2003-03-15

The Blank Slate- inherent logic of morality


Extract
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, ch11 'The Fear of Nihilism' (p192)


But the mere fact that a number faculty evolved does not mean that numbers are
hallucinations. According to the Platonist conception of number favored by many
mathematicians and philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an
existence independent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole
cloth; it has real properties that can be discovered and explored. No rational
creature equipped with circuitry to understand the concept of "two" and the
concept of addition could discover that two plus one equals anything other than
three. That is why we expect similar bodies of mathematical results to emerge
from different cultures or even different planets. If so, the number sense
evolved to grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the
minds that grasp them.

Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of
moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses
some moral arguments and not others.[12] The world presents us with
non-zero-sum games in which it is better for both parties to act unselfishly
than for both to act selfishly (better not to shove and not to be shoved than
to shove and be shoved). Given the goal of being better off, certain conditions
follow necessarily. No creature equipped with circuitry to understand that it
is immoral for you to hurt me could discover anything but that it is immoral
for me to hurt you. As with numbers and the number sense, we would expect moral
systems to evolve toward similar conclusions in different cultures or even
different planets. Andin fact the Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times:
by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and
Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract
theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such
as Kant in his categorical imperative.[13] Our moral sense may have evolved to
mesh with an intrinsic logic of ethics rather than concocting it in our heads
out of nothing.



[12] Antonaccio & Schweiker, 1996; Brink, 1989; Murdoch, 1993; Nozick, 1981;
Sayre-McCord, 1988.
[13] Singer, 1981.

(Footnotes refer to papers in the 'References' section.)