Us And Them: Shifting Moral Provinces

Abstract

A line of thought, tracing from Aristotle through Aquinas to a narrow reading of Freud into modern scholarship about strict social constructivism, holds that people from different backgrounds possess insurmountable cultural differences and that people are blank slates, waiting to be written on and defined by culture and personal experience. As a result, such thinkers suggest, talk of “human nature” as endemic to the species is a mirage. Different ways of perceiving based on different cultures should pose insurmountable obstacles to understanding people from different places and with different experiences.

For Sigmund Freud, life with others is hard. For Emile Durkheim, life with others is easy.

Elliot Turiel¹