2nd Draft

Joshua Putnam

December 1996

Moral Sentiments and Choice

The sources and justifications of human moral sentiments have been debated since ancient times. Philosophers, religious teachers, economists and social scientists are only some of those who have propounded theories of our moral nature. In his book, The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson has woven a broad and varied selection of data from the social and biological sciences into a compelling story about the origins of our sense of right and wrong.^[1] In The Moral Sense, Wilson presents an argument that is critical of liberal ideas of choice and of the concept that people develop morally through processes of moral reasoning. According to Wilson, moral reasoning is a largely useless and occasionally dangerous preoccupation of an elitist class of intellectuals. Wilson contrasts these intellectuals with "ordinary" people. These ordinary people supposedly think much less deeply about right and wrong than the intellectuals. Instead, they make moral judgments based on feelings. Wilson claims that these spontaneous or "instinctive" emotions are the basis of our moral sense and that they are facets of our biological heritage.

In this essay I wish to explore an alternative view of human morality, a view which I have evolved through my own explorations over a number of years. By contrasting my view with Wilson's work and the commentary of some of his reviewers I hope to address some of the deficiencies in Wilson's work and to propose a somewhat different answer to him than his other critics. Specifically, I wish to tell a different, more generous story of our moral history and nature. It is a story which, like Wilson's, can be supported by evidence from history and from the social and biological sciences, but its primary source of relevance is it's ability to move the reader emotionally, to stir the very moral sentiments which it is about.

Wilson was originally a political scientist who, with his controversial book on the biological origins of criminal behavior, On Crime and Human Nature, written with Richard Herrnstein, crossed over into the emerging discipline of sociobiology. Sociobiology seeks the explanation of human social behavior in our biological and genetic endowments. Sociobiology is generally critical of the sociological theory that human culture is the sole determinant of human behavior and sentiments. Sociobiologists differ, however, about what we inherit from biology and what this means for our understanding of human social and psychological development. While more liberal scientists like Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan take our biological inheritances as, at most, starting points from which cultural and personal evolution allow us to move forward ^[2], Wilson believes that much of what we have inherited from biology is essentially immutable.

As Wilson's work covers a wide range of fields and has broad implications he has attracted an impressive array of critics. Social scientists, philosophers and liberal journalists, all of whom Wilson excoriates, have written thoughtful critiques of The Moral Sense. As I am none of the above, I can't hope to do as good a job of pointing out the intellectual problems with Wilson's work. What I hope to add to their criticisms is not so much another scholarly appraisal of Wilson as it is the outline of a different set of sentiments with which to evaluate moral ideas.

Wilson's book focuses on four selected moral sentiments, "sympathy," "fairness," "duty" and "self-control," with separate chapters on each. While not claiming that this is an exhaustive list, Wilson does consider them important "aspects of the moral sense."^[3] [italics not mine]. I propose a different set of three moral categories, which I describe as polar, having both a positive and a negative side. The positive sides of these categories I would summarize with the keywords "contact," "love," and "perception;" their negative sides I call "alienation," "fear," and "belief." It is my contention that one can meaningfully refer to alienation as the opposite of contact, to fear as the antithesis of love, and to belief as the filter of perception. While also not exhaustive, I believe these "sentiments" give a more accurate picture of our moral, social and emotional life than sympathy, fairness, duty and self-control can provide.

Before examining these alternative sets of moral sentiments, I would like to consider the views of two of Wilson's critics.

Alan Ryan, a political philosopher at Oxford, finds The Moral Sense "ambitious and at the same time disarmingly restrained," because Wilson refrains from making specific policy proposals.^[4] What Ryan finds lacking in Wilson is a real understanding of the ideas of the moral philosophers The Moral Sense criticizes. According to Wilson, liberal philosophies like those of Bentham, Mill, Marx, Kant and Hume, to name just a few,

have in common the idea of choice. Analytic philosophy replaced the idea of commitments arising out of moral intuitions with the idea of choosing among "values" that, in principle, were little different from flavors of ice cream.^[5]

Wilson wants to make this point because he feels that such liberal ideas have led to an "avant-garde in which 'meaning' is to be found in self-expressive art, a bohemian counter-culture, or anarchistic politics." Even worse, he claims that these liberal ideas have taken root in our popular ideas about child rearing and discipline, leading to a moral laxity that causes drug addiction, sexual predation and street crime.

