This is an essay about values. It is concerned with providing a socially and psychologically realistic answer to the question of where people find values in the world. I mean it to be a contribution to the rapidly growing anthropological discussion of morality, suggesting that the topic of values should be central to it. It is values, I think, that at least in part account for the desire we have to do what is good. What people actually do will depend not only with how they balance the competing desires different values awaken within them, but how they balance these desires with the feelings of duty different moral facts also arouse. In the background of this essay is the notion that there is some relationship between values, desires and moral actions that is worth investigating. I begin by discussing the social scientific loss of faith in the notion of culture and the problem this raises of how to talk about where values exist in the world. What I want to propose here is that if we accept that values are not likely to be as fully shared as anthropologists once supposed because we can no longer assume they are part of an enduring shared phenomenon called culture - then we will need to face a new the question of where in the world values exist. I want to suggest that values exist in the first instance in what I am going to call exemplars or examples, or at least that people first encounter them in the world in this form. I ultimately want to suggest that examples are concretely existing realizations of single values in their fullest forms.
Moral anthropology; Social psychology of morality; Culture; Ethnography