ABSTRACT
The scene of confrontation thus shifts to the basic category of the moral itself. Traditional ethics in analyzing its normative uses thinks in terms of a single meaning for “moral”. In the variegated field of normative ethics, stretching from simple deciding of particular duties or desirabilities to selection of ideals and self- commitments, its implications are manifold. The effect on theoretical ethics is more systematic. It emerges sharply in the changes taking place in the use of the term “moral’. To the anthropologist the lack of a sharp definition of “moral” presents both a dilemma and an advantage. There are no sharply defined criteria by which to delimit the search for cross-culturally comparable phenomena, but there is a more open, and perhaps a fruitfully less ethnocentrically constricted area of inquiry. Anthropological transcription of theorizing in the informalist-linguistic mode yields comparable insights. This realm concentrates largely on the conceptual organization of moral experience in relation to justification patterns.
