The Job of Grammar

Kyle Wiens has written a sensible article on the importance of grammar:  "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.  Here's Why." 

Yes; people like Mr. Wiens do exist in the real world.  I know folks who will shy away from doing business with people who make grammar mistakes in introductory e-mails.  These folks also do not look favorably upon job applicants who make the same blunders.

Mr. Wiens touches on the import of grammar, that it reflects something more fundamental about a person than mental skill, when he writes:  "Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English.  I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts."

That something more is both self-control and dependability.  These are ethical qualities.  Someone who does not write according to whim but follows conventions in order to communicate clearly with others in the same society typically may be relied upon to follow instructions and discharge one's duty.

Grammar sticklers care about more than just good grammar; they care about good character.

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.

Upgraded from Minimum Wage

It looks as though the New York Knickerbockers will not match the three-year offer that the Houston Rockets recently extended to Jeremy Lin.  This allows the restricted free agent to move to a state without an income tax and to collect $25 million over the next three years.

In a previous post in March, I noted the fact that Mr. Lin, a Harvard alumnus who is presumably smart enough not to squander his new wealth like so many athletes, was at the time making the NBA's paltry league minimum for his tenure, $800,000 per annum:

Lin's "minimum wage," given an 82 game season, is $9,756 per game, which itself is 48 minutes.  So that is equivalent to $12,195.12/hour for game time (assuming Lin plays the entire game, which he doesn't).  By contrast, the current regular minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25/hour.

For the next two years, Mr. Lin will make $5,000,000 per year, which by the same metric as above comes to $76,219.51 per hour.  In the third year of his contract, Mr. Lin will earn $25,000,000, which translates into $228,658.54 per hour.  The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour.

The Knicks might have balked at that $25 million over three years amount in the end, although according to a July 5th Tweet by ESPN's Marc Stein:  "Source with knowledge of Knicks' thinking: 'They will match any offer on Lin up to 1 billion dollars.'"  One billion dollars ended up being too much, I suppose -- not that too many people would have actually cared.  Only the Knicks seem to care about $30 million, and that because it does not want to pay a tax for exceeding the league's salary cap.

The point I made in my prior post still stands, only more so now.  It is that temporary tent-dwellers will raise a hue and cry over, for instance, Jamie Dimon's base salary of $1.5 million as CEO of J.P. Morgan in 2011.  Curiously, that happens to be less than twice that of Mr. Lin's NBA approved minimum wage last season and, what is more vivid, less than Mr. Lin's new $5 million salary for the coming season.

Masses in Zuccotti Park might raise pitchforks in protest of Mr. Dimon's total compensation in 2011 of $23 million, a vast sum, but a sum still less than the $25 million that Mr. Lin will report to the IRS in three years.  To my knowledge, there are no protests over Mr. Lin's package.

Let's be honest.  Mr. Dimon's job is more demanding than Mr. Lin's.

The former's company employs in Manhattan alone more people than the entire NBA employs worldwide.  And this comparison is still true even if you don't count the NBA layoffs last year, which were 11% of its workforce.  One can argue that Mr. Dimon does not deserve his lofty pay package for steering a financial institution that is systemically important to the global world order.  But one might also argue that Mr. Lin does not deserve his similarly lofty package for the game-time intervals of pleasure that he provides to New York and now to Houston basketball fans.  (Of course, the Wilt Chamberlain example in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia comes to mind; see pages 160-64.)

Maybe Mr. Lin relieves through his job the stress that Mr. Dimon creates in us through his.  We worry about the financial system, our money, and what might happen if the system breaks down.  We do not worry about the collapse of the NBA in the same way, and watching Mr. Lin juke a defender or drop a trey helps us to forget about the risks associated with the banking sector that will funnel to Mr. Lin his $60,976 per game next season.

Be that as it may, the real question in my mind still is this:  Why is a large compensation package in one industry (finance) more fundamentally objectionable than that in another (sports and entertainment)?  Why is the one protested and the other not?

And what does the fact that one is protested and the other not say about the basic nature of what is being protested?  And about the protesters?

