The Moral Sense

...In The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson writes in the language of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and social biology, rather than that of the traditional moral philosopher, so it may be that he stands a better chance of being listened to and understood...

...Sartre thought he was nailing God's coffin shut with his denial that any such thing as human nature existed...

...The "senseless violence" of the war in the Balkans, for example, is the other side of the coin to the equally senseless cooperation on which the universal aspiration depends...

...More importantly, if man has a moral nature, why does he so often behave in ways that others consider immoral...

...a 'we' must be defined on some basis if there are to be any obligations to the 'we...

...in fact, man for man, he may be less kind, less fair and less dutiful...

...But such a scary journey through the implications of the historical process he has so convincingly traced is outside his purpose...

...A generation later, as a teacher, I tried to use the same book to make some dent in the invincible self-satisfaction of children who, seemingly from birth, had never doubted that every man was his own Moses...

...Affiliation requires boundaries," Wilson proclaims...

...Among these are the supersession of arranged marriages by consensual ones in the early Middle Ages, the growth of commerce...

...now it is the other way around...

...The success with which he has done so makes of this book a milestone for intellectual progress in our time...

...Neither his mother nor I had, so far as I knew...

...The core of his book consists of chapters on Sympathy, Fairness, Self-Control, and Duty, which draw upon a combination of common sense and the latest research in the social sciences to show that the foundations of any developed morality are not cultural artifacts but congenital human dispositions—that we are furnished by God or Nature with a more or less sophisticated understanding of right and wrong...

...Once again, Wilson falls back on the idea of "dispositions...

...In the case of self-control, for example, "it becomes a dimension of morality to the extent that it implicates the fundamental features of man's social nature: the respect for and the obligation toward others with whom we spend our lives or from whom we expect important benefits...

...Despite what earnest Utopians would like to believe, mankind was never in a position and never could be in a position to choose some tribe's system (still less some invented system) of morality off the shelf and say: This will now apply universally...

...Why this should be the case is explained in a fascinating tour through history and social anthropology, which takes us from Biblical times to the present day and identifies in that vast expanse of time the events that took Western culture further down the road to universalism than any other in history...

...Morality, it is true, cannot be reduced to a generic system of universal rules, and the futile search for such a thing has only given the game to the relativists by default...

...We are appalled by occasional stories of torture, but at one time thoughtful people approved of its routine use...

...As I left him there and he struggled to hold back the tears, I thought: Who taught him that it was better to be brave than to cry...

...and exploration in the later Middle Ages and the growth of the idea of private property which took place in England somewhere between the earlyand late Middle Ages...

...As Shakespeare said, the art itself is nature...

...even more extraordinary is the fact that so many people sometimes obey it...

...Wilson sees this disposition as the product of the child's innate desire for sociability and very early learning of what is necessary for successful social interaction...

...bless relaxes," said Blake—because braces are man-made and relaxes are natural...

...This is territory not to be ventured upon lightly...

...Instead, Wilson wants us to recognize universal dispositions, whose practical expression is more or less determined by social realities...

...The change in marriage customs, which was essential to the breakdown of Western tribalism, was by far the most important of these...

...But he is still doing battle with the dominant tendency of modern thought, from Marx's contention that morality and religion were mere "phantoms formed in the human brain" to Richard Rorty's denial of any "core self' or distinctively human quality whatsoever...

...Instead he writes, as C.S...

...But maybe "repression" and self-control are natural, too...

...He does recognize the need for balance...

...The point, perhaps, is this: How do you get, morally, from tribal culture to modern urban culture...

...This does not mean that we are born genetically programmed for moral behavior: only that there is "some heritable disposition" towards certain practical moral norms such as sympathy, fairness, etc...

...f morality is anything more than an artificial construction invented by the powerful as a means of maintaining social control, why is it so variable...

...he latest champion of natural Tmorality comes in the unlikely form of a social scientist from California...

...Freudianism is based on the same dualism...

...But Wilson comes to the question with air empirical outfit that now seems much more the right equipment for resolving it...

...It is not that modern man is kinder, fairer, or more dutiful than his primitive forebears...

...Within living memory, racism was morally okay and premarital sex was not...

...And yet romantic reverence for nature seems to take it as given that such restraint is artificial, the product of the arts of civilization working upon authentic nature...

...If there is no discernible common ground on which Abraham the Patriarch and Barbra Streisand can both stand, a merely theoretical justification of universal moral dispositions is of little value...

...It is no criticism of Wilson to wish for a fuller discussion than we get here of the drawbacks as well as the advantages of modern universalism...

...Such historical particularities are key...

...But the particular combination of moral and social circumstances obtaining in northwestern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the Enlightenment, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, the emancipation of women—things that happened spontaneously nowhere else and that have determined the configuration of the moral universe for the late twentieth century not only in the West but, increasingly, throughout the world...

...Lewis wrote, in vindication of human nature and its innate moral sense...

...We are angry at terrorists who take hostages, but once diplomacy was largely conducted by the mutual seizing of hostages, and hardly anyone save their immediate family thought their fate was of the least interest...

...That is why, to my mind, the real meat of Wilson's book is in the penultimate chapter, called "The Universal Aspiration": However common the savagery, bloodletting, and mendacity of contemporary life, a growing fraction of mankind lives under the claim that men and women are entitled to equal respect...

...By that time, teens were too uneducated to understand it...

...It is, instead, that whatever may be his moral proclivities, they now encompass a larger number of people...

...Curse braces...

...The spread of that claim is extraordinary...

...and once there is a we, there will be a `they.'" But he does not consider directly the possibility that a society such as our own, in which the "we" is so attenuated, in which the universal aspiration is stretched so thin and covers so much, may be in danger of breaking up into a chaos of new tribalisms—as, it could be argued, some of our inner cities have already done...

...CI...

...I remember reflecting on this some years ago when I took my two-year-old son for his first experience of day care...

...The disposition to sympathy, for example, may apply only within a tightly circumscribed social group in a tribal culture, whereas in a highly developed modern urban culture it can apply, in theory at any rate, to all mankind and even the higher animal species...

...Wilson's purpose is not to act as advocate for any system of morality but rather to establish the basis for all morality in human nature...