Moral Sense.

MORAL SENSE

James Q. wilson 

Free Press, $22.95,313 pp.

Whether morality is a matter of imagination or sense, it is clear for these two authors that it is not a matter of rules. Mark Johnson cites George Eliot: "All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not embraced by maxims." That sounds right. Where did enthusiasm for maxims arise? One might imagine the Ten Commandments and the rest of Deuteronomy were at fault, but in both authors the principal villain turns out to be the Enlightenment.

Mark Johnson's Moral Imagination is a sustained attack on what he calls "the Moral Law Folk Theory" which, he says, holds that moral reasoning consists in bringing concrete cases under moral rules which will then specify "the right thing to do." Not only does such a vision of morality oversimplify a deduction which in real life seems full of dilemmas, Johnson doubts that there are even any moral rules from which to start. Relying on work in cognitive science, Johnson argues that the clear-cut concepts in which the moral rules are stated are anything but. Our thinking is everywhere metaphorical so that the notion of univocal rules is defeated before it starts.

The obvious worry of such an analysis is that it is a straight road to utter moral relativism. Johnson offers various counters to a conclusion he does not wish to draw. There may not be rational objectivity, but there is what he calls "transperspectivity"--a sort of gathering of the metaphors with which we humans have told fulfilling life narratives. From this imaginative exercise we can derive certain prototypes for the good life. Very much influenced by John Dewey, Johnson rejects a "quest for certainty" in favor of a continuing moral dialogue.

James Q. Wilson is one of our most noted scholars of criminal behavior. Thus it is interesting that he should consider "the other side of the coin": the moral sense of people. Perhaps because he normally deals with actions which almost any sane person would regard as morally wrong, he has no patience with sophisticated philosophers or advanced educators who opine that moral judgments are utterly relative: clarify all values but castigate none. Wilson believes that the average person has more moral sense than such theoreticians admit, and that this moral sense is "natural."

Wilson looks for the roots of morality in facts about the species that are so common that the application of "natural" seems hardly out of place. Humans are social animals raised in families. Since this is the universal experience of the race, there are certain natural dispositions for sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty which have evolutionary survival value. Much of the text consists of fascinating sociological studies and conjectures about how social and family context select for traits which are at least "proto-moral." While it is true that the sense of sympathy may extend my consideration to an unfortunate neighbor, it may also cement me with my criminal gang. Nevertheless, without a "natural" trend toward sympathy no society, criminal or saintly, could survive.

Whether it is Johnson's advocacy for imagination and metaphor, or Wilson's emphasis on natural tendencies and social up-bringing, both authors commonly reject reason as the basis of the moral life. Rejecting rationalism is the basis of their common rejection of the Enlightenment. Johnson mounts a sustained critique of the greatest of the Enlightenment rationalists, Immanuel Kant. It is not reason that dictates us the moral law, it is imagination which extends our sense of the good life. Wilson, while admitting some of the liberating aspects of Enlightenment individualism, condemns those intellectuals who "believe in systems of thought rather than habits of life." Humanity would not persevere on rationally argued morality. "Systems collapse faster, and with greater collateral damage than habits." Carded to an extreme, intellectualist morality creates an "adversary culture." which sets itself in opposition "to the habits and preferences of the working and middle class."

I find much that is congenial in these two accounts. George Eliot (and Johnson) are correct. Life is more complex than casuists claim. Of the two treatments, I am more impressed with Wilson. Johnson's book is certainly for philosophers, not the casual reader. While the position Johnson stakes out has merit, I find his reading of the history highly tendentious. Even Kant is not as categorical as Johnson claims, and when he wants to assert that "the Moral Law Folk Theory" has been the moral philosophy of the West, I wonder what he makes of Aristotle who seems not to have been interested in moral law at all.

Johnson's disdain for Kantian moral reason misleads him, I believe, toward a somewhat dubious substitute of moral imagination. Playing imagination off against reason seems to me to accept too much of the "faculty" psychology which Johnson is at pains to reject. (If morality isn't from reason, what other "mental" apparatus will serve?) But morality may rest neither on reason nor imagination, but in habits of character. To the extent that "imagination" suggests a looser, more creative approach to moral situations, I applaud the direction of Johnson's argument. However, I think that Wilson is closer to the truth, when he seeks to surmount rules through "character."

Following Aristotle (and Wilson), ethics is a study of habits (virtues not laws). The virtuous person acquires habits of action (courage, self-control, fairness) which are applied in the confusion of actual circumstance "as a man of practical wisdom" would apply them. It is not moral "imagination" that seems crucial, it is moral experience which leads to practical wisdom. Rules fail in our moral dilemmas, so we rely on basic character, the moral personality which acts with bravery and consideration in "the mysterious complexity of our life."