Steven Pinker on "The Moral Instinct"
Yesterday's NYT Mag included an article by Steven Pinker about the science of morality:
... Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.
These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.
So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.
The whole thing is definitely worth reading. Pinker's take on the subject includes discussions of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, altruism, repugnance and many other topics that come up here on the blog-dot frequently. Pinker ultimately argues that the scientific study of morality can actually help us to become better people.
-Greg Dahlmann
Earlier on blog.bioethics.net:
+ Evolution and morality
+ Steven Pinker on "dangerous" ideas
+ Weekend reading: experimental philosophy
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Fascinating article and blog. For what it's worth, there is a free, non-profit educational web site that has several full interviews with Dr. Norman Borlaug -- who is featured in the original article -- about his work in agriculture. Go to http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org and click on the "Media Resouces" for video podcasts of his interviews. Or go to the "Farming in the 50s-60s" section and click on the "Crops" subsection to see longer articles about the history and debate about the Green Revolution. Again, it's totally free and non-profit.
- by Bill Ganzel on Jan 14, 2008 at 11:57 AM | link
As I see it, another way of stating Pinker's position is to say that "morality" as a mental construct is our mind's attempt to mediate between two "hard-wired" behaviors in humans: (1) behaviors which increase the level of effective cooperation in our social group (the "moral instinct") and (2) using rationality to determine our actions - that is, "deciding" to do things. Since we are driven at a pre-rational level to certain behaviors by (1), we create a rationalization of them to achieve (2) so that we can decide to act in accordance with our hard-wired cooperative behavior.
The implication is that, just as we cannot actually proceed with life without believing that we have free will (i.e., we decide on our actions), even if we intellectually come to the conclusion that it is an illusion, so it is with morality. We cannot proceed with life without some moral framework, even if we intellectually recognize it as not absolute and hence fallacious from a logical point of view.
So we are stuck, so to speak. We cannot establish the absolute basis for our own morality - we may even recognize that such establishment is impossible. But we also cannot act, moment-to-moment, without appealing to it as if it was.
- by Edward Schwarz on Jan 15, 2008 at 2:44 PM | link