Sentiments, Evaluations, and Claims

Sam Spade and his secretary, Effie Perine, possess, to put it mildly, different emotional natures, which lead them to judge Sam's lover, Bridget O'Shaughnessy, differently. Effie is sympathetic; Sam is driven not only by self-interest, but by a sense of duty. "When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you've thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it." And Sam also is moved by resentment and his desire to maintain self-control, because he knows that Bridget is trying to play him for the sap and he is tempted to go along. He sends Bridget to prison, perhaps to be executed, rather than giving in to her pleas to protect her. "I won't because all of me wants to - wants to say the hell with consequences and do it - and because - God damn you - you've counted on that with me the same as you've counted on that with all the others." In The Moral Sense James Q. Wilson explains how the moral senses of sympathy, duty and self-control, as well as fairness, are deeply rooted in our natures.(1) Wilson draws on a truly impressive array of disciplines - biology, sociobiology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, neurophysiology, criminology, history, Greek philosophy, the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment - in showing how our sentiments provide an important ground for our evaluationsof ourselves and others, as wee as a motivating force to act on those evaluations. Wilson effectively demonstrates why our evaluative life - including even Sam Spade's - cannot be explained simply in terms of rational self-interest. Wilson is clear that self-interest plays an important role in the analysis of moral judgments and behavior, but morality cannot be understood simply as a strategy adopted by self-interested agents: the moral sentiments matter. Much, I think, is right about all this. But I remain skeptical that feelings have the dominating role in morality that Wilson ascribes to them. For as with Sam and Effie, our feelings often diverge. Nothing, I think, is quite so common as reasonable people having different feelings, leading them to different evaluations of the same object. This basic affective diversity of our natures, I believe, renders our feelings unsuitable as the focus of a public, shared, morality in a diverse society. That, at least, is what I shall suggest in this essay. Can Sentiments Be Judged as Inappropriate? Although at one point Wilson defines the moral sense in terms of beliefs [xii], the overwhelming emphasis is on the moral sense as -what ordinary people mean when they speak of their moral feelings" [xiii, 8]. It is also said to involve "sentiments' [231. And given that emotions are moral sentiments [2321, it seems that the moral sense - or, rather senses are essentially emotions or sentiments. Now my central problem is this: we have a great deal of evidence that people's emotional natures differ in that some people are more likely, say, to feel anger, or more intense anger at some situations than others. The work of Stella Chess and her colleagues - on which Wilson draws [137-38] - provides evidence of innate differences in temperament; such factors as Quality of Mood" (the tendency to engage in joyful or friendly behavior), as well as threshold responses to stimulation differ from two to three months after birth, and these differences persist.(2) And psychologists of emotions such as Carroll E. Izard recognize that "[t]he interaction of innate differences in emotion thresholds and life circumstances leads to a great variety" of emotional-cognitive orientations.(3) Of course, Wilson himself cites extensive evidence that emotional orientations differ, say, between men and women [ch. 8]. Given this, we know that, in any given circumstance, one person is apt to experience an emotional reaction of a certain intensity that another, placed in just that same situation, win not. Sam is moved by resentment and a sense of duty, Effie by sympathy. …