The Moral Sense.

• Author: Lomasky, Loren E.

Though perhaps not always presenting the loveliest visage nor the most edifying, the image that perpetually fascinates is the one that greets us when we gaze into the mirror. Both that which individuates oneself from other human beings and that by virtue of which we are alike captures and retains our attention as few other things can. Whether as eavesdroppers, voyeurs, Joyce Brothers groupies, or occasional readers of People magazine, nearly all of us offer implicit assent to Pope's dictum that "the proper study of mankind is man."

Perhaps never before in the history of the sport of people watching, though, have amateurs and professionals played the game so differently. The amateur version is laced through and through with moral characterizations. We view both intimate acquaintances and distant celebrities through a prism of virtues and vices. "She's never had a thought in her life for anyone but herself," or "That man simply can't be trusted," we say--and thereby not only describe but evaluate.

The marriage of a royal couple breaks down, or one Balkan people with unpronounceable names sets about slaughtering its equally unpronounceable neighbors, and we bestir ourselves not only to get the facts about who may have done what to whom and why, but then also to sympathize with one party and blame the other. Even when these doings have no perceptible effect on our own welfare, we do not sit on the sidelines as dispassionate observers. Instead we react emotionally to other people's displays of loyalty, treachery, steadfastness, compassion, bravery, duplicity, or whatever--and in our more introspective moments we are cheered or dismayed to view such qualities in ourselves.

But this sort of folk moral psychologizing has increasingly been called into question during the past couple centuries by scholars of human behavior. Economists look at people buying and selling, working and investing, and see various clones of a one-dimensional fellow named Homo economicus who, with single-minded determination, rationally acts to advance his own narrowly materialistic self-interest. He is, in the parlance of the profession, a "utility maximizer," and the utility that moves him is uniquely his own.

Nor does Homo economicus confine himself to the market. The work of path-breaking recent Nobel Prize winners such as James Buchanan and Gary Becker shows him equally at home while running for political office, dressing according to the latest fashion trends, marrying and raising children. Evolutionary biologists tell a complementary story. We are the descendants of generations that won a share of the survival game through assiduously enhancing their fitness potential. Those disposed to sacrifice their own prospects for the sake of their fellows returned their bones and chromosomes to the primeval ooze whence they came, while more consistently "selfish genes" left progeny that eventually generated you and me.

If economics and biology maintain that competition in markets and mating crowds morality out of our nature, behavioral psychology and anthropology assume a yet more radical stance in denying that there is, in any interesting sense, such a thing as human nature. According to B.F. Skinner, we come into existence as blank tablets waiting to be written on by environmental influences. Whether these conditioning factors are deliberately engineered or thoroughly adventitious, they determine all our behavior. Separating an Albert Schweitzer and a Hermann Goering are only the vagaries of their reinforcement schedules.

For anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, "there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture." That which fascinates or repels, inspires or sickens us is rendered such through the imperatives of our cultural inheritance. It could have been radically different--and, as field anthropologists report, elsewhere it is...