The seven moral rules that supposedly unite humanity — Quartz 5/3/20, 2:51 pm

BE GOOD

An Oxford researcher says

there are seven moral rules
that unite humanity
March 6, 2019

By Jenny Anderson
Senior reporter, Editor of How to be Human

REUTERS/DESMOND BOYLAN

In 2012, Oliver Scott Curry was an anthropology lecturer at

the University of Oxford. One day, he organized a debate
among his students about whether morality was innate or
acquired. One side argued passionately that morality was
the same everywhere; the other, that morals were different
everywhere.

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The seven moral rules that supposedly unite humanity — Quartz 5/3/20, 2:51 pm

“I realized that, obviously, no one really knew, and so

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decided to find out for myself,” Curry says.

options Seven years later, Curry, now a senior researcher at Oxford’s

Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, can
offer up an answer to the seemingly ginormous question of
what morality is and how it does—or doesn’t—vary around
the world.

Morality, he says, is meant to promote cooperation. “People

everywhere face a similar set of social problems, and use a
similar set of moral rules to solve them,” he says as lead
author of a paper recently published in Current
Anthropology. “Everyone everywhere shares a common
moral code. All agree that cooperating, promoting the
common good, is the right thing to do.”

For the study, Curry’s group studied ethnographic accounts

of ethics from 60 societies, across over 600 sources. The
universal rules of morality are:

1 Help your family

2 Help your group

3 Return favors

4 Be brave

5 Defer to superiors

6 Divide resources fairly

7 Respect others’ property

The authors reviewed seven “well-established” types of

cooperation to test the idea that morality evolved to
promote cooperation, including family values, or why we
allocate resources to family; group loyalty, or why we form
groups, conform to local norms, and promote unity and
solidarity; social exchange or reciprocity, or why we trust
others, return favors, seek revenge, express gratitude, feel

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The seven moral rules that supposedly unite humanity — Quartz 5/3/20, 2:51 pm

guilt, and make up after fights; resolving conflicts

through contests which entail “hawkish displays of
dominance” such as bravery or “dovish displays of
submission,” such as humility or deference; fairness, or
how to divide disputed resources equally or compromise;
and property rights, that is, not stealing.

The team found that these seven cooperative behaviors

were considered morally good in 99.9% of cases across
cultures. Curry is careful to note that people around the
world differ hugely in how they prioritize different
cooperative behaviors. But he said the evidence was
overwhelming in widespread adherence to those moral
values.

“I was surprised by how unsurprising it all was,” he says. “I

expected there would be lots of ‘be brave,’ ‘don’t steal from
others,’ and ‘return favors,’ but I also expected a lot of
strange, bizarre moral rules.” They did find the occasional
departure from the norm. For example, among the
Chuukese, the largest ethnic group in the Federated States
of Micronesia, “to steal openly from others is admirable in
that it shows a person’s dominance and demonstrates that
he is not intimidated by the aggressive powers of others.”
That said, researchers who studied the group concluded
that the seven universal moral rules still apply to this
behavior: “it appears to be a case in which one form of
cooperation (respect for property) has been trumped by
another (respect for a hawkish trait, although not explicitly
bravery),” they wrote.

Plenty of studies have looked at some rules of morality in

some places, but none have attempted to examined the
rules of morality in such a large sample of societies. Indeed,
when Curry was trying to get funding, his idea was
repeatedly rejected as either too obvious or too impossible
to prove.

The question of whether morality is universal or relative is

an age-old one. In the 17th century, John Locke wrote that
if you look around the world, “you could be sure that there

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The seven moral rules that supposedly unite humanity — Quartz 5/3/20, 2:51 pm

is scarce that principle of morality to be named, or rule of

virtue to be thought on …. which is not, somewhere or
other, slighted and condemned by the general fashion of
whole societies of men.”

Philosopher David Hume disagreed. He wrote that moral

judgments depend on an “internal sense or feeling, which
nature has made universal in the whole species,” noting
that certain qualities, including “truth, justice, courage,
temperance, constancy, dignity of mind . . . friendship,
sympathy, mutual attachment, and fidelity” were pretty
universal.

In a critique of Curry’s paper, Paul Bloom, a professor of

psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, says
that we are far from consensus on a definition of morality.
Is it about fairness and justice, or about “maximizing the
welfare of sentient beings?” Is it about delaying
gratification for long-term gain, otherwise known as
intertemporal choice—or maybe altruism?

Bloom also says that the authors of the Current

Anthropology study do not sufficiently explain the way we
come to moral judgements—that is, the roles that reason,
emotions, brain structures, social forces, and development
may play in shaping our ideas of morality. While the paper
claims that moral judgments are universal because of
“collection of instincts, intuitions, inventions, and
institutions,” Bloom writes, the authors make “no specific
claims about what’s innate, what’s learned, and what arises
from personal choice.”

So perhaps the seven universal rules may not be the

ultimate list. But at a time when it often feels like we don’t
have much in common, Curry offers a framework to
consider how we might.

“Humans are a very tribal species,” Curry says. “We are

quick to divide into us and them.”

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The seven moral rules that supposedly unite humanity — Quartz 5/3/20, 2:51 pm

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