  Some important efforts along those lines have in fact been made. A prominent example is Richard Brandt’s study (1954) of the Hopi people, which revealed differences in basic moral attitudes between the Hopi and white Americans that could not, he thought, be explained with differences in non-moral beliefs. (See Moody-Adams 1997 for a critique, and Abarbanell and Hauser 2010 and Barrett et al. 2016 for two more recent examples.) An attempt to argue that there is empirical evidence for the existence of radical moral disagreement that has been widely discussed in recent years has been made by John Doris, Alexandra Plakias and Stephen Stich (Doris and Plakias 2008a; Doris and Plakias 2008b, and Doris and Stich 2007). They appeal to research conducted by the social psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett (1996) about why certain types of violence among non-Hispanic whites are more common in the American South than in the North. Cohen and Nisbett attribute this difference to the existence in the South of a “culture of honor”, which permits harsh responses even to minor insults. As for why such a culture is more prevalent there, Cohen and Nisbett point to the fact that early European migrants to the United States settled in different regions. Many who went to the South were descendants of people whose morals had been forged in herding economies (in Scotland, for example), where a reputation for being prone to violent retaliation lessened the risk of having one’s cattle stolen.