 The failure to offer an operational definition of morality or moral judgment may help explain the widespread but dubious assumption in contemporary anthropology, noted by James Laidlaw (2016: 456), that altruism is the essential and irreducible core of ethics. But Laidlaw also notes that many of the features of what Bernard Williams (1985) described as “the morality system”—features that Williams himself criticized as the parochial result of a secularization of Christian values—are in fact widely shared outside of the West. This state of affairs leads Laidlaw to ask the crucial question: 