i think it might be appropriate to be a bit disappointed with david brooks, philosopher. that moral claims are more or less merely emotional preferences based on our social nature is not a result just produced by scientists at the university of virginia. it was a doctrine of various ancient greek sophists. it was stated with perfect clarity by david hume in the eighteenth century. it was a doctrine of the logical positivists. etc. on evolution and cooperation, the classic remains kropotkin's mutual aid (1902). now the problem, not even assayed by brooks, is that there's no way to avoid the collapse into relativism. and if our moral preferences, such as they are, are just ways we include ourselves in, they're also ways we exclude others, etc

also one may just note that these are all debates within philosophy. you might have empirical evidence about the ways people do reach value judgments. the normative status of these results is a philosophical question. and the position that the empirical material is supposedly converging on is an ancient position in the debate.

well, if we were trying to drop brooks into the taxonomy of contemporary political philosophy, he'd be a "communitarian," which we might provisionally say is a conservative relativism. that's ok, but it leaves us with a kind of brute chauvinism and preference for whatever brooks tells us our culture is, and makes any rational deliberation about our values delusory. of course there's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back, and brooks throws reason back in there somehow.

at any rate, communitarianism is of course interesting. and all these questions are interesting. but brooks - obviously a very bright guy -is demonstrating the limits of his intellectual scope.

just for the hell of it, i say to you that this doctrine that we're by the microsecond judging every aspect of experience is jive, or is the description of an illness.