I suppose we should all be happy that Mr. Lin has finally broken free from the enslaving shackles of his minimum wage.

Why bother?

A Friday op-ed by Jay Akasie in The Wall Street Journal and a Sunday op-ed by Ross Douthat in The New York Times both addressed the same topic:  the current state of the Episcopal Church in the United States.  According to both men, the current state is distressing.  What is said of the Episcopal Church could be said of any of the mainline Protestant denominations.

Mr. Douthat's main point is that the less distinctively Christian in teaching mainline, or liberal, Christian churches in this country become, the more they hasten their demise.  Their member ranks and financial giving dwindle.  This is a trend that has been continuing for decades and threatens the very future existence of these bodies.

When, as Mr. Akasie reports of the Episcopal General Convention, "During the day, legislators in the lower chamber, the House of Deputies, and the upper chamber, the House of Bishops, discussed such weighty topics as whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats, and whether to ratify resolutions condemning genetically modified foods. Both were approved by a vote...," then it is the case, as Mr. Douthat observes, "Today, by contrast [to a previous era], the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism."

This observation might be new to the regular readers of the Times.  It is not, however, a subject that is new at all.  In 1923 a Presbyterian minister named J. Gresham Machen published a book the title of which crystallizes his concern:  Christianity and Liberalism.  The conjunction and in the title signifies the difference between the nouns on either side of it.  His concern then was that Protestant churches were being overrun by the Social Gospel movement, which under his examination turned out to be mostly social and little to no gospel:

But one thing is perfectly plain -- whether or no liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity.  And that being the case, it is highly undesirable that liberalism and Christianity should continue to be propagated within the bounds of the same organization.  A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour. (160)

Dr. Machen's point was essentially that which Mr. Douthat articulates, something that might be colloquially put this way:  "Why bother?"  Why would the world bother with the church if it is little more than an imperfect version of the world?

History has proven in the time since Dr. Machen's publication that the liberals in the world do, on the whole, in fact become less inclined to attend liberal churches.  That is something characteristic of the way that liberalism and its exponents interact with the Christian church.  The world of secular liberalism does a much better job of offering liberalism than the clumsy ways of liberal ecclesiastical bodies trying to resolve a religious identity crisis.

Despite the similarities between Sunday's op-ed in the Times and Christianity and Liberalism, there is a point at which Dr. Machen would disagree with something noted in Mr. Douthat's column.  It is when Mr. Douthat quotes Gary Dorrien, who argues that the exponents of the original Social Gospel movement were much more dogmatic (read: orthodox) than current Protestant liberals.  The impression given is that as a class the first Protestant liberals were both orthodox and sufficiently socially minded.  Professor Dorrien, himself a Protestant liberal, might view the past with a little more nostalgia than all of the evidence warrants.  Mr. Douthat quotes him as saying of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant progressivism:

Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

That is debatable, and in fact it was debated.  To be sure, Mr. Dorrien's description is true of some Social Gospelers, but it is not necessarily true of them all.  Reading a person's heart is a tricky business.  Interpreting one's doctrinal statement of faith, what is affirmed and denied, is a bit easier.  And it was precisely on this front that Dr. Machen was prompted to pen his book.

It was, in other words, precisely because things like the transcendence of God, the divinity of Christ, and the sole effectiveness of redemption through Jesus' substitutionary atonement were denied that Dr. Machen felt compelled by conviction to, in today's term, "call out" these very denials.  See, for instance, chapter 3, "God and Man," chapter 5, "Christ," and chapter 6, "Salvation." 

About these things, one can disagree, and Dr. Machen was the first to admit as much.  What he desired most was honesty.  He wished for the churches in his day to be clear that the message that it advanced about these subjects was not the historic Christian teaching:

In my little book, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923, I tried to show that the issue in the Church of the present day is not between two varieties of the same religion, but, at bottom, between two essentially different types of thought and life. There is much interlocking of the branches, but the two tendencies, Modernism and supernaturalism, or (otherwise designated) non-doctrinal religion and historic Christianity, spring from different roots. In particular, I tried to show that Christianity is not a "life," as distinguished from a doctrine, and not a life that has doctrine as its changing symbolic expression, but that -- exactly the other way around -- it is a life founded on a doctrine. (Machen, "Christianity in Conflict")

This brings up another point both in Dr. Machen's own writings and in Mr. Douthat's article:  the life that is connected to Christians and their institutions.

