How Unshared Evaluative Understandings Serve to Affect Behavior

Moral or aesthetic judgments affect behavior, when they do, on the basis of two different sorts of understandings. One of these is "values," the evaluative understandings concerning what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Unlike these, the other sort is made up of descriptive understandings concerned with how people actually evaluate what one does and what the social consequences of behavior are likely to be.

These two sorts of understandings can, and sometimes do, affect the indi-

vidual in similar or identical ways. This happens when the individual holds evaluative understandings that would lead him to act in ways that he understands others to view as he does.

The two sorts of understandings, however, sometimes do not work together. This happens as the result of the actor believing that the evaluator holds evaluative understandings concerning the behavior at issue different from his. One way, and a common one, this occurs arises from the role relationship of the judged and the judge. Thus, understandings that hold that men having secret wives (see chap. 8) is a bad thing coexist in the culture with understandings saying it is satisfying and rather delightfully manly.^[3] Men who make such marriages understand many others to condemn them, but their own view is that such marriages (at least their marriage) are acceptable and, since they are permitted by Islam, quite free of sin or blame.

What seems important about the partial independence of the two sorts of understandings is that either can function independently of the other. It is obvious that people are affected by ideal understandings that they hold even if others do not share them. It may be less obvious that ideal understandings people do not share can also affect their behavior through the effect of descriptive understandings concerned with how others evaluate. So long as actors care about the evaluations of the likely evaluators, the evaluations the latter are understood as likely to make will affect what the actors do regardless of how accurate the understandings may be. Even should no one in the group personally understand secret wives and disregard of others' rights as intrinsically bad, the belief that they do may well affect what those who care about their views do.^[4]