I am told that James Q. Wilson, who died at 80 last week, regarded The Moral Sense as his best book. I wrote about the book in The New Criterion when it first appeared in 1993. I thought readers might be interested in my reflections on this eminently thoughtful social scientist, and reproduce the essay here in its entirety:
James Q. Wilson on the Moral Sense
We must be careful of what we think we are, because we may become that.
—James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense
For well over a century, Western intellectuals have rather specialized in bad news. There have been important exceptions, of course. But for the most part, recent reports from the fancier intellectual and cultural fronts have been contributing little to human self-esteem. Sophocles, in a famous chorus from Antigone, proclaimed that of “all wondrous things man was the most wondrous”; the Judeo-Christian tradition affirmed that man was created imago dei, in the image of God; the Enlightenment, though skeptical about God, nonetheless touted man’s autonomy and the universality of human reason; and even Immanuel Kant waxed enthusiastic about “the starry sky above and the moral law within.”
What remains? In the middle of the nineteenth century, Darwin came along to tell us that man, far from being imago dei, was in fact descended from the higher primates. Marx dismissed the entire realm of morality, religion, and culture as so many examples of ideology: “phantoms formed in the human brain,” he sneered. Freud claimed that what used to be called “conscience” was really a repressed distillate of lust and murderous aggression. And in Beyond Good and Evil— a title that epitomizes an entire worldview—Nietzsche assured readers that the ambition to provide a rational foundation for morality was “insipidly false and sentimental” in “a world whose essence is will to power.”
Today, these revolutionary ideas have lost the thrill of novelty but not their sting. They live on: as routine background assumptions (not to say as tokens of bona fides) for most academic intellectuals, and as a horizon of doubt and anxiety for many others. In the intellectual establishment, it is simply taken for granted that—as the philosopher A. J. Ayer put it—moral concepts have “no objective validity whatsoever.”
The omnibus term for this situation is relativism. In part, it is a correlate of what we might call the anthropological axiom: the conviction that morality, like human nature itself, is completely plastic, malleable: a function of culture not nature. If a tribe somewhere practices infanticide or cannibalism—well, chacun à son goût. One well-known guru of cultural relativism, Clifford Geertz, summed it up neatly when he insisted in the early 1970s that “there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture.”
This is the absolute that the deniers of absolutes champion. Their Index Prohibitorum is capacious: terms such as “universal,” “truth,” and “essence” feature prominently, as of course do “good” and “evil.” Anything suggesting that something in human nature transcends the leveling contingencies of culture is verboten. The proscriptions come in sweet and sour varieties. Sour is generally preferred among academics, as the popularity of gloom-spreaders from Sartre to Derrida and Foucault attests: man “is only a recent invention,” Foucault famously sighed in Les Mots et les choses, destined to “disappear soon.”
But sweet relativism, too, has its appeal, as the attention granted to the chummy nihilism of Richard Rorty reminds us. Rorty, one of the most influential philosophers in American academia today [he died in June 2007], won his wide following by tarting up relativism with various aw-shucks blandishments. Insisting (like just about every other academic today) on “the ubiquity of language,” Rorty’s relativism takes the form of a radical pragmatism. He tells us that the statements “It is true because it works” and “It works because it is true” are indistinguishable. He waves a cheerful goodbye to “ideas like ‘essence,’ ‘nature,’ and ‘foundation,’” denies that human beings possess anything like a “core self,” and dispenses with “any truths independent of language.” Hence philosophy must emancipate itself from the idea of truth, morality must jettison the distinction between good and evil. There are no such things, Rorty continues, as “plain moral facts,” “nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness is preferable to the other.” Then comes the sugar: If we would only stop thinking about such anachronisms, we could usher in a “liberal utopia” in which irony triumphs and “the charge of relativism has lost its force.”
Although widespread among intellectuals, relativism à la Geertz or Rorty does not proceed entirely unchallenged. The latest challenge comes from the perhaps unlikely quarter of the social sciences. In The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson, Professor of Management and Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles, mounts a spirited and articulate defense of the idea that the disposition to make moral judgments is innate in human beings. His frankness is a breath of fresh air: “We do have a core self, not wholly the product of culture, that includes both a desire to advance our own interests and a capacity to judge disinterestedly how those interests ought to be advanced.” When was the last time you heard a prominent academic invoke the idea of disinterested judgment (to say nothing of the notion that we possess a “core self”) without derision?
Wilson, whose previous books include Thinking about Crime, Bureaucracy, and other works concerned with public policy, writes about morality as a public fact. The language of virtue and morality has had a tough time lately. “Our reluctance to speak of morality,” he notes, “and our suspicion, nurtured by our best minds, that we cannot ‘prove’ our moral principles has amputated our public discourse at the knees.” Consequently, part of his purpose in this book is “to help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality.” It is not, he writes,
an effort to state or justify moral rules; that is, it is not a book of philosophy. Rather, it is an effort to clarify what ordinary people mean when they speak of their moral feelings and to explain, in so far as one can, the origins of those feelings.
Because the practice of morality is partly a social act, recovering the language of morality is at the same time an acknowledgment of social responsibility. “Rebuilding the basis of moral judgments,” Wilson points out, “requires us to take the perspective of the citizen, but the citizen has gone to great lengths to deny that he has a perspective to take.” While few ordinary people consciously espouse the extreme relativism that makes the academy such a cheerful place today, many have been infected by the habits of mind that such relativism encourages. “We are,” Wilson writes, “engaged in a culture war, a war about values.” It says a lot, for example, that it is now easier to renounce a marriage than a mortgage. If so many highly educated people—men and women, moreover, who educate and help to form the tastes of the young—proclaim themselves “liberal ironists,” liberal irony will naturally be a powerful ingredient in the cultural climate.