It is said, by Mr. Douthat for one, that "[t]he defining idea of liberal Christianity -- that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion -- has been an immensely positive force in our national life."  This is not something that people should wish to sacrifice.  That it would be sacrificed if non-liberal versions of Christianity were to be ascendant is a false inference.  It was leveled at confessional Christian churches in the 1920s, just as it is the working assumption today.

One can see from Dr. Machen's own reflection on Christianity and Liberalism that thought and life, or we might say teaching and social outworkings, go together; they are inseparable.  The point that he never ceased to emphasize was just the logical priority of the one to the other.  As he put it, it is "a life founded on a doctrine."

And it is not just the individual life that is in view.  Human institutions, as well, may be positively affected, the very institutions that some fear that a so-called conservative approach to Christianity would ignore.  Once again, Dr. Machen:

It is upon this brotherhood of twice-born sinners, this brotherhood of the redeemed, that the Christian founds the hope of society.  He finds no solid hope in the improvement of earthly conditions, or the molding of institutions under the influence of the Golden Rule.  These things indeed are to be welcomed.  But in themselves their value, to the Christian, is certainly small. ... Human institutions are really to be molded, not by Christian principles of the unsaved, but by Christian men; the true transformation of society will come by the influence of those who have themselves been redeemed.  (158)

Now, what it means to be redeemed and to what end society should be transformed are open to debate, and it is just these two things that were debated as modernism swept through American churches at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s.

Dr. Machen meant redemption in the historic Christian sense of someone's deserving punishing condemnation by God for rejecting God as God in thought and life, but that person receives, instead, demerited favor because God condemned as a substitute Jesus to whom the sinner is united:  the human is united with Jesus in his death (condemned really but not physically with Jesus on the cross) and in his resurrection (vindicated really now and in the future physically with Jesus in his glorified life in the Spirit).

And Dr. Machen envisioned a societal transformation organically flowing from the charity that became increasingly manifest in the words and actions of those who both were already and were in the process of being transformed by the power of the life-giving Spirit -- the same life-giving Spirit by which Jesus was raised, even redeemed, from the dead.  This is not the redemption that, treasured though it rightly is, an alcoholic experiences by becoming and staying sober.

To note these things does, however, raise a question about terms.  It is not just questions about terms like "redemption" and "transformation" but also about terms like "liberal" and "conservative."  We should admit that these are slippery terms.  They can obscure and hinder conversation perhaps more than they can advance it.  Such terms advance conversation and thinking when they summarize in a word a more involved nexus of ideas and when the defined or connoted summaries are agreed upon by all parties.  That does not always happen today.  These words are often used instead as pejoratives imbued with animosity and unfair attributions.  This is a danger to recognize and to avoid, but I am less sure than perhaps others that the term liberal as Mr. Douthat and even Dr. Machen used it fall into that trap.

The Protestant liberals that Mr. Douthat has in view self-identify as liberals.  They wear their liberalism on their sleeve as a badge, and they don it, often, in their culture wars as a coat of mail.  Typically the self-conception of Protestant liberalism will nod to historic Christian doctrines such as sin and salvation so far as they do not get in the way of the perceived to be more important matter of "social justice" -- the contemporary term for the societal reform and progressivism that Mr. Dorrien identifies.

Or, to put it differently, in view are the denominations as such, not necessarily every member within them.  When Mr. Douthat refers to liberal Protestants and displays the Episcopal Church and its leaders as the poster child, most people generally know what liberal Protestantism is through such an example.  My point is that clarifying terms is important, but the terms in this conversation are filled with sufficient meaning for the conversation to take place without embarking upon a Socratic dialogue to define them.

