The moral sense

I had hoped this book would either be 1) a formidable response to situationalist ethical perspectives, or 2) kind of a light-reading G.E. Moore, or 3) something altogether new and exciting. It was anything but these. Wilson's moral/psychological survey bears all the lesser qualities of early

enlightenment ethical theories. It is frustratingly narrowminded in its assumptions about what is universal in human thought and experience, overly self-assured and under-critical, and too quick to assert that such and such must be the case after striking down the other option in some shortsighted false dichotomy. Yet, being altogether conservative, it bears few insights not more vividly present in those limited works of enlightenment rationalism. Wilson's only seems to me to respond to his opponents' positions adequately if one only listens to superficial interpretations of those ethical systems. Reading this book taught me little, and meaningfully altered my concept of ethics--and therefore behavior--even less. I was really disappointed by the lack of rigor, cogency, and ingenuity. The book is not awful, but a work of comparable magnitude could have been written by just about any armchair philosopher with a yen to write down his thoughts--and I wonder if it might have then been more brief and more interesting.

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