Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 10: Character

This is the last post in my series dedicated to reflections on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense.  The subject, broadly speaking, is character.

In approaching this topic in this final installment, I thought that I would underscore a number of things that stood out in my reading of Prof. Wilson's book.  These are some matters that I think are particularly important and will likely stay with me for some time to come.  They do relate to character, but some of the strands themselves might not immediately seem to have much to do with it.  My catalog of them may even seem a hodgepodge.  Maybe it is.  By the end, however, the tiles of the character mosaic will, I hope, have come into view, and I will have pinpointed some areas where Prof. Wilson's book has prompted me to think most.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 9: Universal Impulse

In a prior post in which I reflected on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I drew attention to the universal impulse in moral sentiment that he identifies:  "The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise -- and occasionally the application -- of the view that all people, and not just one’s own kind, are entitled to fair treatment" (191).  Because it is so remarkable, and because it has such sweeping implications, it is worth probing further this topic about the development of universalism in moral thinking and practice.

We can begin by focusing on a question that Prof. Wilson himself poses:  "How can we explain the great expansion of the boundaries within which the moral sense operates?  How, in particular, can we explain why we believe that moral rules ought to have universal applicability?  This aspiration toward the universal is the chief feature of the moral history of mankind" (194).  Indeed.

Professor Wilson suggests that the long development of consensual marriage, particularly in northwestern Europe, helps to provide a key, but not the only, component of an explanation.

The link between the two, consensual marriage and universal moral applicability, may not be immediately apparent.  The tie, however, is the parallel development in northwestern Europe of individualism.  What is the connection?

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 8: Gender

The pertinent question is an old one:  how do natural differences between men and women manifest themselves in their respective moral senses? 

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 7: Family

Why are the nature and structure of family life so heatedly debated?

This question can often be overshadowed by the rancor of contemporary disputes about family matters (such as cohabitation or marriage and wealth), but it is important to ask.  It is a question that arises in my mind frequently.  I wonder if exploring an answer to it might lay the groundwork for more constructive and less rancorous dialogue about these substantive topics than we sometimes have.

James Q. Wilson's discussion of the family, which occurs in a different context that is not about moral debate per se, may help us to pose an answer to this question.

Quite simply, one reason the nature and structure of family life are so heatedly debated, it seems to me, is because "[t]he family is a continuous locus of reciprocal obligations that constitute an unending school for moral instruction" (The Moral Sense, 162-63).  The fabric of the family ineluctably shapes the fabric of its members' morality.

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.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 2: Sympathy

In part 1 of this series of my reflections on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I summarized the book's main aims and shared a few of the most salient points that I found of conceptual and practical value.  In this post, I begin to tackle the book's second section, which examines four key moral sentiments:  sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.  Specifically I focus on sympathy.

As preparation for a review of moral senses such as sympathy, it may be helpful to recall what Prof. Wilson is and is not doing by exploring these sentiments:

I am not trying to discover "facts" that will prove "values"; I am endeavoring to uncover the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural origins of our moral habits and our moral sense. But in discovering these origins, I suspect that we will encounter uniformities; and by revealing uniformities, I think that we can better appreciate what is general, nonarbitrary, and emotionally compelling about human nature.  (26)

In the chapters on the four moral sentiments, Prof. Wilson does just this.  He weaves together the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural origins of these respective moral habits and senses.  In doing so, I find his descriptive observations -- which are helpful in their own right as an organizing heuristic for thinking about moral matters -- to pull me toward practical considerations and action.

I offered a few remarks on sympathy, "the human capacity for being affected by the feelings and experiences of others" (30), in the earlier post.  It helped to exemplify the basic approach to the subject that Prof. Wilson takes.  Sympathy, like the other sentiments, functions in human life as both a motivation for moral action and a standard for it.  A few other brief notes are worth mentioning.