What is worth embarking upon in dialogue is the relationship between Christian doctrine and its (social) outworkings.  What Dr. Machen predicted was that taken to its conclusion Protestant liberalism ceases to be Christian.  What Mr. Douthat describes is a denomination, the Episcopal Church, whose very identity and life seem troubled by the loss of historic Christian markers and the addition of politically and religiously liberal ones.  How the institutions that persist in promoting distinctively Christian teachings should manifest those professed realities in their lives is another question for another time.

What I wish to emphasize is that the topic of Mr. Douthat's column is not new.  We would do well to heed lessons from a fuller history.

One lesson is the necessary step of identifying the relationship between Christianity and liberalism.  Yes; what is in fact, as I have called it, distinctively Christian is open to debate.  But that debate itself should signal by its very fact that some perceived shift is occurring.  Is an implication of Mr. Douthat's column that the Episcopal Church is showing itself increasingly, because of its self-understood liberalism, to be concerned with matters that are not clearly Christian and are not clear implicates of historic Christianity?  If so, was not this the institution-threatening tendency that Dr. Machen identified in 1920s Presbyterianism?

Another lesson is that the supposed dichotomy between liberalism as leading to admirable social outworkings of Christianity, on the one side, and historic, or "conservative," Christianity as leading to no admirable social outworkings, on the other, is fallacious.  What has always existed is a difference between the two groups on how the beneficial effects of the change of thought and life, change that takes place in individual Christians and that is supposed to be apparent in their institutions, would and should manifest themselves in the body politic and society at large.

It may be that liberalism of an earlier era was more self-consciously focused on doctrine than it is now, but liberalism may not have been thereby more distinctively Christian than it is now.  Both versions, in their own ways, may have been more political, social, and cultural than Christian, as Dr. Machen understood it.  Even many of his contemporaries, although of course not all, agreed that he had reliably represented the liberal viewpoint.

H. L. Mencken, for instance, believed that Doctor Fundamentalis, as he called the Princetonian, was accurate in his depictions of modernist versions of Christianity.  In the Baltimore Evening Sun, the ardent atheist Mr. Mencken noted that liberals within Dr. Machen's denomination had "been trying, in late years to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works" (quoted in D. G. Hart, "J. Gresham Machen and the Problem of Christian Civilization in America," 2; see also Mencken's full obituary).  Who knows?  They might have even debated whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats or to condemn certain mass-produced foods.

Because it gets at the matter of individual and corporate refreshment provided by the church and of organic transformation of society that flows from that ministry, it is worth rereading the closing words of Dr. Machen's book:

At the present time, there is one longing of the human heart which is often forgotten -- it is the deep, pathetic longing of the Christian for fellowship with his brethren. ... There are congregations, even in the present age of conflict, that are really gathered around the table of the crucified Lord ... But such congregations, in many cities, are difficult to find.  Weary with the conflicts of the world, one goes into the Church to seek refreshment for the soul.  And what does one find?  Alas, too often, one finds only the turmoil of the world.  The preacher comes forward, not out of a secret place of meditation and power, not with the authority of God's Word permeating his message, not with human wisdom pushed far into the background by the glory of the Cross, but with human opinions about the social problems of the hour or easy solutions to the vast problems of sin. ... Thus the warfare of the world has entered even into the house of God.  And indeed sad is the heart of the man who has come seeking peace.

      Is there no refuge from strife?  Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life?  Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus' name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation, race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passion of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross?  If there is to be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven.  And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive a weary world.  (179-80)

More could be said.  This is a thorny subject.  I have attempted to introduce a perspective from an earlier time descriptively, because it seems to me to relate rather closely to the debates raging and the distressing church situations in our own time.  It is perhaps sufficient to observe here that the import of the columns by Mr. Akasie and by Mr. Douthat is that as the Episcopal Church, and perhaps mainline Protestantism generally, becomes more of an institution advocating for principles similar to a political and social segment of society, it becomes to that extent less relevant to society as a Christian institution.

