and their own
behavior. The legislator and exemplar representations both have their limits.
Explicit moral codes are often too abstract to provide definite judgments on
particular cases (this is why scholars often augment them with a tradition of
commentary and exegesis); conversely, exemplars provide examples that are
too specific to be easily applied to different circumstances.
More important, however, is the fact that there is something intuitive and
natural in the notion of agents that are attentive and responsive to the way
people behave. Indeed, this notion may be rooted in the way moral intuitions
are developed from an early age. A conventional view would be that children
acquire moral concepts by generalizing and gradually abstracting from social
conventions. In this view, children start by noticing correlations between spe-
cific courses of action (e.g., beating up one’s sibling or being noisy during
class) and sanctions. They then abstract general principles of right and wrong
from these specific cases. Also, children are described as building moral feel-
ings by internalizing people’s emotional reactions to their actions.^27 Both mod-
els may have underestimated the child’s intuitive access to specifically moral
dimensions of actions. Indeed, psychologist Eliot Turiel showed that even pre-
schoolers have a good intuitive understanding of the difference between social
conventions and moral prescriptions (so that beating up people is wrong even
if no one told you so, while being noisy is wrong only if there was an injunction
to keep quiet).^28 Also, children found it much easier to imagine a revision of
majorsocial conventions (e.g., a situation where boys wore skirts) than a re-
vision ofminormoral principles (e.g., a situation where it would be all right to
steal an eraser). Finally, children make a difference between moral principles
and prudential rules (do not leave your notebook near the fireplace). They
justify both in terms of their consequences, but assume that social conse-
quences are specific to moral violations.^29
So experimental studies show that there is an early developed specific
inference system, a specialized moral sense underlying moral intuitions. No-
tions of morality are distinct from those used to evaluate other aspects of social