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Intentionality, morality, and the incest taboo in Madagascar
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Sousa, Paulo and Swiney, Lauren (2016) Intentionality, morality, and the incest taboo in Madagascar. Frontiers in Psychology, 7 . 494. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00494 ISSN 1664-1078.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00494
Abstract
In a recent article (Astuti and Bloch, 2015), cognitive anthropologists Astuti and Bloch claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent as to whether considerations of intentionality are relevant to moral judgments concerning incest and its presumed catastrophic consequences: when making moral judgments about those who commit incest, the Malagasy take into account whether the incest is intentional or not, but, when making moral judgments relating to incest’s catastrophic consequences, they do not take intentionality into account. Astuti and Bloch explain the irrelevance of intentionality in terms of incest entailing such a fundamental attack on the transcendental social order that the Malagasy become dumbfounded and leave aside considerations of intentionality. Finally, they claim that a similar dumbfound reaction is what is involved in the moral dumbfounding concerning incest that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found in the US. In this article, we argue that (i) Astuti and Bloch are unclear about many aspects of their claims (in particular, about the moral judgments at stake), (ii) they do not provide sufficient evidence that considerations of intentionality are deemed irrelevant to moral judgments relating to incest’s presumed catastrophic consequences (and hence for the claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent), (iii) their hypothesis that conceiving of incest as an attack on the transcendental social renders considerations of intentionality irrelevant lacks coherence, and (iv) the extension of their explanatory account to the moral dumfounding of American students in Haidt’s well-known scenario of intentional incest is unwarranted.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Life Sciences (2010- ) | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Incest -- Madagascar, Intentionality (Philosophy), Ethical problems | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Frontiers in Psychology | ||||||||
Publisher: | Frontiers Research Foundation | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1664-1078 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 7 April 2016 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 7 | ||||||||
Article Number: | 494 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00494 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 18 May 2016 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 18 May 2016 |
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