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Overview
The classic and controversial argument that morality is based in human nature.In this New York Times Notable Book of the Year, James Wilson seeks to reconcile traditional ideas of morality with an extraordinary range of important empirical research into the sources of human behavior over the last 50 years. His findings will shake the assumption of many readers.
Synopsis
The classic and controversial argument that morality is based in human nature.
Publishers Weekly
In this age of self-gratification and widespread lawlessness, Wilson ( Thinking About Crime ) takes the unfashionable view that a moral sense is part of our basic nature, albeit one that competes with our narrowly defined self-interest. In this lucid, elegant, magisterial and controversial essay, the eminent social scientist, a public policy professor at UCLA, punctures the tenets of neo-Darwinian biologists, cultural relativists, Freudians, behaviorists and anthropologists. Social bonds, he argues, are not entirely a matter of convention or a tool to ensure perpetuation of the species. Instead, our moral faculties--sympathy, fairness, self-control, etc.--grow directly out of our mutual interdependence as social animals. Wilson believes that the moral sense is formed as the child's innate disposition interacts with earliest familial experiences. Self-restraints on appetites are built into the ``primitive'' limbic brain, he stresses. Perhaps his most controversial thesis is that men and women differ in their moral orientation, with men more inclined to emphasize justice and emotional control, while women stress sympathy, caring and cooperation. First serial to Commentary, Crisis, and Public Interest. (July)