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What in Morality Is Innate?
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11007 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1993 |
881 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
James Q. Wilson's important book The Moral Sense raises the issue of whether morality has a basis in human nature. I agree that it does--indeed, I would argue that this is incontrovertible--but I would disagree about how we establish this and over where we arrive when we do so. To the extent that morality has a basis in valuational activity, the argument is easy. It is now generally agreed that all knowledge is interpretational. Locke's tabula rasa never could have had any experiences. The ability to cognize a color, syntax, or desirable experience requires some implicit coding in the organism. The infant who seeks the mother's breast may not know why he does so, but the implicit recognition of is desirability is a primitive form of valuational activity.
Although the distinction between nature and nurture is one of the hardest to establish, humans differ from lower species in the extent to which their cognitive activities depend on nurture. If we now recognize that even birds learn from experience and teach their offspring, the evolutionarily produced long childhood of humans is a condition of their ability to adapt successfully to an enormously varied set of circumstances. Thus, all of their built-in interpretative codings permit a wider range of variations than in other species.
This difference has impact on the relationship of human nature to morality. The primates are closer to humans than other species. Experiments with monkeys show that they are highly sociable (with individual variations) when raised with mothers, indifferently sociable when raised with broomsticks in place of mothers, and incapable of sociability when deprived even of broomsticks. (I neglect the learning that may occur in the womb.)
Thus, it is highly likely that sociability, for instance--an important element in Wilson's argument for an innate moral sense--depends for its existence not on nature alone but nature under favorable conditions. Furthermore, given what we know of the development of the brain after birth--the destruction of much of its substance while circuits are built that permit certain forms of activity--it follows that nature itself is developmental after birth, and it is likely that certain aspects of later nature may be aborted by failures in early development. Whether it is such a failure in sequence that produces the psychopath cannot yet be proved, but I suspect that this is a likely, if not necessarily an exclusive, explanation of many of the cases.
With respect to examples of claims of fairness--another important element in
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