This seems to these observers to be the case today, but it may not always be so.  There are times when, for instance, the moral vision of Christian institutions like the Episcopal Church has been mirrored in society in general.  Then the church was, although perhaps troubled and always imperfect, not in the state of dangerous demise that it is today.  The church may thrive even as its advocated ways are adopted in the culture.

The problem may not be with alignment of church and culture but, as Dr. Machen clearly argued and Mr. Douthat implies, with liberalism -- with liberalism itself within the church.  If the church increasingly reflects the liberal political and cultural order, but does it more poorly than the political punditry and cultural structures, then the question that every institution must ask itself relative to its members is, Why bother?

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.

The Dark Knight (of Taxing) Rises

In an effort at once to sympathize with those who find themselves in the minority and to recognize respectable reasoning through a topic when it arises, I reproduce in full today's rather lengthy editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

A Vast New Taxing Power

The Chief Justice's ObamaCare ruling is far from the check on Congress of right-left myth.

The commentary on John Roberts's solo walk into the Affordable Care Act wilderness is converging on a common theme: The Chief Justice is a genius. All of a sudden he is a chessmaster, a statesman, a Burkean minimalist, a battle-loser but war-winner, a Daniel Webster for our times.

Now that we've had more time to take in Chief Justice Roberts's reasoning, we have a better summary: politician. In fact, his 5-4 ruling validating the constitutional arguments against purchase mandates and 5-4 ruling endorsing them as taxes is far more dangerous, and far more political, even than it first appeared last week.

This is a minority view. By right-left acclaim, at least among elites, the Chief Justice has engineered a Marbury v. Madison-like verdict that camouflages new limits on federal power as a reprieve for President Obama's entitlement legacy and in a stroke enhanced the Supreme Court's reputation—and his own. This purported "long game" appeals to conservatives who can console themselves with a moral victory, while the liberals who like to assail the Chief Justice as a radical foe of democracy can continue their tantrum.

It's an elegant theory whose only flaw is that it is repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts's own language and logic. His gambit substitutes one unconstitutional expansion of government power for another and rearranges the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system.

***

His first error is the act of rewriting the plain text of a law, instead of practicing the disinterested interpretation that is the task of the judiciary, regardless of the partisan outcome. The second error is converting the health insurance mandate's penalty into a tax. Ninety years of precedents have honed precise and widely divergent legal meanings for taxes and penalties for violating laws or regulations, and they are not interchangeable.

The Chief Justice did not simply change a label—as if Congress said something was a penalty when it was really a tax. Rather, these categories are defined by their purposes and effects, by how they operate in practice. Taxes are "exactions" whose main goal is raising revenue, while penalties punish individuals for breaking the law. The boundaries can blur—legitimate taxes may also have strong punitive aims—but scarcely so in this case. ObamaCare's mandate was designed to regulate individual conduct to help achieve universal coverage. If it succeeds perfectly, it should collect $0.

Even if Democrats had passed the mandate tax as rewritten by the Chief Justice, and they did not, the Supreme Court until Thursday has never held that Congress can call anything it wants a tax. The taxing power like the Commerce Clause is broad, and the courts are generally deferential. But all powers the Constitution enumerates are also limited, and these limits—unique to each power—must be meaningful and enforceable by the legal system.

The Chief Justice's compounding errors deprive the taxing power of any viable limiting principles. Article I, section 8 gives Congress an independent grant of power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Taxes must originate in the House, the political body designed to be most responsive to voters. There are also important additional safeguards on the type of exactions known as "direct taxes."

Indirect taxes—"duties, imposts and excises"—are taxes on activities and products. They are passed on by a seller, triggered by a transaction and more or less optional: Consumers don't have to buy taxed goods and services. Direct taxes, on the other hand, are those that the federal government is empowered to impose on individuals as citizens. They cannot be avoided because they are levied on the existence of people.

America has its origins in a rebellion against arbitrary and pernicious taxation and the Framers wanted to make it extremely difficult to impose or raise direct taxes. These can easily morph into plenary police powers, the regulation of private behavior and conduct that the Constitution vests in the states. For this reason, while the taxing power in addition to raising revenue can achieve regulatory results, those regulatory results must be constitutional themselves.