Ryan, however, notes that many of the liberal philosophers Wilson attacks were in fact propounding a view not so distant from Wilson's own proposition that our morality is grounded not so much in our intellect as it is in our emotions. This is the essential meaning of Hume's claim that there is no rational basis for preferring one thing over another, for example a glass of orange juice over the destruction of the world, and of Rorty's assertion that it is no more logical to prefer kindness than to prefer cruelty. Similarly, where Wilson sees support for cultural relativity in A.J. Ayer's pronouncement that moral claims are expressive as opposed to descriptive statements, Ryan sees nothing of the sort. According to him,

[A]ll Ayer claimed was that saying "murder is wicked" is more like expressing shock and encouraging other people to share that sentiment than it is like describing or analyzing anything.^[6]

Ryan concludes "Hume, Rorty and Wilson are all in the same boat."^[7] He finds, however, that Wilson is "as far out of his depth in the company of philosophers as most philosophers are in the company of anthropologists and political scientists."^[8]

A different set of criticisms is offered by Elliot Turiel, a professor of education and social science researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Turiel takes particular umbrage at Wilson's idea that "ordinary" people are less thoughtful and more spontaneous than intellectuals and that this greater emotionality is a mark of the moral superiority of the ordinary person and of "common sense." In Turiel's world view we are all ordinary and we all ordinarily engage in moral reasoning.

As noted, Wilson feels that the liberal ideas of intellectuals have lead to liberal styles of parenting he believes are at the heart of the social ills of the day.

Many people have persuaded themselves that children...should be encouraged to discuss the merits of moral alternatives. This is called "values clarification," but I think it a recipe for confusion rather than clarity.^[9]

He warns us that we "should not be surprised if young people who have heard these ideas grow up taking drugs, cheating on tests and shooting their enemies."^[10]

Turiel, however, is an educator and researcher who has spent a great deal of time studying children's moral development. He reports that

At young ages children go well beyond social impulses and the habitual or reflexive. They attempt to understand emotions, other people, the self, and interrelationships. By a young age certainly by four or five years and even earlier--children make judgments which we can confidently term systematic and which entail categories reflecting discriminations among significant components of their social experiences. They discriminate among different types of social rules, understand authority relations in complex ways, and struggle with social conflicts of various kinds.^[11]

From this account of the morally reasoning nature of young children Turiel proceeds to a well documented defense of the universality of moral reasoning among ordinary members of all cultures. Where Wilson claims without evidence that the universal application of moral rules is a particular outgrowth of Western culture, Turiel demonstrates that diverse people hold universal moral standards and that even in traditionally highly sexist cultures the sentiments of women are similar to those of Western women. They consider their treatment to be unjust.

Ryan and Turiel do a good job of criticizing Wilson from an intellectual standpoint. Ryan exposes deficiencies in Wilson's philosophical scholarship. Turiel finds some of the holes in both Wilson's social theory and in his data. The problem I see in Wilson's work speaks more to the heart than to the head.

As noted, the first of Wilson's four moral sentiments is called "sympathy." Sympathy, according to Wilson, is our natural ability to empathize with others in pain. He claims that this ability is most strongly conditioned in us towards kin. From this instinctive sympathy to kin, children raised in positive environments learn to extend sympathy first to others outside the family most like them (those of the same region, race, religion, etc.). Sympathy for total strangers and distant outsiders is the highest development of this emotion, a stage not often reached. To Wilson, this offers an explanation for why "whites will help other whites more frequently than they will help blacks"^[12] and other like phenomena. It is Wilson's belief that "the history of tribal warfare and ethnic conflict suggests that the tighter the community the less value it's members assign to the humanity of strangers."

