by Scott Soames
Since both sets of factual premises are needed, Wilson doesn’t attempt such derivation. However, he does argue that statements about the innate moral sense of human agents provide evidential support for statements about what, in the main, normal human agents should, or shouldn’t, do. The sources of this support are other-regarding ends and interests that are inextricably linked in normal human agents with self-regarding concerns, and so beyond their power to renounce at will. These other-regarding motivators provide us with moral reasons for action in various situations. It is not required that they be the only reasons bearing on an act; often they aren’t. Because we typically have many, often conflicting, reasons, it is not required—in order for something to count as a moral reason for acting in a certain way—that we actually do act in that way. Nor is it required that we consciously recognize or acknowledge each reason we have. It is enough that our fundamental interests would, to some substantial degree, be furthered by performing the act.
What, then, does it mean to say that A morally ought to do X? To answer this question, we must distinguish moral reasons from purely self-interested reasons. Suppose we take our moral reasons to do X to be a subset of potentially motivating reasons arising from our concern for the well-being of others, and for our cooperative relationships with them (broadly construed). Recognizing that these other-regarding interests arise from our social attachments, we note that they are often intertwined with our self-conceptions, and are, therefore, central to our own well-being. These are distinguished from our purely self-interested concerns for food, leisure, comfort, health, and a long life. Given all this, we might take the claim that A morally ought to do X to be true if and only if (i) A has some moral reason to do X, (ii) A’s moral reasons for doing X outweigh A’s moral reasons for doing anything else, and (iii) doing X would not require A to sacrifice A’s own welfare to an unreasonable degree.
Given this, one can see how it might turn out to be conceptually possible to derive moral oughts from a rich set of factual premises about what is. Whether or not one takes this to be a realistic possibility depends on one’s conception of human nature. This is where Wilson makes his contribution. If he is right, our genetic endowment, our early family experience, and the unalterable circumstances of the human condition provide us with a motivational base that ties us by bonds of affection, social affiliation, and mutual interest to others.
In making his case, Wilson repudiates Freud and embraces Darwin. Because cooperation promotes survival, we have been bred by natural selection to be social animals. We don’t simply need what others can provide, and so are moved by self-interest to depend on them. We are also disposed to form powerful cognitive and emotional attachments to them. Parents are innately disposed to protect, nurture, and love their babies. Children naturally bond with parents, while imitating and emulating those with whom they are intimate. In their early years they form reciprocal bonds of affection and trust in which their well-being and self-conception is intertwined with others. Entering into games and collective activities, they learn fairness, which involves adhering to common rules and earning rewards proportional to the value of their efforts.
This fusion of natural sentiment with rational principle gives birth to morality. Sentiment infuses our participation in games and collective activities with those we like and admire, and who we hope will like and admire us in return. Often our companions are models of the people we wish to become. The rules governing our activities with them are typically impersonal principles that apply to anyone who occupies a given role in the effort. Because these rules define the commonly accepted terms of participation in a mutually beneficial undertaking, it is in the self-interest of each participant to obey them. But they are more than prudential rules of thumb. Because the parties are often comrades bound by ties of social affiliation, rule violations carry psychic risks beyond the loss of the purely self-interested benefits secured by participation. Violations of rules governing interaction with one’s socially affiliated fellows are affronts to them, to one’s friendship with them, to one’s image in their eyes, and to the person one wants, with their help, to be. With this, instrumentally useful rules obeyed to secure the benefits of group action become principles to be honored even when no one is looking. This is the point at which sentiment, social affiliation, and recognition of mutual interest are incorporated into the binding commitments and broad principles that, at least partially, constitute morality.
That is Wilson’s basic picture. Further progress can be made by recognizing (i) that we are beings that construct our own identities in relation to others, (ii) that in doing this we often must rely on others for guidance about who we are and whom we wish to become, (iii) that the most successful way to secure this guidance requires being open to and caring about others, while trusting them to feel similarly about us, and (iv) that to build the relationships we need we must internalize impersonal rules that encompass not only the ancient principle Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but also its corollary, Be the kind of person you want and expect others to be.
THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENT OF THE MORAL SENSE IN HUMAN NATURE
Wilson divides the content of the moral sense into four virtues: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty. Sympathy is our sensitivity to, and concern for, the well-being of valued others. Fairness is a disposition to engage in rule-governed conduct based on reciprocity, equal or proportionate rewards for equal or proportionate contributions, and impartiality (including a willingness to have disputes settled by disinterested third parties in accord with rules known in advance). Self-control is the ability to resist temptations, not only in order to advance one’s own self-interest, but also to keep promises. Duty is the disposition to honor commitments and obligations even when it is not in one’s narrow self-interest to do so.
