What About Culture and Development?
Across cultures, self-serving interests tends to be considered as wrong or bad, negatively evaluated, and reprehensible. All children are exposed to this norm even if, in some human societies, this norm is expressed in paradoxical individualistic ways. Attached to this fundamental and universal ethics law is the subjective sense of fairness, what individuals consider their right share of the resources and what they are entitled to. Fairness pertains to the strong, often elusive sense we have of who deserves what and why in relation to others. As elusive as it might be, this sense is manifest remarkably early in development. And this is true regardless of vastly different social and cultural environments. In human ontogeny and across cultures, from five years of age, individuals from all cultures have developed all the basic ingredients to face and deal with others’ as well as their own moral conundrums. They step right into the main plot of the human drama that, from time immemorial, plays out in myths, oral tales, and tragic representations across all human cultures.