I agree with Wilson's conception of "sympathy" in that I do think that empathetic reactions are instinctive and are evident in animals as well as people. However, I feel that the true mechanism of sympathy and the reason it is not always felt is more precisely explained by the dichotomy of alienation and contact. By alienation I mean our sense of separateness, the urge toward individuation and self-awareness. Seen in this light, it is obvious that alienation has a positive evolutionary value; it is in the extreme that it becomes toxic.

By contact I mean not only physical contact, affection and intimacy, which are the most basic forms of "bonding," that is, of transcending alienation. I mean also all the myriad forms of emotional, intellectual and spiritual contact that make us feel at one with other individuals, with larger communities and with the world at large. While holding one's child or one's lover in one's arms is certainly a form of contact, so is sharing stories with a group of friends over a bottle of wine or becoming enrapt in listening to a concert with a thousand other people or watching the sunset, listening to the waves and becoming lost in the silence.

Writing in the 19th century, in perhaps his most purely sociological essay, Karl Marx first analyzed the negative impact of alienation in the modern workplace.^[13] Marx believed that workers were alienated from one another, from the work that they did and from the products of their labor by the conditions of mass capitalism. To this I would add that they were alienated from themselves, considering their component parts (body, mind and soul) as possessions (my body, my mind, my soul), as distant from their own feelings as from those of others. How many people have died because they did not pay enough attention to the way they were treating their bodies or to the way things made them feel? I am convinced that alienation is the number one killer. Yet in the proper measure it is merely the borderline which marks the boundary of the ego.

Wilson's second moral sentiment is fairness. Wilson makes much of the fact that young children learn to share and will complain that other children who fail to share are "acting unfairly." From this primitive sense of fairness emerge adult conceptions of fairness as equity (which, according to Wilson, women are more likely to define as equal shares for everyone in a group and men are more likely to define as greater shares for those who make greater contributions), fairness as reciprocity, fairness as impartiality and fairness as a right to property. As one can see from the above, fairness is primarily concerned with distribution of material goods.

I think that what Wilson calls fairness is in fact no more than rule following. While Wilson makes much of young children's propensity to share in social situations where sharing is called for, as a Montessori educator I have worked in classrooms with children as young as three who were instructed to respect one another's work as private property which did not have to be shared. While these children would occasionally volunteer to work together, they most often took great pride in working alone and would complain that other children were acting unfairly if they tried to interfere in "my work." Moreover, when these children moved from the classroom to the playground, where the rules called for sharing, they easily made the transition from one standard of fairness to the other.

I propose that children's rule following emerges from contact with their parents and from their negative reactions to the alienation they experience when their parents withhold that contact as punishment for misbehavior. In later life, the threat of alienation from the larger society and the desire for contact with a larger circle of peers become further motivations to conformity. When one's peer group's behavioral norms conflict with those of the larger society this can lead to troubling inner conflicts and anti-social behavior.

I would also suggest that the second set of sentiments I have named, love and fear, have something to say about fairness and about sympathy. By fear I mean nothing more or less than is conventionally conveyed by the term. The survival value of an instinct to fear what is perceived as dangerous is obvious. By love I mean attachment, the emotional awareness of the uniqueness and importance to us personally of that which is loved. It is the instinctive feeling which passes between mother and child in the instant when the child is laid on the mother's breast for the first time, quelling the fear of the childbirth experience. It is the sentiment which most often inspires self-sacrifice, for what is loved is often more important than life itself. While fairness can inspire sharing, it is love that inspires giving. As Wilson himself notes, "[a]ttachment, not fear, is associated with later moral development."^[14]

The last two of Wilson's moral sentiments, self-control and duty, I find more tenuous. About self-control Wilson asks: "Why do we call the temperate person good and not merely prudent or even cunning?"^[15] His answer is that self-control and consistency are essential to obeying rules, so self-control is really tied in with fairness. He feels that manners are an outgrowth of this sentiment. "The universality of rules of etiquette probably reflects their value as a way of signaling self-control"^[16] Wilson feels that people distrust those who break common social conventions, for example by going naked in public, because this signals that such persons lack self-control. In fact, I can not see why it should signal any such thing. A person who went naked every day in the face of public scorn might be said to have terrific self-control. What their nakedness would signal is not their lack of control but their lack of membership in the in-group of polite society, their state of alienation. This alienation and the fear it would likely engender explain why the group would shun them more plausibly than a sense of their lack of control. It is the unpredictability of what we feel unrelated to, not its state of control, that we fear.

