David Brooks on the Moral Sense

David Brooks of the New York Times has a piece here on the origin of what he calls the "moral sense." The article starts this way:

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

Brooks goes on to describe the naturalist case for the evolutionary development of the "moral sense." Right off the bat, however, Brooks has posed what I can only call a false alternative, a phrase I now have a visceral reaction against since Barack Obama so often abuses it. ("There are those who pose the false alternative between spending trillions of dollars you don't have and fiscal sanity...") Anyway, God gives us the "rules" in a number of ways. One way is through direct revelation, another way is through the natural law:

When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them... Rom 2:14:15.

There is no conflict between the natural law known by reason and the divine law known through revelation; both have their source in God. This would even include Brooks's evolution-based morality since God, if He is, would not have His Purposes stymied by evolution. Evolution would then be just another way God could reveal His Will to us. In other words, God created the kind of world in which we live, knowing that we would evolve the right sort of moral rules.

But we've got to dismiss the evolutionary basis for morality, not because it is exclusive of a Divinely Revealed morality, but simply because it is incapable of serving as a basis for morality in any case. Moral rules concern the relationship between the possible and the actual; they criticize what we are doing in terms of what we should be doing but are not. But if your moral rules are entirely based on "observing people as they live", then your rules will necessarily be nothing more an affirmation of already-existing arrangements. And no one needs rules to tell them to keep on doing what they are already doing anyway.

Brooks quotes a professor who compares the moral sense to our sense of taste:

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

There is, however, no gainsaying taste. Some people like sweet foods, others like salty foods. Some people act fairly and others with cruelty. We haven't gotten to morality yet until we can say that it is better to act fairly than with cruelty, and that can only happen when we acknowledge that the possible (how people should act) has authority over the actual (how people in fact do act). I believe it was Kierkegaard who wrote that the poet is higher than the historian, because the poet criticizes the actual in terms of the possible. The evolutionist is an historian.

There was a time when slavery was a universally accepted human institution. At such a time, basing morality simply on how people live, we would have to conclude that slavery is a morally acceptable institution. There was a phrase popular back in the sixties that went if it feels good, do it. The evolutionary morality version of this is, if you are already doing it, keep on doing it. But who needs to be told that? No more than than they need to be told to keep on doing what feels good.

Now the supporter of evolutionary morality might object this way: Our studies show that evolution has endowed children with an inborn sense of justice:

This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.

Slavery, the supporter of evolutionary morality will say, clearly conflicts with this inborn sense of justice. Therefore slavery is wrong. It just took people a while to figure it out, but when they did, it was because they realized slavery conflicted with their evolutionary developed sense of justice.


This doesn't work because if, for centuries, people had no problem approving of slavery despite the rudimentary sense of justice they were born with, then clearly slavery did not conflict with this sense of justice. The evolutionist is just reading back into his rudimentary sense of justice his preferred moral results. In other words, he's slipping the possible in by the back door. If our principle is to "observe people how they live", and if they live in happy accord with a slave-based society, then we have no possible basis on which to condemn that society. And historically, that is not how slavery ended. The slave trade ended in the 19th century because the British Navy decided that a world without slavery was preferable to a world with slavery (the actual one), and further decided to bring this preferable world about at the end of a cannon.


The only way to get to morality is through the notion of a final cause for man; in other words, to acknowledge that man has a rationally appreciable point to his existence that he is free to bring about (or not bring about) through his actions. The final cause serves for him as an ideal, as the possible which he has not yet brought into existence, but should. But the primary reason Darwin offered his theory of evolution was to banish final causes from the world; in doing so he banished any rational basis for ethics as well. This isn't to stay that people can't still behave morally in the era of Darwin; it only means that any attempt to make sense of their behavior in Darwinian terms must fail.