In all of his chapters on the sentiments, if to varying extents, Mr. Wilson explores the relevance of evolutionary biology on the moral sense in view.  The theory of inclusive fitness, advanced by William Hamilton after Charles Darwin, fills out the latter's theory of a species' successful self-propagation over time:  "An individual is reproductively successful to the extent that his genes occur in the next generation, and he can assure that occurrence not only by reproducing himself but also by assisting in the reproduction of individuals who have his genes" (41).

Professor Wilson admits that this theory might explain why we humans sacrifice ourselves for our kin, but it does not go very far in explaining why we humans are willing to sacrifice ourselves for our grandmother, who is past childbearing age and cannot deposit genes to future generations.  It also does not explain why we may rush into a burning building to save a dog or adopted children, with whom we have no genetic similarity (42).

Maybe the notion of reciprocal altruism can help:  "we engage in altruistic acts -- such as helping nonrelatives, caring for adopted children, or being affectionate toward pets -- in order to impress others with our dependability and hence to increase our opportunities to have profitable exchanges with these others" (43).  Mr. Wilson points out that as an explanation this utilitarian idea has truth elements to commend it, but a more basic motivation -- "a prior, dominant fact" (44) -- must be recognized.  We more basically value reciprocity in human relationships to which we are naturally drawn because we fear isolation and loneliness and we value human sociable companionship.  This human trait governs the theory of altruism, and it is at the heart of sympathy.

What can be said about evolution and sympathy, then, is this:  "If sympathy is widespread, it must have been adaptive, but what was selected for is a generalized trait that both encourages reproductive fitness and stimulates sympathetic behavior.  That trait, or adaptive mechanism, is attachment or affiliative behavior" (44; emphasis original).

We are naturally more sympathetic to those to whom we are most similar.  Humans naturally think of themselves first in terms of a small group (a nuclear family, an extended kinship, a local community, religious group), but we can imagine ourselves as part of a larger sphere and, with extra effort, behave sympathetically toward those who differ from us in race, religion, and culture.  Earlier, Prof. Wilson makes the keen insight that "life-styles" today is the nonjudgmental word for what used to be called "character," and I might broaden that to say "culture" (7).  This is a point that illumines the linguistic shift which has occurred in morality and permissible moral discourse, on the one hand, and that, on the other, contemporizes the tendency toward small group affiliation, toward those who live life as we do.

Two towering moral philosophers, both Scotsmen, in their own way identified sympathy as either the source of moral sentiments (Adam Smith) or at least as one of the two extremely powerful and basic sources along with utility (David Hume).  Both men viewed moral philosophy as inextricably linked to the study of human nature.  The place of sympathy in the thought of other philosophers could be mentioned, but the central place of it in Smith's and Hume's writings should prompt us to reflect more than we typically do -- or I have done -- on what it is, how it is manifested, and how it might be cultivated.

Sympathy can lead to benevolent feelings and actions, Mr. Wilson notes, but we should not limit sympathy to the rosier side of life:

Sympathy is often expressed by phrases that convey not tenderness or concern, but anger and vengeance.  If we see an abominable act -- say a man laughing while torturing an innocent baby -- our first reaction is not likely to be an expression of sympathy for the child but rage at its tormenter; and this will be true even if it is not our child.  Sympathy is often wrongly portrayed as entirely a tender sentiment:  sympathetic people are sometimes described as soft, warm, or weepy.  They often are; but they are much more than that, and some of the most sympathetic people have no trace of cuddliness in their temperament.  Even so staunch a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill recognized this:  "It is natural to resent and to repel or to retaliate any harm done or attempted against ourselves or against those with whom we sympathize." (40)

If we do not limit sympathy to the soft and warm side of life, then we should perhaps also be prepared to view anger and vengeance as legitimate moral responses that stem from not just a sense of justice but also of sympathy.

In this way, we may also have stumbled upon an important observation:  moral senses such as sympathy and justice are connected.  We may not be able to say (yet) with someone like Adam Smith that sympathy is the primary cause of moral sensibility.  But we recognize that there is interplay between the moral senses.

