Discussion Group Report

Since they were first published, newspapers have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, political terror and human atrocities. Differences in religious belief, color of skin, and lineage have precipitated riots, repression, and genocide. Almost any boundary drawn on the earth can become a cause for war. Warlords fight for booty while children starve.

Contemplating this litany of tragedy, one might become persuaded to Thomas Hobbes' opinion that in their natural state, human beings engage in a war of all against all, being worse than beasts. They are not content, like beasts, with only sufficient food and sex, but strive to outdo each other in every aspect of life, seeking power and wealth, pride and fame, beyond reasonable measure.

In his book The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson rejects this Hobbesian view, as well as that of most modern great philosophical theories of human behavior, which give little weight to the possibility that humans are endowed with a moral sense. Commonly two errors are made in understanding the human condition: assuming that culture is everything and assuming that it is nothing.

"People," Wilson argues, "have a natural moral sense...formed out of the interaction of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences." People from an early age judge themselves and often try to live by the judgments they make. Children often discuss concepts such as fairness. Most of us do not break the law most of the time, not simply for fear of being caught, but also because our conscience forbids our doing wrong. We honor promises, play games by the rules, respect the rights and claims of others, work at our jobs even when the boss isn't looking, wait our turn in line, cooperate with others to achieve a common goal, are courteous to strangers, leave tips for waitresses, help people in distress, and join campaigns that benefit others but not ourselves, partially out of fear of retribution but also out of a sense of duty, a desire to please, a belief in fairness, and sympathy. Children, no matter how burdensome, are not abandoned in large numbers. Incest is universally tabooed. Although infanticide, cannibalism, and killing the aged has been practiced, these customs have been readily abandoned by every primitive people to whom colonial governments have offered improved technology, modern medicine, and communal peace enforced by disinterested constables.

In fact, when people act fairly or sympathetically, it is rarely because they have engaged in much systematic reasoning (that society will be better off as a consequence). Much of the time our inclination towards fair play or our sympathy for the plight of others are immediate and instinctive, a reflex of our emotions more than an act of our intellect, and in those cases in which we do deliberate, our deliberation begins, not with philosophical premises, but with feelings--in short, with a moral sense.

There is, however, often a war within the individual between his or her moral sense and more selfish inclinations, and although some individuals allow the latter to predominate, most frequently demonstrate the former in their behavior.

The human inclination towards a moral sense encourages a family and community loyalty that has served to ensure the survival of the species during the process of organic evolution.

The Study Group Discussion dealt with evidence from other sources, some of which seem to support Wilson's hypothesis. It was observed that Japan, with its low crime rate and finely honed sense of personal courtesy in interpersonal relationships, serves as a living refutation of Christian Fundamentalist claims that a nation must be Christian in order to be decent.