The interaction between virtue and self-interest is complex. If the virtues weren’t distinct from self-interest, they wouldn’t be virtues; if they weren’t intertwined with self-interest, we wouldn’t acquire them. Because most people admire other-regarding behavior, it is generally in one’s interest to develop a reputation for being sympathetic, honest, fair, and reliable. Because we are always observing and judging others, the best way to acquire such a reputation is to cultivate the virtues we want others to believe we have. Paraphrasing Robert Frank,3 Wilson says, “people will accept your behavior as a sign of honesty or duty only when it would be costly to fake it. If it is very costly to fake it, you can’t fake it; the reputation you then earn for honesty or duty corresponds exactly to reality. You are dutiful.”4
The advantage one derives from the good opinion of others is one reason why it is normally in one’s interest to acquire the habits of virtue. Although acting morally won’t always benefit you, it very often will. Even when it doesn’t—when acting morally requires real self-sacrifice—there are compensating rewards. Because virtuous agents have cultivated their natural sociability, established committed relationships with others, and internalized duties, their ultimate goals have expanded to include contributing to the welfare of others, honoring their commitments, and living up to their idealized self-images. Thus, the degree to which their goals are realized is measured in part by the contributions they make to the welfare of those they care about, the extent to which they have honored their commitments, and the degree to which they have lived up to their conceptions of the persons they most wish to be.
These compensations are not a higher form of selfishness. To be selfish is to lack other-regarding ends; to be unselfish is to have such ends and to act on them. The ends that move us are things we desire, not the satisfaction we feel when we get what we aimed at. We do feel satisfied when we achieve our ends, whether those ends are other-regarding or self-regarding. But satisfaction isn’t what we desire; it is the feeling we have when we get what we desire. Behaving morally involves desiring well-being of others and acting on that desire.
Wilson connects our natural sociability to cons
cience.
Conscience [the awareness of duty], like sympathy, fairness, and self-control, arises … out of our innate desire for attachment, and thus acquires its strongest development when those attachments are the strongest. People with the strongest conscience will be … those with the most powerfully developed affiliation.5
He uses psychopaths, who have very little social affiliation, to illustrate his point.
[T]he psychopath is the extreme case of the nonsocial personality, someone for whom the ordinary emotions of life have no meaning. Psychopaths lie without compunction, injure without remorse, and cheat with little fear of detection. Wholly self-centered and unaware of the emotional needs of others, they are, in the fullest sense of the term, unsocial.… If man were simply the mere calculator that some economists and game theories imagine, this is what he would be.6
Empirical findings suggest a neurophysiological basis for this condition. Wilson reports that psychopaths lack certain involuntary physiological responses—e.g., those detected by a polygraph when normal subjects lie. Psychopaths also lack responses associated with fear or apprehension caused by painful shocks following a stimulus. They have defects in role-playing ability, and they use thrill-seeking to compensation for under-arousal.7 The thread tying these findings together is the evidence of a neurological basis for striking differences in the qualities of lived experience between psychopaths and normal human beings that make the former blind to central facts of ordinary human nature that underlie morality.
By contrast, Wilson describes ordinary agents as
fully social beings: we have genuine emotions and can sense the emotional state of others. We are not so greatly in need of excitement that we are inclined to treat others as objects designed for our amusement. We judge others and expect to be judged by them.… To … some degree … we develop a visceral reaction to the actions that we contemplate, experiencing internally and automatically the prospect of praise or blame.… Of special importance is fear: our memory of unpleasant consequences begins to arouse our apprehension even when no consequences may occur. In this way our conscience is shaped.8
Wilson connects conscience with our earliest and strongest attachment, the bond between parent and child. Citing research on subjects ranging from gentile rescuers of Jewish Holocaust victims, to civil rights and campus activists in the 1960s, to later conservative activists, he argues that a strong sense of duty is correlated with unusually strong parent-child relationships.9 Studying American airmen imprisoned in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, he also notes the power of social attachment in the most extreme circumstances, which called for resistance to prolonged torture.
Duty … meant honoring an obligation to behave under duress in a way that signified how much the prisoners valued their comrades and how little they valued their captors. The key rule was unity over self. Fidelity arose out of a social connection … [kept alive by tapping coded messages to one’s fellows, each in solitary confinement].… A tiny and remote chance that one would be honored intangibly by one’s comrades was more valuable than a high and immediate chance that one would be rewarded materially by one’s enemies.… When guilt and fear are one’s only emotions, fear can be tolerated more easily if guilt can be overcome, and that in turn requires some signs, however faint, that one is not alone and that one’s comrades, however distant, share a set of rules by which guilt can be assessed.10
THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIAL AFFILIATION
Wilson points to well-documented, unlearned, pro-social behavior of infants that elicits corresponding innate, nurturing responses from parents and other adults. He attributes these to an innate disposition for attachment arising from natural selection. Attachment is common to all species that nurture their young after birth, but it is especially strong in humans because of the very long period in which the human infant and growing child requires parental care. Individuals and species willing to devote long periods to caring for their young leave more offspring behind with more intense, cooperative, social attachments than individuals of other species—adding up to a potent recipe for evolutionary success. Nor is the child’s disposition to form strong affective attachments limited to parents; it generalizes to relationships formed with siblings, unrelated playmates, and other adults.11
Wilson also notes the complex relationship between attachment, moral sense, and the acquisition of language.