Moreover, if there is any truth to the commonplace that men and women are different (a truism to which some do in fact object), and if on the whole it is the case that women naturally display the tender and sensitive side of sympathy more than do men, then men would do well to remind themselves that such sympathy may be a manifestation of moral sense.  And it may be a commendable moral expression just as much as the stereotypical male tendency to display the more violent and vengeful side of sympathy.

If they are so tempted, men, in other words, should not diminish women's proclivity to soft sympathy.  Women, likewise, should not diminish men's proclivity to hard sympathy.  Both may be appropriate, admirable actions stemming from a developed moral sense.  If morality is valued, then the various expressions of the moral senses should also be valued.

To be sure, members of each sex can and often do display the moral trait that I have associated as more typical of the other.  The point is not gender stereotypes per se but better mutual appreciation among the sexes.  Professor Wilson's discussion of sympathy, which recognizes its pluriformity, provides men and women enhanced grounds for doing what they already know that they ought to do:  live patiently in an understanding way with one another.  Sympathy has come full circle.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 1

I finally completed James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense.  I have mentioned the book in previous posts; I will again -- and for good reason.  The late Prof. Wilson's accessible writing is marked by his massive erudition and incisive reasoning.  It offers much from which one may learn, even if one disagrees with parts or the whole.

Because I find the volume so worthwhile, I plan to post a series of reflections on it.  As with this entry, summaries will be followed by ruminations.  I do not pretend that my posts of gleanings will do justice to the book.

The book is about human nature.  In particular, it is about the moral sensibility that is inherent in human nature and cultivated accordingly.  In arguing that there is such a sensibility, Prof. Wilson finds himself at odds with many academic gatekeepers.  He contends that "an older view of human nature than is now current in the human sciences and moral philosophy is the correct view; thinking seriously about the kinds of animals we are will help us understand our persistent but fragile disposition to make moral judgments and the aspects of human relations that must be cultivated if that disposition is to be protected and nurtured" (vx).

To say that this disposition is something that may be "protected" assumes that it exists, and Prof. Wilson marshals plenty of supporting evidence.  That is the point:  "This book is a modest effort to supply the evidence that man has a moral sense, one that emerges as naturally as his sense of beauty or ritual (with which morality has much in common) and that will affect his behavior, though not always and in some cases not obviously" (25).

To say that one might want this moral disposition be "nurtured" affirms that that to which this sensibility disposes humans is potentially valuable.  Indeed, this positive moral trajectory seems to be where Prof. Wilson places the accent in his discussion:  "Beneath our wars, crimes, envies, fanaticisms, persecutions, snobberies, and adulteries; beneath, that is to say, all of those human traits that might be said to constitute our original sin, there is a desire not only for praise but for praiseworthiness, for fair dealings as well as for good deals, for honor as well as for advantage" (vx).  It is these desires, or sensibilities, and their sources that Prof. Wilson examines.

Although one can reasonably argue for more such moral senses common to almost all people than those that Prof. Wilson treats, he covers much ground with these four:  (i) sympathy, (ii) fairness, (iii) self-control, and (iv) duty.  Next time I will focus on these.  For now, I wish simply to comment on some overarching, framing matters.

To identify these ethical inclinations as Prof. Wilson does is not to identify a set of moral rules (see 11).  But it is in various ways "an attempt to clarify how we evaluate human behavior, and so [the book] starts with judgments in order to discover what we are praised for doing.  Almost everyone has a moral sense that is evident when we speak disinterestedly about our behavior or that of others.  We regularly praise and condemn other people's speech and conduct" (24-25).  There may be a place for rules.  What is more interesting to me is the everyday nature of morality, or moral sensibility, that is highlighted.  This is where most people live.

First, how conscious are we that when we condemn or praise others we are making moral claims?  This may be apparent for things like cheating (it violates our sense of fairness, which is a form of justice) or adultery (it violates our sense of loyalty, which is a form of self-control).  But it extends to more mundane behaviors, too.

When we say that someone is meanspirited, we are judging that meanspiritedness as behavior that ought not to occur; the person should have behaved with kindness instead.  Why?  Because we generally value or find praiseworthy kindness more than we do spite.  The former is the virtuous or moral alternative to the latter.

