The Moral Sense

This is a beautiful book, and intellectually persuasive in its beauty. Among the many points made by Wilson - professor of public policy at UCLA and one of the most morally astute social scientists of our time - is that there is a closer connection than many think between the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the moral. Although Wilson does not put it this way, the "three transcendentals" - the good, the true, and the beautiful - are complexly interrelated, and it may be that most people intuit that this is the case. Wilson does assert that his purpose is to help people "recover confidence" in what they already believe to be the case.

In the modern era, intellectuals and people who have been too much influenced by intellectuals have been intimidated into stifling "the moral sense," the belief that we know how we ought to act and have. One says, not in criticism but in high praise, that the present book is an extended footnote to Aristotle, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith, all of whom took "human nature" seriously and understood the indispensability of moral sentiments." These worthies knew well the shadowed side of human behavior and the propensity to sin, but they gave a vigorous rational defense of what Wilson calls moral "dispositions." It is the dispositions, not the specific moral rules, that are universal, Wilson contends. The dispositions belong to what it means to be human, and without some sense of what it means to be human, he notes, we are in no position to say what is inhuman.

"The truth, if it exists, is in the details," writes Wilson. "This book is about the details; it is the result of scavenging through science in order to illuminate everyday life." Wilson is a very thorough scavenger indeed, collecting an astonishing array of studies from the biological and social sciences that bear upon human behavior. Almost all of these are engagingly presented and woven together in a way that undercuts the blithe relativism of our high and popular cultures.

The much discussed "culture wars" have been going on for centuries, according to Wilson, at least since the Enlightenment. One might suggest that the Enlightenment project is more internally various than Wilson allows, but he is surely right in saying that, all in all, the Enlightenment raised to dogmatic status the belief that morality consists in rational rules of universal applicability. Its epigones have also effectively disseminated the doctrine that an "ought" cannot be derived from an "is," thus precluding the pertinence of empirical evidence and common sense regarding what is natural for human beings. Wilson attends assiduously to what we might call the "isness" of things, believing that therein is to be found the source and sustaining power for the moral sense.

First he examines the moral sentiments themselves and argues that the most important can be treated under four headings - sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty. To each he attaches definitions that themselves invite further reflection. For example: "Duty is the disposition to honor obligations even without hope of reward or fear of punishment." At almost every step he anticipates objections. With respect to duty, for instance, he knows that "a reader eager to reduce all human motivation to self-interest narrowly conceived may interpret what the Good Samaritans or the Holocaust rescuers did as efforts at reputation-building, but taking this view so stretches the concept of self-interest as to deprive it of any meaning." Whether Wilson's response refutes the self-interest analysis or simply indicates the almost infinite subtlety of self-interest others may decide. Moreover, he does not engage a classic argument that there is no choice to be made between morality and self-interest rightly understood." But these are the kinds of questions and quibbles that are raised by almost every page in this intriguing book.

We inescapably make moral judgments, says Wilson. It is a fact of everyday life only thinly veiled by relativistic chatter about our having "different values." The distinctions between kind and unkind, selfish and loving, heroic and cowardly are native to all of us. "If we purged our discourse of such terms, the only difference between Tiny Tim and Scrooge would be their age." In his examination of duty, Wilson makes extensive use of the Samuel and Pearl Oliner study of those who rescued Jews from the Holocaust, and of Admiral James Stockdale's memoir of eight years as a POW in Vietnam. Among the many behavioral studies discussed, Wilson obviously takes wry pleasure in reporting on one that asked people to choose between two investment programs, one that would help the individual and the group, the other that would help only the individual. "In the 12 versions of this experiment, only one group of subjects clearly preferred to be free riders by shunning the group project - graduate students in economics." So much for a "realistic" definition of self-interest.

The second part of the book treats the sources of the moral sense. Here Wilson examines man as a social animal, the crucial role of families, gender differences, and the aspiration toward a universal morality that transcends clan and tribe. Given the current intellectual climate, Wilson knows that he must walk on eggs in discussing gender differences. He sides with Harvard's Carol Gilligan in believing that there are such differences, with men tending to emphasize justice, fairness, and duty, while women stress sympathy, care, and helping. There are also fascinating studies indicating that, in the division of goods and burdens, men care more about equity and women about equality. That is, men are more likely to calculate a "just" division based upon an individual's contribution or cost to the group. In addition, men tend to be "hierarchical" in a way that accords with the organization of modern institutions, thus putting women at a distinct, and perhaps permanent, career disadvantage in such institutions.