PhD candidate Brett Heasman reflects on Professor Richard Shweder’s (University of Chicago) talk in honour of the Department of Social Psychology’s 50th anniversary

Heasman, Brett

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18/05/2015The cultural psychology of morality: Reflections onProfessor Richard Shweder’s talkblogs.lse.ac.uk /psychologylse/2015/05/18/the-cultural-psychology-of-morality-reflections-on-professor-richard-shweders-talk/PhD candidate Brett Heasman reflects on Professor Richard Shweder’s (University of Chicago) talk inhonour of the Department of Social Psychology’s 50th anniversary.In the second lecture of 2015 celebrating fifty years of Social Psychology at the LSE, Professor Richard Shwederdelivered his talk The Moral Challenge of Robust Cultural Pluralism. Shweder’s talk examined the tension thatexists between robust cultural pluralism and dedicated liberalism. This challenge is especially embodied byanthropologists and psychologists, who are rooted in a liberal ethics of autonomy but yet at the same time often tryto represent the moral thinking of others who are rooted in, what Shweder terms, the ‘illiberal ethics of communityand divinity’. The lecture therefore had three aims: (1) to highlight the limits of liberal moral concepts for judging themoral foundations of diverse cultural traditions; (2) to ask what a highly developed social intelligence should look likein a complex multicultural society; and (3) to open a long overdue conversation about the provocative ‘equality-difference paradox’, which suggests that embracing cultural diversity and promoting economic equality are notharmonious social policy goals.Shweder’s lecture began by observing that individuals areembedded in social and cultural contexts, and these contexts canaffect the discovery of moral foundations within diverse culturaltraditions. To illustrate his point he presented the audience withfour statements with differing levels of moral breaches. Thestatements included (1) a patient who was refused hospitaltreatment because they did not have enough money; (2) a childthat continues to sleep with their parents up until the age of ten; (3)a son that has a haircut the day after his father’s death; and (4) awidow that eats fish two to three times a week. For westerncultures rooted in a traditional liberal perspective, ranking theseverity of such moral breaches tends to correspond with the orderin which the statements were given. However, according toShweder who has conducted over thirty years of research on Hinducultures in India, it is possible for these moral breaches to beviewed quite differently. For example, the concept of women eatingfish after their husband has passed away could be deemed highlyimmoral – fish may be perceived to arouse the senses and as suchcould heighten sexual appetite and jeopardise the spiritual devotion a woman shares with her deceased husband.This contrasts with the liberal autonomy perspective which views the failure to administer aid to a patient because oftheir economic status as the most highly immoral act.Such differences in cultural reasoning underpin theories of modern social psychology, where social behaviours areunderstood to be highly contextualised to the beliefs, practices and interactions in which they take place. In a worldfilled with plurality of meaning and cultural diversity, multiple representations of the same social object can exist bothbetween cultures, and within them (e.g. cognitive polyphasia). However Shweder’s contribution is to examineresearchers themselves, who go into diverse cultures to try to accurately and fairly represent the views of natives.The problem Shweder identifies is that the liberal ethics of autonomy embodied by researchers are no morelegitimate than the community-based morality of the people they study. If one wishes to understand the moral1/2foundations of diverse cultures, then a more expansive theoretical notion of the moral domain is required, and onein which the illiberality of practice is not read as indicative of morality.For Shweder the culmination of such moral tensions led to what he terms the equality-difference paradox, whereembracing lifestyle diversity and promoting economic harmony are not compatible goals. This is because the goal ofeconomic equality does not take into consideration the social and cultural capital advantages of community life.Indeed, through illustration of the Kiryas Joel Jewish community in New York State, Shweder demonstrates thatindividual financial capital is often measured as low, yet at the community level there is wealth within institutions.Importantly, the principles of economic liberal autonomy would conflict with many community-based conceptions ofmorality, and de-prioritize the values that make Kiryas Joel a diverse culture relative to the rest of New York state,and indeed America. Thus, for Shweder the equality-difference paradox can be summarised as thus: the more weembrace economic equality the more we will erode cultural differences; conversely the more we embrace culturalpluralism, the more we must accept income inequalities. Although cultural diversity and economic equality are twolong-running discourses in the social sciences, Shweder believes they are interrelated, and thus social scientistsmust consider carefully how to embrace one while promoting the other.The lecture was chaired by Associate professor of Social Psychology, Dr Alex Gillespie, with Dr Bradley Franks(Department of Social Psychology) and Professor Anne Phillips (Department of Government) as discussants.Video embedded from LSE YouTube Channel Copyright © 2015 London School of Economics2/2

The cultural psychology of morality: reflections on Professor Richard Shweder’s talk

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