In this vein, Prof. Wilson discusses sympathy.  This is getting ahead of ourselves somewhat, but it will help to advance the present point.  He writes that sympathy is

the human capacity for being affected by the feelings and experiences of others.  Sometimes sympathy leads us to act altruistically; usually it does not.  More often it restrains us from acting cruelly.  And even when it does not inspire benevolent actions, sympathy is an important source of the moral standards by which we judge both others and ourselves.  Sympathy, in other words, is both a motive and a norm. (30)

We probably agree that sympathy is a motivation for our behavior, but we might ask, How does sympathy also function as a standard, a moral norm, for behavior?  Professor Wilson suggests that our motivation derives from our natural (biological and emotional) sociability.  We desire to be admired by others and so to please them, not to offend them.  In other words, we exist in relationship with others and desire to promote the mutual relational interaction.  To this end, "we must imagine" what others think and feel.  In imagining, we judge in this way:

More particularly, we judge whether the actions and feelings of another person are proportionate.  A rich boy distraught at the loss of a penny arouses not sympathy but derision; a boy indifferent to the loss of a loving dog arouses not sympathy but disdain.  We approve of the conduct and character of another person if, when we imagine ourselves in this position, our feelings correspond to those that we think motivate him. ... Sympathy -- our sense of another's feelings and of their appropriateness given the circumstances -- is the basis of our judgment.  (32)

If this account is roughly accurate, then feelings have a much larger role not just in our moral motives but also in our moral standards than perhaps many of us have been conditioned to suppose.

This is a second noteworthy item of the first section of The Moral Sense:  the role of emotions or feeling in both moral interactions and moral calculations.

To admit a place of emotions in moral reasoning may seem odd, but it also seems to make perfect sense.  As I thought about this from the perspective of engaging others on often controversial topics (because morality is typically a disputed subject), it struck me that a perhaps (more) fruitful way of conducting these conversations is to be sensitive to and aware of other people's emotional responses to the topics under consideration.

Some of us find it relatively easy to explain why we think what we do about a moral topic.  Others do not.  Often it is also the case that people have difficulty mustering arguments for their firm position on a moral topic.  It is therefore helpful to remember this:  "The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments that they employ" (8).

Why is this helpful?  It will help us to learn to practice patience in our own lives as we interact with people who may display inconsistency (as we all do) between our words and actions and who may not be able to verbalize their moral feelings.

Second, the feelings on which people act may give us a better barometer of what positions people actually hold, despite what they say.  It will help us to understand -- to sympathize with, as it were -- our family members, friends, or other conversation partners, because we understand the integrity of moral sensibility in persons:  it involves not just their mental senses but also their emotional senses, which prompt physical actions.  We become, as it were, more holistic readers of moral philosophy.

Third, in being patient with others and sympathizing with them so as to understand them better, we will also likely perceive more constructive avenues to pursue in our actual dialogues and interactions.  Where is there more common ground than we might otherwise have assumed?  What is the heart of the matter or disagreement, if there still in fact is one?  Are we approaching the same point in different ways?  How should we best carry on the conversation from here?

Fourth, we will learn to be more self-aware.  We will hone the ability and discipline to discern when emotions are compelling us to respond to justice or injustice, to something praiseworthy or condemnable. And we will better be able to identify which ones they are and why.

In this connection, we may wish to ask ourselves these questions or ones like them.  "Why am I feeling this way about what she just said?  Is it a moral response?"  Or, "Why do I have this physical reaction to what he just did?  What is the connection with my sense of what is right?"  In so doing, we will actually deepen our social relationships with people, because we will be more in tune with, and frankly concerned about, the deeper principles that individual occurrences reflect.  I suspect that we will also be led to better appraisals of ourselves and others.  And in time, with faltering steps -- and by honing our senses of sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty -- we will probably be able to cultivate not only more substantive relationships but also more virtuous responses to them.

Two separate spheres of life?