What is striking about the newer findings of child psychologists is that the emergence of a moral sense occurs before the child has acquired much in the way of a language. The rudiments of moral action—a regard for the well-being of others and anxiety at having failed to perform according to a standard—are present before anything like moral reasoning could occur.… Indeed, the acquisition of language itself, rather than a necessary precursor to moral action, is itself a manifestation of the natural sociability of mankind.12
Noting the innate disposition of human children to acquire highly complex linguistic knowledge and abilities between the ages of 18 and 28 months, Wilson analogizes the rapid and uniform acquisition of our moral sense with our rapid and uniform acquisition of language, concluding that in both cases much of what is “learned” is hardwired into our brains from the beginning.
[T]he acquisition of language itself, rather than a necessary precursor of moral action, is itself a manifestation of the natural sociability of mankind.… By the age of three a child will be using complex grammar and be able to invent new languages (play languages) that obey grammatical principles they have never heard, and they will do so in accord with certain deep grammatical structures that produce certain uniformities in language across cultures.13
If the essential elements of social behavior … had to be learned or were produced by the higher and later-to-evolve parts of the brain … then it would be difficult to imagine how the species could have survived.… [I]f somehow only the higher parts of the brain were involved in sociability, they would often be overridden by the more urgent, primitive demands of fear, hunger, sex, and anger.14
Many of our self-seeking impulses can be kept on a short leash by some of our more social ones because both derive from the oldest, most “primitive” part of our nervous system.… Sociability does not require a modern brain and may not even require … language. Mating, rearing a child, and defending it against predators may express some of the more “primitive”—that is more instinctive—aspects of our nature.15
Emphasizing his biological theme, Wilson also draws on Darwin.
This view of how a moral sense emerges was stated with utmost clarity by Charles Darwin a century before developmental psychologists began to gather data that confirmed it. The third chapter of The Descent of Man is about the moral sense, and the key passage is this. “Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or nearly as well-developed, as in man.”
This is so, Darwin went on to say, for four reasons. First, social instincts will lead a creature to take pleasure in the company of its fellows and do certain services for them. It will even lead to what we call sympathy.… Second, as the mental faculties become more highly developed, man … can recall past actions, reflect on them and the motives for them, and as a consequence experience a sense of dissatisfaction from having failed to act when action was required. Third, with the advent of language, the wishes of others can be expressed, and there can occur discussions as to how each should act. Finally, the repetition of social acts … as modified by the expressed preferences of others, will lead to the development of habits that are, for most of us, the fundamental basis of the moral life.16
Wilson also helps fill in what Darwin took to be a lacuna in earlier accounts of morality by David Hume, Adam Smith, and others who emphasized inborn sympathy for others. Darwin objected that these accounts do not explain certain aspects of morality, such as duty and fairness, that are less dependent on empathy or compassion f
or others. Wilson replies that our native sociability provides a platform on which these more rule-bound parts of morality are built.17 It does so, he argues, because sociability “animates the kind of family life in which children learn at a very early age that play requires fair play, that if help is expected, help must be offered.”18
Given all this, one would expect to find some moral universals. Wilson maintains that we do find such tendencies in norms governing the organization of societies around kinship,19 norms governing marriage as an institution in which responsibility is taken for child care and collective economic well-being,20 prohibitions against infanticide21 and against unjustifiable homicide and unprovoked assaults,22 and taboos against incest,23 plus rules requiring promises be kept and property respected, and fairness in one’s dealings with others.24 In many cases, exceptions are made for special circumstances, certain standard excuses are recognized, and the contents of admonitions or injunctions are subject to some variation. For example, the great majority of documented cases of culturally permitted infanticide (in the anthropological literature Wilson cites) involve either a scarcity of food, deformed infants, or uncertain parentage. Moreover, he reports that infanticide rarely occurs after the first few hours of life (when bonding occurs) and it almost never occurs after the first month.25
There are, of course, also cross-cultural differences, including the extent to which individuals internalize universalistic moral rules that extend beyond their communal group. Wilson hypothesizes that individualistic child-rearing cultures, in the United States and elsewhere, lead children to develop strong peer-defined, peer-enforced rules of fairness that result from being encouraged from an early age to play with friends and acquaintances, and to make their own decisions. The result is a greater extension of sympathy to unrelated outsiders, a more impersonal rule-based conception of fairness, and a greater deference to universalistic standards. By contrast, he thinks that cultures like Japan, in which families rather than individuals are more central, emphasize preserving family honor and avoiding shame. They also define obligations more in terms of kinship, social position in the local community, or membership in an ethnic group. Such cultures still have other-regarding morality, but not one that so readily extends to all human beings.26 These broad generalizations about cultural differences, reflecting Wilson’s impressions nearly three decades ago, must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt—not least of which because cultural interpenetration and homogenization have, presumably, progressed to a considerable degree since then. Still, his perspective may be useful in raising broad issues about cultural variability.