The real humbug of the relativists is revealed when you turn their own arguments against one of their pet political projects. When I have argued in conference lectures and in print that politically correct censorship of the media or liberal judicial activism is merely the codification of power relations, a mere statement about who is going to be the boss round here,they went primate-excrement.
They deny absolutes yet they act as if there were absolutes. When I taught a course on the Hindu caste system I used strict moral neutrality and said that we could not criticise another civilisation which was based on different values , those of justified lifelong inequality, and that we had to treat the idea of equality in an entirely relativist way.The liberal students were baffled and had no answer. It is curious that left-relativists always exempt equality from their relativism.
Cut a piece of cake into two differently-configured pieces and watch two kids argue over who got the bigger piece. Make that two kids who have never set foot in any school, thus barely touched by society’s rule-enforcers. You can’t convince me kids don’t have an inherent sense of fairness and morality.
In my bygone days as an academic developmental psychologists I devoured the writing of Jean Piaget, who was once dubbed the Giant in the Nursery, but alas is now mostly ignored. In The Moral Development of the Child, his greatest of his gazillion books IMHO, he makes a pretty darn convincing case for moral absolutism. Although his books make explicit reference to most of the big old dead men of philosophy, he shuffled off this mortal coil before relativism hit the academic world in force. I would have loved to read in his words how his research on children devastates his intellectual opponents.
I believe that book is actually titled The Moral Judgment of the Child.
“imago dei, in the image of God”
They also meant in capacity for reason; not the physical body…
So you’re conflating Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Darwin? Really? Darwin?
He doesn’t conflate them. He points out that Darwin’s argument that we descended from apes rather than being created by God played an important role in the direction taken by ethicists. This is simply true, regardless of what one thinks about that direction or what other influences played a role.
Yes, Darwin. Really. The first three were confirmed materialists and Darwin supplied the “proof” that none of them were more than naked apes shaped solely by the material forces of nature.
Got a problem with that?
Tragedy, the anti-hero, sarcasm on top of ironical irony with a sarcastic souffle on the side.
Look at so-called “documentary” photography: from Weegee to Robert Frank to Diane Arbus to those Daughters of the Revolution. It seems as if the “art” of it is really all about making fun of everyone but ourselves since there is always a distance implied. “No, not me – I’ll never wear pancake make-up or have twins with weird, googly eyes.”
“Crappy America” has become a product trundled out by board-certified iconoclasts who resemble a platoon of jar head marines more than free thinkers.
I know of course you meant no derision, and I claim no insult.
But it is the platoons of Jar Head Marines (and a few scrappy farmers long ago with muskets) that allow these Egg-heads the luxury of such contemplations in safety and comfort of institutions they imagine to be so monumental.
Seniments I’m fairly certain you share, but for the sake of focus did not incude in your comments.
Pardon me the intrusion, sir.
Good point and overall ironic, as Marines have a strong sense of morality, right versus wrong and culture.
Freud boasted that his was the 3rd great step in the decentralizing of man in the universe, following Copernicus and Darwin.
So yes, Darwin too. Really.
I don’t believe that Darwin (or other scientists) believe that science says that evolution or any other scientific discovery means that we are “nothing more than…” though many people have somehow got that idea. This is unfortunate because it puts a regard for truth at odds with morality. If you have to choose between the two you’ve got a problem, a dilemma that many Christians (for example) can’t seem to think their way out of.
My favorite nonesence from an academic:
“….nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness is preferable to the other”
That I would, to their own precious small child:
A) Instantly risk my own life and limb to shield their child from a moving car that jumped the curb,
even though I do not know them at all, verses:
B) Conspire to, and consumate, the most vile acts of carnal knowledge upon the same,
with live mutilation and death the result.
And neither A nor B, in their supreme intelligence, is “preferable” to the other.
Only an over-educated fool can be so utterly stupid.
Pitty we must subsidize such nonesense, and call them “experts”
Root, you are spot on. Anyone who denies the reality of good and evil is simply a fool. Obama supports infanticide, and that makes him a fool in my book.
Did Wilson mention Islam? No system of belief is more opposed to Nietsche, Marx, and–most of all–Darwin than Islam. Nevertheless, Islam has joined in an alliance with Marxism in order to fight reason, democracy, and Israel.
Did Wilson mention the Inquisition, the Crusades, the religious wars of the 16th century? How do they fit in with his analysis?
Your review was simply superb. Thank you, Roger
For those defending the writer’s dismissal of Darwin, what he said was this:
‘In the middle of the nineteenth century, Darwin came along to tell us that man, far from being imago dei, was in fact descended from the higher primates.’
By letting the quote go without further comment, then lumping CD in with Marx, Freud & Nietzsche, Kimball seems to imply that Darwin could have done otherwise. But if Darwin hadn’t ‘come along’ to reveal our biological origins, someone else would have–and in fact did, as CD’s theory was of course jointly released with Wallace’s. As their theory is, well, true, it’s hard to see what’s achieved by wistfully imagining that it isn’t.
Also, Darwin didn’t really comment extensively on the implications of his theory, at least not in his major works. Neither the Origin or the Descent suggests that the fact of our common ancestry degrades our humanity. That association was made by those who couldn’t bear the thought that we weren’t sculpted from divine dust.
Darwin did not show that human beings do not have a moral sense, only that we are descended from apes (and ultimately from bacteria). Other animals also have moral instincts (a “moral sense”), see SocioBiology; namely, how they should relate to other members of the same species.