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.

You can usually tell when an author gets into a subject that he truly relishes, and this is evident in Wilson's chapter on families. It is about as good an antidote as is available to all the carelessly chic talk about alternative families and modes of child care. "It is easy to make either of two mistakes," he writes, "to suppose that the child is a blank slate or to think he is a miniature adult." B. F. Skinner and some Freudians make the blank-slate mistake, proposing that the child is "conditioned" to a morality imposed by the society. "For all the difference it made [according to these theorists], people might as well have been Labrador retrievers." From the earliest stages, Wilson contends, children are the subjects of their capacity for moral development within the matrix of the family. But Wilson has little use for the moral-development theories and "values clarification" schemes proposed by Kohlberg and others. "I am a bit suspicious," Wilson writes, "of any theory that says that the highest moral stage is one in which people talk like college professors."

On all the subjects mentioned - plus the moral significance of property, the logic of consanguinity rules about who can marry whom, the universality of dispositions against cannibalism, infanticide, and incest - the reader will come away from this book informed and fascinated by the remarkable range of studies and theories brought together by this master scavenger. I believe the book admirably achieves its declared purpose; namely, the reader will be more confident, less tongue-tied and embarrassed, in making unapologetically moral arguments about how people ought to live.

Critical readers may also, however, leave the book with a number of dissatisfactions and frustrations. Wilson is sometimes given to obiter dicta that occasion puzzlement. For instance, at one point he says there are no "moral absolutes." It is true that on his account there are no commands from God, but there are certainly moral dispositions that he has spent most of the book convincing us are universal and constitutive of being human. These might qualify as absolute by some definitions. Especially in the first part of the book, Wilson makes a great effort to buttress his argument with speculation about evolutionary theory. For readers who are in thrall to the scheme of evolution, those sections will be of special interest, and indeed might suggest that the behavioral patterns described by Wilson are confirmed by the most absolute truth available to them.

Also disappointing is the author's strained effort to separate the questions of infanticide and abortion. He addresses the former with intelligence and in great detail, but he wants to maintain silence on the latter. The two, he says in a footnote, "cannot be subjectively equivalent actions because the mother can only imagine a fetus but can see and touch a neonate." Mothers, one suspects, have a relationship to the unborn child that goes well beyond mere imagining. Perhaps Wilson simply wants to avoid, as much as possible, subjects that might offend the essentially liberal, educated, secular audience he has in mind. Thus, where one would expect to find it, there is no treatment of homosexuality and the claims of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement. Surely this is today one of the most agitated subjects regarding "the moral sense" as it pertains to human sexuality. Inferences can be drawn from Wilson's argument, but on these current disputes he is inclined to maintain a discreet silence.

There are also occasional statements so improbable that one is compelled to think that at times the author wrote in haste. In discussing the difference between shame and guilt, for instance, he notes the role of the conscience, or what Adam Smith called the "man within the breast." "Unlike some other person," Wilson writes, the inner man "knows our real motives. We can fool our friends, but not ourselves." Really? Most of the great literature in moral philosophy and theology, including much that is cited by Wilson, devotes the most serious attention to self-deception. Wilson himself writes insightfully about the conflicts and ambiguities in our passions and self-understandings. He at points seems to be proposing an almost Augustinian understanding of human nature, although, to be sure, Augustinianism without God.

The treatment of religion - or, more accurately, the non-treatment of religion - is the most unsatisfactory part of the book. Wilson tells us that "the most astonishing thing about the moral development of humanity" is the aspiration toward the universal. The universal he has in mind, however, is entirely a socio-historical universal. There is no reference to the transcendent, no reference, for example, to Aristotle's highest good. Although he laments modernity's break with the classic moral tradition, Wilson dramatically breaks from the tradition that he would champion by relegating the transcendent to the category of the irrelevant. Like Emile Durkheim, Wilson contends that morality is socially constructed (backed up by bio-evolutionary forces). Unlike Durkheim, he has no time for religion as the supreme social construct and formative control.

Wilson declares that social habituation, not religion, is the source of moral virtues. As though religion were not a crucial part of social habituation for the great majority of mankind. Wilson asserts: "Religion is for many a source of solace and for a few a means of redemption, but if everyday morality had depended on religious conviction, the human race would have destroyed itself eons ago." This obiter dictum is not argued, nor is it supported by the massive evidence that in this society the great majority of people claim to believe that morality is derived from religion. As I have argued elsewhere (America against Itself, 1992), the Oliner study suggests that religion may have been the most important variable for Holocaust rescuers. Even the more committedly secular of our time are, as often as not, dissatisfied with the notion that morality is simply a matter of biology and social convention.

The Moral Sense is, nonetheless, a significant achievement. In a society where many people have been trained and intimidated into pretending otherwise, Wilson convincingly demonstrates that moral judgment and moral argument are inescapable. He revives the hope that Americans might again be confident enough to address, in their personal lives and in the public arena, the great questions about how we ought to live.