Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 6: Sociability

In Part II of his book The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson discusses the sources of the four moral sentiments that he explores in Part I.  Those sentiments are sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.  The sources of these virtues that he takes up are also four in number:  the nature of humans as a social animal, the family, gender differences, and the modern impulse toward moral universalism.  A common theme across each of the four chapters on these sources is sociability:  “The mechanism underlying human moral conduct is the desire for attachment or affiliation” (127).

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 5: Duty

I concluded my last post of reflections on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense by noting a desire of mine, namely, to be confident that other people, specifically my friends and family but others also, are dependable. I do not think that I am alone in this.

That post was on self-control. We value self-control as morally virtuous to a significant degree not for its own sake but because it tells us something about the character of the person who possesses it. People with that sort of character are valuable to us both practically (because we are social beings who rely upon and must cooperate with others in our shared lives) and emotionally (because we generally need stability in key areas in order to fare well in our lives). Self-control is virtuous, in other words, because it is necessary to advance praiseworthy human goals in life. Something similar is at work when we turn our attention from self-control to duty.

Terminating 2 at 20

Exercising her right to choose ... to kill her twins.

I ran across a disturbing opinion column from one week ago about a woman in Florida who was pregnant with twins.  "Was."  She is pregnant no longer.

No, she was not a sad victim of urban violence -- but her twins were.  She terminated them at twenty weeks of gestation.  She ended their lives half-way through her pregnancy.  Why?  For the supremely sensible reason that ... she just didn't want them, and she felt nothing for her twin children.

The website on which the column appears is littered with annoying political ads, and the column itself ends with an appeal to "the church" that may not make sense to readers or even follow from the text that precedes it.  But what the column does do well is to bring to attention how commonplace this sort of ending of innocent life is in the United States.

It also prompts questions in my mind about what sort of person possesses such a psychological and emotional disposition that she does not think twice about killing the two twin children who are so visibly alive and growing in her womb.  What really causes a person to feel and act that way?

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 4: Self-Control

While in middle school, I had to stay after classes had ended for tutorials in English grammar.  I cannot recall now if that was because I incorrectly wrote my homework or quizzes, or if it was because I asked questions that the teacher could not answer fully before having to move on through the lesson.  I do remember one week when all I did after school was practice how to distinguish an adjectival from an adverbial prepositional phrase.  Once I got that down, something clicked.  Grammar became not only an interest but also more closely aligned with the way I thought -- or how I thought about how I thought.  This tendency only increased when I began to learn foreign languages, which in turn enhanced my understanding of English grammar.

Among other things, I was drawn by grammar to the conventional nature of language.  I am not sure whether I was taught or simply caught prescriptivism, the notion that grammar does not merely reflect language usage but specifies what it should be.  Proper grammar is how people ought to employ language.  Inasmuch as there was an obligatory element to grammar, there was a moral dimension to it for me:  This is not only how others ought to speak and write, which is how we got the grammar rules I was learning, but also how I myself ought to speak and write.

What is more, if I could speak and write in such a fashion, other people, because of our shared convention, would understand me and trust me not only to communicate but also as a communicator.  Well-executed grammar would say something about me, about my person, about my character.  Not splitting my infinitives could suggest that I would likely not divide my loyalty.  Faithfulness in small things would augur faithfulness in larger things.  If I were trustworthy in my communication by following shared conventions, I would be trustworthy in the rest of my life by adhering to that shared life.

To be sure, I may not have been able to articulate all of this explicitly at the time, but I can safely say now that this was to a significant degree how I thought and felt then.  This understanding is similar to thoughts that appear in a previous post on the usefulness of grammar in the workplace.  A main point of that post, of the person quoted in it, and of my remarks above relates to the third of James Q. Wilson's moral sensibilities:  self-control.

In this continuation of my series of posts on Prof. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I offer mostly a descriptive recapitulation of his main ideas, because I find myself agreeing generally with him.  For those who wish to become familiar with his ideas but who do not have time or inclination to read the book itself, such a recap may be useful.  In this vein, I touch briefly below on (i) what self-control is and why it is moral, (ii) some historical perspective, and (iii) addiction and morality.  Lastly (iv) I offer some additional reflections.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 3b: Fairness

What about fairness and private property ownership?  In my last post, I mostly focused on applying Prof. Wilson's categories of fairness to relationships between persons.  These are important, and they are often overlooked.  We need to think, probably more than we typically do, about relational fairness between individuals.  But questions about fairness between groups, particularly differences in ownership of property by various societal segments, are also important and happen to be currently at the forefront of national conversation.  So we need to think about that, too.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 3a: Fairness

Part three of my series on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense is well-timed.  In a recent post, I observed that current disputes about tax policy in the U.S. are at bottom disputes about competing understandings of fairness.  In another post, I noted complications in the advocacy and practice of tolerance, which also turns on rival versions of fairness.  This matter, fairness, is the second of the four key moral senses that Prof. Wilson discusses.  In his hands, just as in my earlier posts, it turns out to be more complex than we might first assume.