Why does a blog ostensibly about "cultivating wisdom, prudence, and virtue" comment on and provide links to articles about political-legal topics such as termination of human life or Congress' powers to regulate it?

This is a fair question worth pondering.  Two recent sets of posts relate to these topics.

The question, it seems to me, probably reflects a critical assumption:  morals, morality, and moral evaluations -- those things tethered to virtue of mind and action -- have very little, if anything, to do with politics and law.

The reasoning behind such an assumption might go like this:  "If those two things, morals and politics, did have something to do with one another, then I could understand why you might mention them in this forum.  But I'm not really sure that they do go together.  Isn't morality just a private matter while politics is public?  Aren't these two separate spheres of life?  That's how I tend to think about it.  So I need some help understanding why you've raised those topics here, when you want to promote right practical thinking and action that are in accordance with virtue."  We might respond by posing a question of our own.

Are morals really separate from politics?

This is a well-traveled moral and political philosophical question.  It arises, for instance, in classical Greek thinking.  One encounters the matter in the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Aristotle.  It evolves in their successors, the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans.  I touched on it in my inaugural post.

Another way to frame this question is to ask:  Do morals and morality transcend social structures, or are morals and morality determined by them?  Is doing right (morality) distinct from faring well (socio-political pursuits in community)?  This matter is not only well pedigreed in classical philosophy; it is also a matter that tangibly affects daily life today -- including the propriety of content in blog posts such as this one.

It is a mistake, I submit, to divorce questions of morals from questions of politics.

It is erroneous, in other words, to separate decisively considerations of virtue in individuals from considerations of society's governing policies that form the communal environment in which these individuals find moral pursuits a matter of daily experience.  To separate them so, at least, is to reconfigure radically social community.

In a previous post, I noted that some people explain political differences in terms of different conceptions about the structure and function of the family:  the morality that informs approaches to the family gets mapped onto the government as family.  The guiding moral framework of the microcosm (the family) becomes the guiding moral framework for the macrocosm (the political state).  People tend to see the government as family, and they wish for those principles operative in the one sphere to prevail in the other.  This is just one theory (that of George Lakoff in Moral Politics), and it is not perfect.  It does, however, posit one vivid way in which morality and politics are connected:  the role and moral principles of the family understood subsequently as those of the government.

Morals and politics may be connected not only from the perspective of cognitive linguistics but also from the perspective of philosophical reasoning.

In his A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre makes this observation while discussing the supposition that "there are two distinct spheres of life, one for 'morals,' the other for 'politics.'"

But, in fact, every set of moral evaluations involves either neutrality toward or assent to or dissent from the social and political structure within which it is made.  And insofar as dissent is concerned, the moral evaluation will involve some degree of commitment to an alternative.  (MacIntyre, Short History, 97)

This connection between the two was the case for Plato and Aristotle, the Notre Dame professor argues, because they assume that the proper role or duty of an individual is inextricably intertwined with that individual's role and duty in the polis.  That is, these philosophical giants take for granted their particular social structure in deriving norms for practical guidance in pursuit of virtue. Therefore, the "Greek moral vocabulary is not so framed that the objects of our desires and our moral aims are necessarily independent.  To do well and to fare well are found together in a word like eudaimōn" (85).  And they are found together, moreover, in the daily context, the rough and tumble world, in which they both occur.

Additional reflection on Prof. MacIntyre's larger treatment of Greek ethics could help to shed light on multiple angles of this topic, particularly how morality neither completely transcends social settings nor is wholly subsumed by them.  To explore his treatment, however, would take us far afield.  The point I find most germane now is the moral evaluation that necessarily takes place in one's disposition toward a certain social and political structure.  We might simplify this structure and call it policy.  Professor MacIntyre identifies assent, dissent, and neutrality.

I am not always entirely sure whether neutrality in the strict sense, without a slight preference for one policy or the other, is in fact possible.  Even if it were, the person displaying neutrality would still be involved in a moral evaluation based on some sensibility, and that person would still be assuming a commitment to an alternative, a third thing, something either not on offer or not yet proposed.  Neutrality in this sense would also be dissent from the social and political structure (or policy), a lack of assent to this but desirous of "something else."

