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Richard Shweder, a cultural psychology at the University of Chicago, does his research in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, on the Bay of Bengal. His research shows that when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity. When people think in terms of the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals. When people think using the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership. When people think in terms of the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred….
Purity is not just about the body, it is about the soul. If you know that you have divinity in you, you will act accordingly: you will treat people well, and you will treat your body as a temple. In so doing, you will accumulate good karma, and you will come back in your next life at a higher level – literally higher on the vertical dimension of divinity. If you lose sight of your divinity, you will give in to your baser motives. In so doing, you will accumulate bad karma, and in your next incarnation you will return at a lower level – as an animal or a demon. This linkage of virtue, purity, and divinity is not uniquely Indian. Ralph Waldo Emerson said exactly the same thing: “He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.”
-- Jonathan Haidt, “Higher Ground,” Psychotherapy Networker
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