I believe that most research on morality so far has been limited to the study of the morality that is dominant among educated Westerners. Beyond those requirements, we want to maximize people's freedom and autonomy, and minimize the intrusions of the state, or of other people, in people's affairs. In my dissertation research I found that this thin morality did indeed describe the moral judgments of college students at the University of Pennsylvania, who thought that people should be free to eat their dogs, shred their flags, and have sex with dead animals, as long as they did these things in private. However outside of academic environments and the San Francisco Bay area, this thin morality appears to be rare. In stable communities with a long past or a long future morality tends to grow thicker, and to govern much or all of life.
People care what other people do, even in the privacy of their own homes.
Brazilians, and especially people of lower SES, cited issues such as respect, decency, and naturalness as important moral virtues. Eating your dog is sick and disrespectful, even if he was already dead and you ate him in private. I believe this picture provides an alternative to the reason-based approaches that grow out of the Kohlbergian tradition and attribution theory. These rules of purity and pollution are ubiquitous in traditional religious communities, including those of Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. The reading of facial expressions of emotion, in India and the U.S. .