Moral innatism, connatural ideas, and impuissance in daily affairs: James Q. Wilson's acrobatic dive into an empty pool

The idea that a moral vision is engraved in the human mind is "such a box of quicksilver that it abides nowhere; it dwells in no settled mansion; it is like a dove's neck, or a changeable taffeta; it looks to me otherwise than to you who do not stand in the same light that I do; and if we enquire after the law of nature by the rules of our reason, we shall be as uncertain as the discourses of the people, or the dreams of disturbed fancies." People hold very different, often violently conflicting ... moral beliefs and beliefs about morality.... They cannot all be right; so there must be some basic obscurity, some tendency to fool ourselves, some difficulty in seeing clearly, some temptation to become bewitched. Nor do things seem to get much better by our coming to know more facts; or not coming to know more scientific facts, anyway. The Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, presenting a lecture at the Esalen Institute, noted for its quirky clientele, was challenged during the question-and-answer period to tell how he would go about constructing an experiment seeking to demonstrate the falsity of the law of gravity. Feynman's response was instantaneous. He would not consider undertaking such an experiment, he said, because everything he knew indicated that the law of gravity was immutable. Then Feynman expanded his answer into a dictum that he said ruled his intellectual work and one that he presumably believed ought to play a larger part in the thought process of his interrogator. "I do not bother myself with matters that appear to me to be beyond resolution," Feymnan said. "I have more important uses for my mind and my time."(3) James Q. Wilson obviously does not run his intellectual life by such a rule. In The Moral Sense he seeks to persuade his readers that there is in the human animal an inherent "moral sense," an implanted predispositional impulse to do the right and decent thing, to show sympathy, fairness, self-control, and regard for duty.(4) An element of Spiro Agnew's populism pervades Wilson's theme. It is the intellectuals - the Freudians and the hoity-toity academic political philosophers, Marxist dialecticians, secular humanists, and cultural relativists, demons all - who overlook or disregard the simpler kinds of truths and deny the omnipresence of natural human moral behavior. Mr. and Ms. America know better: they do not pay attention to those fancy convoluted theories but rather go about the business of behaving decently, instinctively predisposed to do right rather than wrong. A particularly notable index of indwelling morality offered by Wilson is the "apparently irrational attachments of family members" which "rest on a moral sense" [17]. Wilson is not memorably hospitable, however, when it comes to entertaining alternative plausible explanations: he ignores the fact that there are many other ways to explain matters such as enduring and irrational family obligations (for example, it is useful to have strong kinship ties that allow demands to be made and met) and that there are an overwhelming number of illustrations of how presumed "enduring and irrational family obligations" are both ignored and abhorred (for example, the alleged murders in Los Angeles by the Menendez brothers of their parents). But how much contrary evidence is necessary to challenge Wilson's theme successfully? How do you match, say, the sales of Mother's Day cards against the number of patients who complain bitterly to psychiatrists and other therapists about the way that they were brought up by their parents and tormented by their siblings? "Natural moral sense" is said to be derived from the interaction of "innate dispositions" with the "earliest familial experiences" [2]. This is a twist on the contrary position that predatory law-breaking abides in certain persons and will emerge in the face of sufficient eliciting experiences. That contrary position is voiced in a recent novel by a Cambridge senior tutor who maintains: "As with all mammals, their first sounds are angry, the pleading note comes later. …