Macbeth and the supernatural

Macbeth and the Supernatural
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliations

Macbeth and the Supernatural
One of the fundamental ideas in Macbeth is the distinction between human nature and outer action as well as the inner life experience. The European warrior does not know how to endure torture. The two lives, the outer and the inner have different qualities as well as culture ADDIN CSL_CITATION {“citationItems”:[{“id”:”ITEM-1″,”itemData”:{“DOI”:”10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.07.008″,”ISBN”:”1090-5138″,”ISSN”:”10905138″,”abstract”:”Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural survey data from a global sample of 87 countries to show that beliefs about two related sources of supernatural monitoring and punishment – God and the afterlife – independently predict respondents’ assessment of the justifiability of a range of moral transgressions. This relationship holds even after controlling for frequency of religious participation, country of origin, religious denomination and level of education. As wel…