Pinker on Morality

Steven Pinker, one of my favorite authors, is a linguist, psychologist, and, now it seems, somewhat a moralist. He was featured a couple of days ago on an episode of NPR's Talk of the Nation, after his column "The Moral Instinct" was printed in the 13 Jan edition of the NY Times. Both feature about the same information, so take your pick; are you an auditory or visual learner? Either way he raises some very interesting questions. Here's a recap from the article (cutting and pasting is so much easier) to start, then some notes from the radio show:

• "Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the ''moral'' setting isn't just a matter of how much harm it does. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles."

• If you're going to read the article, pay attention to the moral dilemmas on the third page. They reveal a lot about our moral psychology: "People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, ... but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification."

• Pinker goes into the physical psychology of moral judgments including the trolley dilemma. Different parts of the brain light up when making the moral judgment between throwing a fat man in front of the trolley barreling toward 5 unsuspecting victims, than when considering pulling a switch that will amount in about the same outcome. Three areas light up in the former: (1) "implicated in emotions about other people", (2) "implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train)", and (3) "an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere, registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another." In the latter, however, only the second area lit up, which "corroborate Greene's theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis."

• In listening to the radio show (at about 8:00 into the broadcast) Pinker answers an interesting question about war, implying that the way we do war, with kinship metaphors and communal meals, are ways of brainwashing people into thinking that they're fighting for their clan or family, rather than "a more abstract entity called the nation-state."

• The morality of certain issues, like homosexuality, is amoralized over time, and amoral issues of the past are now moralized; take smoking for example.

• Five ways to moralize: Purity (vs. Contamination), Group Loyalty/Conformity to Norms, Avoidance of Harm, Fairness, and Deference to Authority. Interestingly, Left wingers tend to appeal more to Avoidance of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives favor Purity, Group Loyalty, and Deference to Authority...

• One caller on the radio show poses the question of whether this is a more convincing approach for justifying morality than an appeal to something like a divine edict. Pinker, in his response says, "I don't think that Traditional religion is a viable source for morality." Rather, the more convincing source of morality lies in "rational interchangeability of perspectives (23:47)." He even implies that there is a higher standard for morality than the Bible, citing different contradictory commands in the bible in which we make a moral judgment one way or the other.

If there's one thing that this teaches us, it's that morality's origin is at least gray. Enough questions surround this topic to conclude that humility should be the name of the game. In any moral question, and in the questions surrounding the nature of morality itself, it must be assumed that you could be wrong.

Another point worth raising: morality, evolutionary or a result of something else, serves a purpose and is part of our make up for a reason. And morality for morality's sake seems an unlikely reason. As people began facing social pressures rather than environmental pressures as the primary obstacle to survival, we began to possess a negative reaction to behavior that compromised the community upon which humanity came to rely.

This is interesting, because it implies that morality is highly reasonable. And being reasonable has its benefits. We can talk about it in concrete (as concrete as concrete, at least) terms, and get out of our dogmatic bubbles when talking about "right" and "wrong."

And if morality has evolutionary origins, that hints that our existence in a community has a synergistic effect. We wouldn't evolve with socio-philic emotions hard wired within if it didn't benefit the species in some way to exist in community. And that offers a bit of hope, I suppose.