Making Sense of Social Experiences and Moral Judgments

In a recent review of James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense,(1) Alan Ryan observed that the book "s astonishingly ambitious and at the same time disarmingly restrained."(2) I believe that most readers of The Moral Sense would readily agree with this observation. The book is ambitious not only because, as Ryan notes, Wilson aims to "rehabilitate our everyday moral intuitions,"(3) but also because Wilson attempts to do so by integrating most of the relevant areas of scholarship - including philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, religion, politics, education, and evolutionary biology. The book is disarmingly restrained because, as Ryan also notes, Wilson aims to rehabilitate our moral intuitions "without pushing any public policy agenda."(4) Indeed, Wilson's book is all the more disarming because it appears to be inclusive and balanced in accounting for the innate and the learned, nature and nurture, the individual and the group, freedom and constraint, the old and the modern, self-interest and sympathy for others. Wilson's analysis is broad and inclusive; he supports his position with knowledge of research findings from many fields. At the same time, he omits or dismisses out-of-hand much of immense significance for morality. Especially, Wilson minimizes writings of some highly recognized thinkers and largely ignores the role of rationality or judgment in his analyses. From my limited knowledge of moral philosophy, he appears to exclude a very significant body of thought. From more extensive knowledge of developmental psychology, I do know that reasoning is now regarded as central (along with emotions) by most who have directly studied children's morality (to be sure, there are many differences in explanations of developmental processes, the contributions of biology and culture, the relations of judgment and action, and so forth). In Wilson's view, however, moral reasoning is mainly the province of the scholar or the "intellectual" rather than the "ordinary" person, whose natural, commonsense moral views are based, to a much greater extent, on emotions. This contrast between scholars and ordinary persons is revealing of Wilson's general position. He states that "science has challenged common sense" [viii], resulting in some people "talking" themselves out of the moral sense most of us possess. Argumentation, justification, and intellectual analyses, for the most part, do not stand us well in the moral realm. Instead, it is our feelings that matter: In fact, when people act fairly or sympathetically it is rarely because they have engaged in much systematic reasoning. Much of the time our inclinations toward fair play or our sympathy for the plight of others are immediate and instinctive, a reflex of our emotions more than an act of our intellect, and in those cases in which we do deliberate ... our deliberation begins not with philosophical premises ... but with feelings - in short, with a moral sense. The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments that they employ. [7-81] Moreover, feelings translate into moral ideals through habits ("moral ideals arise out of habitual human behavior" [243]), and not intellectual analysis. One of the theoretical constructions of scholarly intellectual analyses has been the idea of complete individual autonomy, an idea resulting in such moral ills as drug abuse, street crime, and political corruption [234]. This kind of moral populism moves me to ask a question I am unaccustomed to asking: Am I an ordinary person? As a social scientist conducting research on children's moral development (and other related topics) and theorizing on topics like moral reasoning, moral conduct, culture, and education, I suppose I am not in Wilson's world view an "ordinary" person. But I do not normally ask myself this question because I do not categorize people this way. I assume that most people have "expertise" in the realm of morality and that there is as much variety in views among the general public as among philosophers or social scientists. …