Recent work in moral psychology has begun to acknowledge that culture may play a large role in shaping people’s moral values. For instance, how an individual construes of herself in relation to her social group can affect her broader orientation toward moral concepts (Shweder, Mahapatra & Miller, 1997; Miller, 1993; Moghaddam, Slocum, Finkel, Mor & Harré, 2002). Specifically, the two orientations toward morality that I explore in this work distinguish between rights-based systems and duty-based systems of morality. As a result of these culturally-specific systems of morality and particular types of practices, the norm of self-sacrifice may evolve to be an important virtue among certain cultural groups and social classes. The focus of the current work is to investigate how the norm of self-sacrifice affects the formation of moral judgments. Study 1 uses cultural folktales from India and the United States to demonstrate a link between the presence of duties and self-sacrifice. In Study 2, field experiments with several different populations in India and the United States show that self-sacrifice is valued more among some social classes than others. The final two studies show that the norm of self-sacrifice is embedded within a rich cultural fabric which dictates when self-sacrifice is laudable. Study 3 shows that participants are sensitive to the role of the agent carrying out an act of self-sacrifice. In Study 4, groups who seemed to value self-sacrifice the most devalued it when it was done for mundane causes. Evidence for cultural differences in how the act of self-sacrifice is construed also emerged in Study 4 as participants from some groups but not others seemed to be more sensitive to the likelihood of a self-sacrifice’s success indicating a less romanticized ideal of an act of self-sacrifice. Conclusions are that both culturally-specific systems of morality and certain types of life experiences may foster an environment where sacrificing oneself may become an important part of the moral sphere. These results have implications for behavioral scientists’ understanding of individual motivations of engaging in social action and that perhaps, self-interest may not be the right framework across all cultures and social contexts.