The Moral Sense, by James Q. Wilson

...Wilson tries rather unconvincingly to argue for a biological bond binding mother to child as well as the reverse, but this does not take us very far...

...Wilson wants to refute the suggestion that, in his words, "if culture is everything, then nature is nothing" by stressing the contribution of biological nature to socialized or acculturated human nature...

...His efforts to ground a universal moral sense in biology and natural selection are not as consequential as he thinks...

...Lames Wilson contends that there is a universally human moral sense that makes possible the existence of stable human 'societies...

...The capacity to create and acquire culture itself rests on biological endowments common to the species...

...We draw on some of the same specific evidence: infantile dependency and social bonding, StanWINTER • 1995 • 127 Books ley Milgram's famous experiments on obedience to authority, Edward Banfield's account of what he called "amoral familism" in Southern Italy, social-psychological research indicating that individuals alone rather than in groups are more likely to intervene to prevent crimes, psychiatric descriptions of psychopathic or sociopathic personalities who lack the capacity to sympathize with others or to feel remorse after harming them...

...He therefore seeks to ground his moral sense in nature itself, specifically in human biology...

...I also have doubts about Wilson's argument against reinforcement theories of learning—his assertion that "children [naturally] imitate what they see others doing...

...His effort to ground morality in biology is clearly animated by the desire to find a pan-human standard that will invalidate relativism...

...Much to Wilson's credit, he is always careful to note qualifications and possible criticisms of his own tentative generalizations...

...He suggests that natural selection would have eliminated peoples who practiced drastic child neglect or all-out Hobbesian war of all against all, but population genetics is not necessary to produce this result: such cultural practices would have made survival improbable whether genetically based or not, and, of course, we would not know of the existence of past societies that had engaged in them precisely because they would not have survived...

...Wilson, however, repeatedly insists that the moral sense is "natural," "inborn," "inherited," "innate," or "instinctive," and is the product of Darwinian natural selection...

...Wilson's argument for the necessity of a moral sense is cognate with my own in The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society...

...He thinks that Freud and psychoanalysis have undermined belief in a moral sense by criticizing excessive instinctual repression, while I think that they offer the most credible explanation of why human beings possess a moral sense and how they acquire it...

...We both believe that there is a common human nature underlying cultural and historical variation and that this nature includes sympathetic identification with others that restrains violence against them and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest at their expense...

...Wilson devotes most attention to the third question, seeking biological roots for the moral sense he postulates...

...Similarly, Wilson's moral sense tells us little about particular moral issues or even about the range of others it embraces: is it confined to the family as in Banfield's "amoral familism," or does it stop at the boundaries of the tribe, or does it at least adumbrate the brotherhood of man...

...What worried me," he explains, "was not that the students were prepared to accept some excuses, but that they began their moral reasoning on the subject by searching for excuses...

...An individual cannibal cannot be expected to know any better, but refusal to judge him or her in no way precludes condemnation of cannibalism as an undesirable cultural pattern Such a version of "love the sinner, hate the sin" is altogether defensible...

...Although Wilson is hardly a dogmatic hereditarian, many (though not all) conservatives have in the present century favored nature over nurture, biological over cultural determinism...

...Wilson, with characteristic fairness, credits Benedict with wishing primarily to reject racism and ethnocentrism, the rigid moral condemnation of another culture by the values of one's own...

...At a few points, Wilson seems to suggest that the nuclear family, private property, and prevention of addiction to substances that lessen self-control are desirable, which at least echoes conservative themes in current debates...

...Mother-child bonding is especially important, for without it children would be neglected and die, terminating the species...

...In fact, several societies in the historical and ethnographic record have institutionalized practices threatening and in a few cases ending their survival...

...He criticizes Clifford Geertz for maintaining that "there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture...

...Wilson avoids much reference to language, the most distinctively and universally human capacity of all, presumably out of a desire not to conceive of his moral sense as language-dependent...

...Perhaps the possible analogy between language and morality accounts for Wilson's scant references to the former...

...He divides his moral sense into four parts: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty...

...Cannibalism, human sacrifice, and slavery are, after all, patterns of culture just as much as the nuclear family, humanitarianism, and democracy...

...I differ with Wilson on a number of more general issues...

...He nevertheless observes (in a footnote) that Geertz "acknowledges" human universals, claiming simply that the notion of a person who embodied only those would amount to a "cartoon...

...It is, to be sure, a highly general one: he does not argue that the moral sense dictates the content or scope of ordinary moral propositions...

...The thrust of Benedict's formulation was directed against moral judgment of the behavior of individuals who were merely conforming to the norms of their culture...

...For obviously, even if there is an innate "deep structure" of "generative grammar," as Chomsky believes, it in no way predisposes humans to speak any particular language...

...Attachment and affiliation to others undeniably is rooted in the helplessness and dependency of the infant, a condition peculiar to the human species that biologically resembles "infantilized" or "fetalized" apes in Géza Roheim's suggestive formulation...

...Yet sociologists would instantly shy away from Wilson's case for "natural sociability" as the foundation of morality and social order...

