<p>Looking past the misleading label “ancestor worship” to the moral import of ancestor regard, and expanding our view of the moral beyond the ethical, we can find numerous forms of responsibility (not only ethical but personal, cultural, historical, and religious) and moral status (not only as fellow persons but as rulers, dependents, targets of moral opportunity, symbolic figures, and theoretically supreme beings) in which ancestors are morally considerable. Thus we gain a better appreciation of the moral cogency of an attitude or bundle of attitudes that is plausibly foundational for culture and religion, though lacking endorsement in modern Western culture. A further argument for viewing ancestor regard as essential to our moral life is that our recognition of moral authority and expectation of enforcement of moral norms are rooted in our attitude toward ancestors even when our official standards and procedures are impersonal: abstractions like God and Justice are imagined as Ancestor-like when invoked as moral authorities, and retribution is most compellingly imagined as what the most benignly detached elders would impose. While there is reason to associate ancestor regard with excessive conservatism and reinforcement of patriarchy, ancestor regard can also help in remedying such problems.</p>