Most helpful in this chapter I found to be a taxonomy of fairness.  Professor Wilson identifies three conceptions of fairness: 

1. equity:  proportionate contributions yield proportionate outcomes on the merits
2. reciprocity:  proportionate exchanges
3. impartiality:  a "fair hearing"

Lists visually reinforce to my mind their content; however, for all of their reinforcing benefits, they are usually not sufficiently expansive to provide more workable definitions of terms.  This Prof. Wilson does in the following summary, which is still admirably succinct:

The human sense of fairness appears to embody three related but distinct concepts.  First, equity:  People who are equal with respect to contributions should be equal with respect to outcomes.  Second, reciprocity:  People who have given something to you are entitled to something back.  Third, impartiality:  People who judge another person ought to be disinterested, free of favoritism, and observant of rules agreed upon in advance. (70)

This taxonomy outlined by Professor Wilson is not the final word on fairness.  It is, however, one of the clearest and most useful that I have encountered.  It is helpful as a heuristic.  Immediately following his summary explanation of these conceptions, Prof. Wilson suggests the source of them, namely, the relationship between parent and child:

I suggest that these principles have their source in the parent-child relationship, wherein a concern for fair shares, fair play, and fair judgments arises out of the desire to bond with others.  All three principles are rational in a social and revolutionary sense, in that they are useful in minimizing conflict and enhancing cooperation. (70)

What could be lost in his neat trifold scheme is the natural sociability that various conceptions of fairness all reflect:  "a concern for fair shares, fair play, and fair judgments arises out of the desire to bond with others" and helps with "minimizing conflict" (my emphasis).  Typically when unfairness of whatever variety exists, relational friction also exists.

Perhaps this point is so obvious that it actually needs to be underscored.  Our being mindful of it will help us to be more attuned to dynamics in our own interpersonal relationships.  Conflict occurs when one senses unfairness.  When there is conflict between two parties, a likely reason is that one of them believes that he has been treated unfairly.

As crucial as recognizing this is to assessing what may be a reason for interpersonal conflict, a sense of unfairness, it still masks the reason behind the cause of the conflict -- that is, what caused the cause.  And if Prof. Wilson is right, the original source, that Ursource, as it were, is not unfairness per se but the desire to bond with others.

How would our relationships be improved, or more quickly reconciled, if when unfairness is felt or claimed we kept in mind this underlying desire to bond?

Consider this as an example.  If my brother becomes miffed because he believes that I favored my sister with a more expensive birthday gift than his, or because I spent less time visiting him than her, the proximate cause of his being miffed is unfairness.  In particular, he believes there is unfairness due to inequity.  Both he and our sister are equally my siblings.  They have contributed a proportionate amount of "siblingness" to my life.  Therefore, my brother reasons, he ought to receive a proportionate recognition of his sibling contribution.

But it would be too shallow to end the analysis there.  Is my brother ultimately interested in the gift or the giver?  Is he finally concerned with a perceived inequity, the unequal token (the gift, the visit) to my sister of my sibling affection for her relative to him?  Or is he concerned with the affection itself?  Does he most want a pricier gift or a longer visit per se, or does he most want me?  He is ultimately concerned to be reassured that I, his brother, as a person, view him with the same love and affection with which he views me.  He wishes to confirm, and in this way advance and deepen, the bond with me.

Here we have discovered an additional element in the relational fairness mix:  reciprocity.  In this example reciprocity is closely tied to equity.  My brother has given to me sibling affection, and he wishes to receive back like affection, an amount proportionate to his contribution, not for affection's sake but insofar as it seals, or authenticates, the sibling bond that we share.  

In short, my brother's protests of unfairness reflect less a concern with unfairness itself than a concern with our relationship.  He wishes our relational connection to be acknowledged in a similar gift or visitation (equity) and returned through zealous commitment to one another (reciprocity).  Fairness is not only about the law court; it also pervades the family room.

Being cognizant of this fact will, or should, help us practically in our own relationship situations.  The payoff may be clearer discernment of why conflict has arisen with someone.  Maybe, with a fuller understanding of the forms that fairness can take, we can avoid some conflicts entirely by taking measures to preempt feelings of unfairness.  We may even be able, positively, to cultivate our own sense of fairness and to practice it in our lives so that this is the result:  that other people will naturally characterize the relational bond that we have with them as solid, and that they attribute it to our concern for fair shares, fair play, and fair judgments.

Professor Wilson's interest is not only what fairness is but also how we make determinations about what is fair.  The two, as my example demonstrates, are intimately connected to each other.  In the next post, a follow-up to this one, I will turn my attention to our appraisals about what is fair in relation to property ownership.