My concern is not indifference or neutrality per se; rather, it is that approval of, disapproval of, or even neutrality toward a particular socio-political structure involves a moral evaluation of it.  The one socio-political structure or policy is approved or disapproved because it is judged to be right, or just, or not.  If one is neutral, one is either unsure whether it is just (itself a part of moral reasoning) or has a framework in which what is right is judged to be based on different criteria (because, from an alternate moral sensibility, the policy is not clearly right or wrong as other partisans suppose).

Therefore, it does seem that morals are connected to politics; the two are not separate from each other.  To say this is not to identify them; they are distinct but not separate.  It is just to affirm that politics have an inextricable moral dimension, and our moral sensibility is what causes us to think and feel the way we do about politics.  Our moral sense, to use the phrase that is the title of James Q. Wilson’s valuable book, is what prompts our assent to, dissent from, or neutrality toward a governing policy or regime.  We are involved in judging whether we think it is right.

What is the payoff of these reflections?  This point is important to make because there is a tendency with some currency to divorce moral questions from political ones.  This proclivity may be subsiding somewhat.  The oft-rehearsed appeal to "social justice" explicitly introduces moral questions into political discussions.  But we need to realize that differences on questions that may relate to "social justice," on the one hand, are not necessarily a matter of one side's being moral and the other's being immoral, the one just and the other unjust.  It is, on the other hand, actually to underline that the political topic is a moral one and that the disagreement is about the nature of justice, precisely the moral principle in question.

Second, this is, in fact, to bridge the two things that sometimes are divorced, the norms of virtues like justice and the social and political structures in which the norms find expression.  It is to recognize the uniting thread of doing right and faring well, morality and politics.

It is, third, to admit that discussion about policy measures that we might characterize as questions of "social justice" may involve us in discussions about more basic questions of morals, morality, and moral evaluation.  We may have to back all the way up to comprehensive moral frameworks.  We must be prepared for those more difficult soundings in our conversations with one another.  We cannot raise the political matter and shy away from discussions of the moral matter.  More to the point, in raising a political topic we implicitly welcome moral questions.  We cannot cry foul if we are pressed to explain ourselves and our guiding moral convictions and assumptions.  This may be the only way to make real political progress in such conversations.

Finally, we must also train ourselves to engage in these discussions both respectfully and thoughtfully.  Not only in ancient Greece but also in our own day, to probe the moral questions that lie underneath surface questions of politics is what responsible individuals do, as a key component of their role, in social community.  This sort of communal self-understanding and sense of responsibility is something that we would do well to reclaim.

Wilson's Moral Sense

As I mentioned that I would in a prior post, I have picked up the late James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense and have begun to make my way through it.  Some excerpts from and reflections on the book might appear in this blog in the process.

Professor Wilson's thesis is this:  "that most of us have moral sense, but that some of us have tried to talk ourselves out it.  It is as if a person born to appreciate a golden sunset or a lovely song had persuaded himself and others that a greasy smear or a clanging gong ought to be enjoyed as much as true beauty" (ix).  This thesis and the analogy attached to it are interesting for any number of reasons. 

Tale of Two Conservatives

Two conservative writers died last week, James Q. Wilson and Andrew Breitbart.  To my knowledge, I never read a word of Mr. Breitbart's, which seems to have been extremely provocative.  (In fact, Mr. Breitbart's writings, by most third-party accounts, seem consistent with what I had expressed in my About page about many blogs:  they are "vapid billboards of arrogance; a number are myopic delivery systems of cookie-cutter ideology.")  I can probably count on one hand the number of articles by Mr. Wilson that I read, which, because of their depth of thought, always seemed to require more than one reading.  From what I can gather from media reports, the two men both had, in their own ways, sharp minds and were able to communicate clearly to others their views.  These are admirable traits, whatever one's views happen to be.  But Professor Wilson intrigues me.  He seems distinct, or, better, distinguished.