Duty Wilson defines as "the disposition to honor obligations even without hope of reward or fear of punishment."^[17] While I would agree with this as a definition of duty, I believe that this motivation is fully covered by the sentiment of love. As stated above, it is love that motivates us to sacrifice all if need be for what we love. If we love another person, we may give up our life to save them. If we love truth and justice, we may sacrifice our lives as Martin Luther King, Jr. or some of those who tried to help Jews in Germany during the holocaust did, not for individual reasons but in pursuit of some larger cause. If we love our country we may willingly die to protect it. If, however, we love something which is unwholesome, an abusive partner, a fascistic government or a bigoted religious philosophy, then love and the sense of duty it engenders may inspire us to evil as easily as to good. In these cases, the fear of the partner, government or wrathful deity often competes with the love of it provoking a schizophrenic condition in those subjected to it which may eventuate in apathy or an uncontrolled homicidal rage.

The last pair of moral sentiments I would offer as a counterpoint to Wilson's account are belief and perception. As stated, I believe that belief is the filter of perception and that perception is the destroyer of belief. In the words of the novelist Robert Anton Wilson:

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is to think about and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything...^[18]

As stated, alienation and fear have obvious survival value in their promotion of individuation and self-preservation. The continuing value of belief for our survival as individuals or as a species is more questionable. In the distant past when our ancestors first descended from the trees and began to hunt, as chimpanzees do today, in small tribal groups, group cohesion must have been nearly all important. As in our modern military organizations, where respect for higher authority and clearly established rules and hierarchy remain more important than individual initiative and creative thought, the first primates to use language must have found belief to be a natural blending of the thoughts of all members of the group, a way of making contact on the mental level which helped to insure the cooperation necessary for group survival.

Beliefs, often of a religious nature, also commonly function as "ontological security blankets", allowing people to accept more easily the fear their perception of the inevitability of death and other tragedies evokes. It is possible, however, to imagine a society where love and contact and the shared commitment to perception unbiased by dogma could provide the security people need without belief in external authorities, whether earthly or heavenly in origin. This, however, would require a social structure which fostered in people a much stronger belief in themselves.

Without an increase in our capacity for love, without a decrease in our alienation from the rest of the world, without a retreat from revealed dogma's to the truth made plain by our own hearts, Wilson's goal of restoring our moral confidence may lead to more harm than good. As Ryan notes:

Serbs and senators alike are altogether too confident of their moral rightness already, and if there is anything that Northern Ireland needs even less than car bombs and Armalite rifles it is an increase in the moral confidence of the contending parties.^[19]

The last piece which I would like to add to the picture I have been painting relates to Wilson's primary fear, that liberal ideas of choice have challenged the immutable moral standard imposed by our instinctive sentiments, leading to all sorts of trouble. This liberal ideal was perhaps best summarized by the philosopher William James as "tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant."^[20]

In The Moral Sense and in his political writings, Wilson displays considerable intolerance. Whether he is attacking Gay marriage as a threat to the family, tribal cultures as practitioners of witchcraft and animal torture or advocating random searches of African American males because they are "those most likely to be carrying an unlawful weapon,"^[21] Wilson evinces a distinct lack of sympathy for and contact with those whom he would scapegoat. One is as certain reading Wilson that he has never had dinner with a Gay family or eaten a traditional sacrificial meal with a Native American family or experienced the rampant police misconduct visited daily on African Americans and other minorities as one is that he has never visited the moon. Contrary to the lip service he pays to universal morality, Wilson is alienated from those who differ from him, fearful of them and in the throes of false and prejudicial beliefs about them.

