Pinker on Moral Instincts
For those who missed it, there’s an interesting essay by Steven Pinker in today’s NY Times Magazine on human beings’ moral instincts. Here’s a taste:
The findings of trolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a “universal grammar” that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.
The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be….
The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?
This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.
Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky’s theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that people in different cultures moralize?
Looks like Pinker is being quite Kantian here in a materialist sort of way — claiming that the structure or content of the brain/mind determimes the structure or content of thought. Which leaves him with the same epistemological problems Kant ended up with.
If I recall correctly, someone reviewed two books on this issue in the most recent Commonweal.
Joe, yes, I wondered how your bonobos fit into all this.
I also have to admit that when I read the title “Pinker on Moral Instincts,” I had a fleeting moment wondering WHO was pinker on moral instincts than WHOM? But nobody talks about being “pink” anymore.
Eduardo, this was an interesting read, and I kept wondering how and whether Natural Law fit into any of this.
Hope some of you philosopher types might address that.
Jean, the phrase “natural law” means different things to different philosophers. What Pinker says would not mesh with an Aristotelico-Thomistic conception of natural law.
As far as the question of the relationship between a “moral sense” and the “wiring” of the brain and the anthropological evidence cited in this piece, so far as I can see one could use the same evidence to support some sort of claim that it is part and parcel of human nature to have a conscience.
I was interrupted and should have made the last sentence above say that ” it is part and parcel of human nature that each person have a conscience that provides the same sort of guidance to each of us.” Note that none of what I’ve said suggests that conscience provides any of us with foolproof guidance about all relevant matters.
I found the article interesting but flawed in the sense that “evolutionary biology” is still at the initial stages of looking at this question.
I think then that Pinker tends to overstate his case,
Still, I would not worry if where he’s headed is no tconguent with traditional philosoph yeither.