...Many of Wilson's arguments for a moral sense resemble those that liberal sociologists commonly advance against the recent revival of economistic cost-benefit or "rational choice" models in the social sciences...

...Wilson recognizes that many factors, including both other innate dispositions, external circumstances, even the putatively baneful influence of theories like cultural relativism, can override the moral sense in determining individual conduct...

...The question of whether or not there is an innate disposition to acquire language is, of course, central to the controversies over Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories...

...Second, assuming such a nature, does it include a moral component resembling Freud's "superego" or Wilson's "moral sense...

...Wilson's eminence as a social scientist—much greater than that of the quirky and cantankerous Allan Bloom—accounts more for his being taken up by conservative publicists than the direct bearing of anything he WINTER • 1995 • 129 Books says on the "traditional values" extolled by contemporary conservatives...

...Conservative publicists like George Will, however, who have used him as ammunition in the "culture wars," have not been so circumspect...

...Wilson thinks that many prevailing doctrines in and around the social sciences deny the existence of such a sense, most notably the cultural relativism propounded by anthropologists and postmodernist philosophers, but also Freudianism, behaviorism, and the egoistic utilitarianism favored by economists...

...My view, too...

...The notion of cultural relativism, to be sure, was used in questionable ways from the very beginning: I remember arguing in 1947 with a fellow student who reproached me for denying to the Soviet Union the culturally relativist tolerance I was willing to extend to the Trobriand Islanders and the Samoans...

...Yet, although the prelingual child may lack any innate tendency to imitate, he/she will learn language even if eventually growing up to be a psychopath totally bereft of any moral sense...

...Critics were quick to note that Benedict obviously preferred the peaceful and cooperative Zuni to the two other cultures she described...

...Wilson is shocked that his students reserved judgment about Nazi genocide...

...They would equate sympathy with the formation of emotional bonds sensitizing individuals to "the role of the other," fairness with a universal "norm of reciprocity," and self-control and duty with the general "internalization of social norms...

...Moreover, since his moral sense consists of sentiments and impulses rather than definite rules of conduct, it does not go very far toward providing a transcultural standard for moral judgment— beyond suggesting that human beings should be nice to one another, especially to infants and children, and should cooperate on important projects...

...Wilson does not regard all aspects of the moral sense as genetically based: he is not prepared to argue that there is a "sympathy gene," merely "some heritable disposition that helps us explain why sympathy is so common, as a norm if not a motive, among humans...

...Wilson wants to conclude from the existence of a universal moral sense validated by science that there is a transcultural standard of moral judgment...

...But he does not go very far in this direction...

...It is hard to see why Wilson's quest for a biological basis for morality is necessary to the claim that most human beings possess a definable moral sense...

...However, he joins Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind in deploring the perversion of cultural relativism into a nihilism that rules out any moral judgments at all...

...First, is there a common human nature cutting across or underlying cultural diversity...

...Four related but distinct questions are at issue in the relativism debate...

...Wilson seems to think that this statement denies the existence of cultural universals, equating "culture" exclusively with the particulars distinguishing one society or group from another...

...Third, assuming such a component, what combination of nature and nurture, biology and culture, produces it...

...Fourth, does such a component provide a cross-cultural standard for evaluating cultures that rules out relativism...

...Early in this century, the philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead insisted that language, with its duality of reference to self and other, made possible much of the acquisition of common habits that psychologists were prone to attribute to inborn psychic mechanisms such as "an instinct to imitate," "suggestibility," or even "sympathy...

...Bloom complained that his students refused to condemn the Hindu practice of suttee, the burning of widows on their husband's funeral pyres, which was suppressed by the British...

...I asked him if it should apply to the Nazis as well—he said that was an altogether different matter...

...130 • DISSENT...

...Benedict was primarily concerned to oppose the narrow, puritanical moralism of Christian missionaries and, often 128 • DISSENT Books enough, colonial officials by calling attention both to the fact of cultural diversity and to the inescapable shaping of individuals by the dictates of their cultures...

...There are indeed cultural universals that have been partially shaped by biological universals, just as cultural particulars necessarily depend on potentialities within the broad limits set by biological universals...

...In the context of her final chapter on psychology and culture, "that last disastrous sentence," as Clifford Geertz describes it, in which she refers to "equally valid patterns of life" can be understood as meaning equally genuine representations of the varieties of human nature rather than that all patterns are equally acceptable morally...

...Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture is often regarded as the locus classicus of cultural relativism and is even blamed for the excesses of contemporary multiculturalism...

...Yet most sociologists, including this writer, would find little that is questionable in Wilson's general conception, although they would probably attribute his moral sense to the socialization process that creates human beings out of unformed biological organisms...

...Why is more than that needed to affirm the existence of Wilson's moral sense...

...Such a heritable disposition is in his view partly a matter of neurochemicals in the brain, partly a matter of psychic mechanisms such as the infantile tendency to imitate, which both reflects and presupposes an innate emotional attachment to the mother...

...We also disagree on cultural relativism, his primary culprit for the allegedly widespread denial of a moral sense...