The social character of ethics is best revealed by exploring the complex dynamics linking individuals’ freedom to moral requirements. In this article, we consider James Laidlaw’s influential proposal that an anthropology of ethics makes freedom central to what is distinctively ethical in human life, but we argue that it unduly restricts the proposed scope of anthropology. This account of freedom is both overly cognitive, focusing on reflection, viewed as involving distance, decision, reasoning and doubt, and too individualistic, downplaying the importance of freedom’s normative background and excluding from consideration many documented forms of ethical experience. We propose instead an alternative, more open-ended conceptualization of freedom, distinguishing a concept of freedom that differs from its widely varying conceptions, and drawing on ethnographic material from the Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan and elsewhere to illustrate multiple ways in which the constitution of selves and normative constraints impinge on one another.

通过探索将个人自由与道德要求联系起来的复杂动力，可以最好地揭示道德的社会特征。在本文中，我们考虑了詹姆斯·莱德劳（James Laidlaw）的有影响力的建议，即人类学伦理学应将自由置于人类生活中独特的伦理学的中心，但我们认为这过分地限制了人类学的拟议范围。对自由的这种描述既是过度的认知，集中于反思，被认为涉及距离，决策，推理和怀疑，又过于个人主义，低估了自由的规范背景的重要性，并没有考虑许多文献形式的伦理经验。相反，我们提出了另一种更开放的自由概念，以区别与广泛不同的自由概念不同的自由概念，