What are the sources of moral order? This is an important question when violence, dishonesty, family break-up and other social problems affect an increasing proportion of the population.
In The Moral Sense: An Essay James Q. Wilson locates the source of moral order in a ‘moral sense’- ‘a directly felt impression of some standards by which we ought to judge voluntary action’. This moral sense is based in human predisposition found across cultures and across time. It cannot be explained as the product of self-interest or simply as the following of cultural rules, but is grounded more fundamentally in human nature.
Others have, of course, expressed similar views. The distinctive feature of The Moral Sense: An Essay is that it uses the findings of modern science and social science to provide extensive evidence that natural human inclinations toward sociability lay the foundations for sympathy, fairness and reciprocity.
While other commentators on moral order seem close to despair, Wilson remains hopeful. The moral sense provides no guarantee of good behaviour, but it does provide solid foundations for moral order.
(Extract)
The central problem for social science is to explain social order. How do people manage to live together? One can discern two ways of answering that question. The first view is normative and communal: people learn from their culture customs that provide an internal compass guiding them to act in ways that minimise conflict and ensure comity. The second view is rationalistic and individualistic: order is created by explicit and implicit agreements entered into by self-seeking individuals to avert the worst consequences of their predatory instincts. In the first view, order is natural and prior to any social contract or government institution; in the second, it is contrived and dependent on agreements and sanctions. Rules are obeyed in the first case because they have moral force, in the second because they convey personal advantage. In the first view, compliance is automatic and general; in the second, it is strategic and uncertain.
The normative view has been under heavy attack for several decades for at least three reasons: it seems to imply a complacent functionalism; it appears to minimise or deny the value of conflict; and it lacks the theoretical power found in the assumption that people always seek their own interests. I believe that one can grant, up to a point, all of these objections and still be left dissatisfied with the alternative, namely, that social order is contrived, based on calculation, and dependent on individual assent.
I wish to reestablish a version of the normative view. My argument is that while conflict within societies is ubiquitous and diversity among them obvious, people everywhere have a natural moral sense that is not entirely the product of utility or convention. By moral sense I mean a directly felt impression of some standards by which we ought to judge voluntary action. The standards are usually general and imprecise. Hence, when I say that people have a moral sense, I do not wish to be understood as saying that they have an intuitive knowledge of moral rules. Moral rules are often disputed and usually in conflict; but the process by which people resolve those disputes or settle those conflicts leads them back to sentiments that seem to them to have a worth that is intuitively obvious. These sentiments constitute the fundamental glue of society, a glue with adhesive power that is imperfect but sufficient to explain social order to some degree. The philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular Francis Hutcheson writing in 1742, David Hume in 1740, and Adam Smith in 1759, explored with care and subtlety the reasons why certain sentiments commend themselves to us as worthy. I am under no illusion that I can improve on what they accomplished; but I hope to show, by drawing on the social and biological sciences, that their fundamental claims are consistent with much of what we have learned since the mid-eighteenth century.
One can infer the existence of a moral sense from behaviours that cannot easily be explained by even enlightened self-interest. There is less crime than one would expect from the probability of detection and punishment. Even in the poorest neighbourhoods, a complete breakdown of law and order does not lead most people to engage in looting. There are more obligations honoured than one can explain knowing only that it is often useful to honour them. For example, we sometimes keep promises when it is not in our interest to do so, we often vote in elections even though we cannot affect the outcomes, we make charitable donations to organisations that confer no recognition on us, and some of us help people in distress even when no one is watching to applaud our good deed.
