Rights from Wrongs: The Sense of Injustice
14th November 2009
From its first publication in 1975, Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology has stirred disputes over his claim that ethics is rooted in human biology. Our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, he asserted on the first page of the book, are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved by natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural and social environment. In 1998, Wilson’s book Consilience renewed the controversy as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments. Human nature is not a product of genes alone or of culture alone, Wilson insisted. Rather, human nature is constituted by “the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction rather than another, and thus connect the genes to culture” (164). The biology of the moral sentiments would be the study of the “epigenetic rules” of moral experience as shaped by the complex interaction of genetic propensities and cultural learning. Wilson has often used Edward Westermarck’s theory of the incest taboo as a good example of this.