Steven Pinker on The

Moral Instinct
Brian CarnellJanuary 30, 2008 1 Comment .entry-meta

.entry-header
Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Steven Pinker did
an excellent job outlining an evolutionary explanation and
approach to our individual and collective moral intuitions.
The most intriguing part of Pinkers long essay is his
summary of the view that there may be a small set of
universal moral values, along the lines of Noam
Chomskys theory of a universal grammar, and that
cultural differences in morality are explained through the
different rankings and importance that different cultures
assign to different values,

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral

sense can be universal and variable at the same
time. The five moral spheres [harm, fairness,
community, authortiy, purity] are universal, a
legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in
importance, and which is brought in to moralize
which area of social life sex, government,
commerce, religion, diet and so on depends
on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting
practices in faraway places become more
intelligible when you recognize that the same
moralizing impulse that Western elites channel
toward violations of harm and fairness (our
moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to
violations in the other spheres. Think of the
Japanese fear of nonconformity (community),
the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of

Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage

at insulting the Prophet among Muslims
(authority). In the West, we believe that in
business and government, fairness should
trump community and try to root out nepotism
and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is
incomprehensible what heartless creep
would favor a perfect stranger over his own
brother?
Pinker argues that examining our differing moral thinking
through the lens of these five factors may allow us not
only to understand each other better, but also achieve
more rational solutions to problems such as global
warming. This is, in Pinkers view, much preferable to the
habit of moralizing problems, and he does a nice job of
taking chief moralizers Leon Kass to task to demonstrate
the problems of reducing morality simply to our intuitions,

Though wise people have long reflected on how

we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our
public discourse still fails to discount it
appropriately. In the worst cases, the
thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be
celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay
The Wisdom of Repugnance, Leon Kass,
former chair of the Presidents Council on
Bioethics, argued that we should disregard
reason when it comes to cloning and other
biomedical technologies and go with our gut:
We are repelled by the prospect of cloning
human beings . . . because we intuit and feel,
immediately and without argument, the
violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . .

. In this age in which everything is held to be

permissible so long as it is freely done . . .
repugnance may be the only voice left that
speaks up to defend the central core of our
humanity. Shallow are the souls that have
forgotten how to shudder.
There are, of course, good reasons to regulate
human cloning, but the shudder test is not one
of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of
morally irrelevant violations of purity in their
culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from
the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing
Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating
sodomy between consenting men. And if our
ancestors repugnance had carried the day,
we never would have had autopsies,
vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial
insemination, organ transplants and in vitro
fertilization, all of which were denounced as
immoral when they were new.
Pinker is certainly on the right track here, but he too
quickly glosses over just how disconcerting this is. Earlier
in his essay he debunks a naive version of the selfish
gene theory, demonstrating that although our genes may
be selfish that does not mean that human behavior must
be (as he puts it, the genes that predispose us to care for
our children may be selfish, but parents who care for their
children are usually acting on genuinely altruistic
motives).
Be that as it may, our moral intuitions are extremely deep
rooted and it is disconcerting to think that, for example,
my view that free speech should be tolerated except for a
handful of very extreme instances is simply a product of

a) an evolved, shared set of moral values, combined

with b) the particular way that my culture and
subculture rank the relative importance of those moral
values. There is, after all, a reason that the God said it,
and I believe it explanation of morality is so popular.