Abstract

The confrontation of anthropology and ethics has not been a peaceful one. Entrenched attitudes, hardened lines, frequent anxieties about trespass have tended to prevail. Philosophers may allow anthropology, like any other science, to putter about in the external investigation of causes and conditions of morality, perhaps even to play an ancillary role in the practical decisions of normative ethics, but they are prone to rule it out as an interloper in the reflective analysis of theoretical ethics. We should like to suggest that anthropology has a contribution to make, through both its content and its method, in the latter domain; and paradoxically, that it is through the light it throws on theoretical ethics that anthropology makes its profoundest contribution to normative ethics.