Michel argues that moral reasoning cannot be measured against a single abstract standard. Kant, Habermas and Piaget locate ethics in sweeping accounts of human development; Vodou, long caricatured in the West as the absence of morality altogether, shows instead how thoroughly ethics is shaped by culture, history and gender.

Her evidence comes from Karen McCarthy Brown's study of Alourdes, known as Mama Lola, a manbo serving a congregation in Brooklyn. Brown, a white anthropologist who was herself initiated, wrote from friendship and proximity rather than at a distance, letting the religion speak in its own terms. Michel uses that material to build the analytic framework Brown did not set out to supply.

What emerges is a code of ethics that is inherited rather than written down, rooted in African values, and carried in large part by women. Their standing as spiritual and social leaders, Michel suggests, is one reason Vodou has been so persistently disparaged.