Against this negative moral standard Wilson proposes I offer my personal belief about choice. While I agree completely with James' formulation, I find it overly passive. Similarly, economic theories of rational choice, which rely on independent actors choosing the best option from a menu of choices, also seem too limited to account for the full range of human potentialities. As Ryan points out, Wilson lacks

anything new to say about the undeniable fact that human beings aren't only the creations of the combined operation of nature and culture, but are themselves creators of new and different standards, and new and different ways of living.^[22]

My personal belief, which is more poetic or mythic than analytic or philosophic, is that there is a property in the universe and in our consciousness that I refer to as "Choice" (with a capital C). Choice is akin to imagination and inspiration, also to love, contact and perception. In my personal moral mythology, good is identical to the creation of Choice and evil to the destruction of Choice. Choice is distinct from choices in that choices refer to what is already on the menu and the creation of Choice refers to the adding of new items to the menu. When a painter paints a new masterpiece that expands our aesthetic sense, when a writer reveals a new metaphor or idea which broadens our sense of ourselves or of the world, when a friend touches one's life with tenderness and insight, inspiring hope where before only despair was present, this is the creation of Choice. When Columbus revealed to the Europeans that the world was round and they could sail to an undreamed of land, the Americas, Choice was created.

Similarly, the destruction of Choice refers to acts of coercion and violence, to the removal of choices from the menu. Whoever acts to preserve their power over others is destroying Choice. Whoever works to create power with others is creating Choice. It should obvious from this description that, when viewed within this framework, all human societies depend on destruction of Choice to preserve the status quo. Yet to the extent that we can learn to value human rights and human decency over our personal advantage, we can create societies that minimize negative control and maximize opportunities for consensus, creativity and the creation of Choice. In my opinion the best tools we have to help us in creating such societies are love, contact and perception, the obstacles we must overcome are alienation, fear and belief.

As stated at the outset, the purpose of this essay was not to match Wilson or his critics in terms of scholarship. Rather, I have tried to show how the story Wilson tells about human nature is but one of many stories that can be told about our moral sentiments. The oldest of these stories are, no doubt, religious fables about good and evil that date back to antiquity. Although Wilson utilizes extensive social and scientific data to support his account, in claiming that morality is best justified by emotion and not by reason he places his description in the same category as religious pronouncements on right and wrong. His data are no more or less than parables.

I have also tried to sketch an account of human morality, one which I do not claim is more objective or rational than Wilson's. I do claim that my account is more tolerant than Wilson's, more deeply informed by love, contact and perception. But the truth of these claims is for the reader to determine, comparing them with the facts of her own life and the wisdom of her own heart.

A critical reader might protest that my account is too sketchy, too poetic, that it lacks the wealth of examples offered by Wilson to support his views. My answer to this is that the truth of these things can be seen in the facts of any readers own life as well as in the examples Wilson offers to defend his own points of view. For example, Wilson's claim that whites are more likely to help other whites than to help blacks can be explained by the fact that whites are alienated from, afraid of and possessed of racist beliefs about blacks. I have spent time in communities where children of Gay, straight and bisexual parents from African American and white backgrounds are raised together. There the children, like the adults, live, grow and play together and seem as disposed to sympathize with one another as members of segregated societies are with their peers. My experience in those communities is only one reason why I find my explanation of race-relations more compelling than Wilson's claim that discrimination emerges because sympathy is only instinctive towards kin.

In the end, it is for each of us to tell ourselves our own moral stories, to determine for ourselves where our moral sentiments lie. If we can do that and treat one another with respect it will not matter whether we all agree, for our different points of view will harmonize like the different parts of a symphony. If not we will either be left with a monotonous chorus of voices all singing the same tune or a cacophony of unrelated sounds.

^[1] James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense. (The Free Press, 1993).

^[2] Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. (Ballantine Books, 1992).

^[4] Alan Ryan, Reasons of the Heart, N.Y. REV. BOOKS, Sept. 23, 1993,p. 52.

^[11] Elliot Turiel, Making sense of social experiences and moral judgements.,

Vol. 13, Criminal Justice Ethics, June 1, 1994, p. 72.

^[13] Karl Marx, Early Writings. (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

^[18] Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Volume I. (New Falcon Publications, 1993), p. ii.

^[20] William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals. (Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 4

^[21] Professor Advocates Police Frisking Citizens for Guns., Morning Edition (NPR), March 24,1994.