extremely vague. That is, most of o u r m o r a l i n t u i t i o n s are clear but
their origin escapes us, because it lies in mental processing that we
cannot consciously access. Seeing these intuitions as someone's view-
point is a simpler way of understanding why we have these intuitions.
But this requires the concept of an agent with full access to strategic
information.
All this may explain why the "interested party" notion is vastly
more widespread and more active in people's actual thinking than the
"legislator" or "exemplar" connections. The interested party model is
the assumption that gods and spirits have access to all relevant infor-
mation about what we do and thereforehave the moral opinions that [191]
we get as intuitions. As I said at the beginning, we know that religious
codes and exemplars cannot literally be the origin of people's moral
thoughts. These thoughts are remarkably similar in people with dif-
ferent religious concepts or no such concepts. Also, these thoughts
naturally come to children, who would never link them to supernat-
ural agency. Finally, even religious people's thoughts about moral mat-
ters are constrained by intuitions they share with other human beings,
more than by codes and models.
To sum up, then: Our evolution as a species of cooperators is suffi-
cient to explain the actual psychology of moral reasoning, the way
children and adults represent moral dimensions of action. But then
this requires no special concept of religious agent, no special code, no
models to follow. However, once you have concepts of supernatural
agents with strategic information, these are made more salient and rel-
evant by the fact that you can easily insert them in moral reasoning
that would be there in any case. To some extent religious concepts are
parasiticupon moral intuitions.
WITCHES AND MISFORTUNE
When I was working in Cameroon I heard of hundreds of cases of
accidents and suspicious deaths that could only be explained, in peo-
ple's view, by the action of witches. So-and-so had fallen from a tree,
although he was a good climber. This or that woman still had no chil-
dren though she did all it takes. Someone had almost drowned in the
river when a dugout canoe capsized. Someone else had been even less
lucky and was run over by a truck. I was told that "there is more than
meets the eye" in each of these cases; and the "more" in question only
WHYDOGODS ANDSPIRITSMATTER?