***

That boundary held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power. The Chief Justice ruled instead that the mandate was an unconstitutional exercise of federal police powers under the Commerce Clause, only to transform the taxing power into a license for the federal government to impose taxes whose defining feature is commanding people as members of society.

Chief Justice Roberts concedes that "Congress's ability to use its taxing power to influence conduct is not without limits" and that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Supreme Court "policed these limits aggressively, invalidating punitive exactions obviously designed to regulate behavior otherwise regarded at the time as beyond federal authority." But then he writes that "more recently we have declined to closely examine the regulatory motive or effect of revenue-raising measures."

His error—or more likely, his deliberate sleight-of-hand—is that this modern jurisprudence does not deal with direct taxes but indirect taxes and income taxes. Income taxes were authorized in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment, which was necessary to bypass the other important limit on direct taxes, called apportionment.

The Constitution says that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken." Colloquially, direct taxes are known as head taxes and they must be spread among the states according to population. Apportionment's onerous limits were meant to protect against abuse and sectional favoritism. If Congress uses direct taxes, the residents of South Carolina will pay the same overall share as Massachusetts, and so forth.

But apportionment would defeat the mandate tax's "whole point," the Chief Justice writes, since every state will have a different percentage of citizens that are uninsured. So he cryptically rules that "A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax."

But if not a direct tax, then what kind of tax is it? It is not an indirect tax because it applies to a failure to purchase something, what the Chief Justice calls "an omission," not an optional transaction. It is not a tax on income because that merely hits "accessions to wealth," not what people choose or choose not to do with those accessions.

The result is that Chief Justice Roberts has created the only tax in U.S. history that exceeds its own constitutional limits and is meant to execute powers that the Court otherwise ruled were invalid. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises.

In the process, Chief Justice Roberts has hollowed out dual federal-state sovereignty and eviscerated the very limit on the Commerce Clause that he posits elsewhere in his opinion and that has some conservatives singing his praises. From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires.

The Chief Justice seems to understand this, so he tries to articulate his own new limiting principle for the tax power. His mandate tax isn't a mandate but merely a suggestion: choose to buy insurance or "pay money into the Federal Treasury, no more," an act he likens to a tax on gasoline. He also temporizes that "taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new."

True enough, but the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.

Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.

***

The John-Roberts-as-Daniel-Webster school argues that the long-term limits on the Commerce Clause and other aspects of the ruling are a good trade for the loss of upholding ObamaCare, and government excess has now reached its high-water mark and will recede over time. That false hope seems unlikely given the subversion of the taxing power and unleashing a general federal police power. This is equally harmful to liberty and dual sovereignty.

One possible saving grace is that this center-right country remains suspicious of taxation, and therefore the Chief Justice increases accountability somewhat through truth-in-labeling. But note how Democrats are already claiming that the ObamaCare mandate is not really the tax that is the only reason it was upheld.

White House chief of staff Jack Lew said Sunday that "The law is clear. It's called a penalty." Neither sentence is true. On Friday, the Obama re-election "truth team" was even less subtle in a memo titled "They're lying about ObamaCare" that made the same claim. Chief Justice Roberts has created a creature that is not a tax for political purposes but is a tax for constitutional purposes.

Chief Justice Roberts's ruling is careless about these bedrock tax questions, and they are barely addressed by either the Court's liberal or conservative wings. His ruling, with its multiple contradictions and inconsistencies, reads if it were written by someone affronted by the government's core constitutional claims but who wanted to uphold the law anyway to avoid political blowback and thus found a pretext for doing so in the taxing power.

If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked. The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.

"It is not our job," the Chief Justice writes, "to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." But the Court's most important role is to protect liberty when the political branches exceed the Constitution's bounds, not to bless their excesses in the interests of political or personal expediency or both. On one of the most consequential cases he will ever hear, Chief Justice Roberts failed this most basic responsibility.

A version of this article appeared July 2, 2012, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Vast New Taxing Power.