3/4/12.
Roger Kimball on Professor Wilson's book, "The Moral Sense:"
We must be careful of what we think we are, because we may become that.
—James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense
Roger Kimball on Professor Wilson's book, "The Moral Sense:"
We must be careful of what we think we are, because we may become that.
—James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense
"Wilson, whose previous books include Thinking about Crime, Bureaucracy, and other works concerned with public policy, writes about morality as a public fact. The language of virtue and morality has had a tough time lately. 'Our reluctance to speak of morality,' he notes, 'and our suspicion, nurtured by our best minds, that we cannot ‘prove’ our moral principles has amputated our public discourse at the knees.' Consequently, part of his purpose in this book is 'to help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality.' It is not, he writes,
an effort to state or justify moral rules; that is, it is not a book of philosophy. Rather, it is an effort to clarify what ordinary people mean when they speak of their moral feelings and to explain, in so far as one can, the origins of those feelings.
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