The biological roots of moral sentiments?

David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical patterns of that psychology, and its deep structure, are being elucidated by contemporary researchers (and some of the work can be found in popular works such as The Blank Slate). Humans believe they have an intuitive understanding of our species' psychology and nature in a manner which is unlike our ...