In his fascinating op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times, “A Grand Bargain Over Evolution”, Robert Wright quotes the well-known experimental psychologist Steven Pinker:
“There may be a sense in which some moral statements aren’t just … artifacts of a particular brain wiring but are part of the reality of the universe, even if you can’t touch them and weigh them.” Comparing these moral truths to mathematical truths, he said that perhaps “they’re really true independent of our existence. I mean, they’re out there and in some sense — it’s very difficult to grasp — but we discover them, we don’t hallucinate them.”
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3 responses to “Steven Pinker on Romans 2:14-15”
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Very interesting coming from Pinker. The last part about discovery versus hallucination reminds me of the distinction between revelation and intuition. God's is a revealed Word.
The great problem for evolutionary sociologists, etc. is that of "ranking" or "differentiating" the various cultural norms or moral codes that are seen as evolutionary responses that exist because they have had beneficial effects in certain human contexts over time. There has been a massive rejection of the "social Darwinism" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which glorified war as an evolutionary necessity to human advancement, and a great effort to cast "social cooperation" as an evolutionary advantage that therefore has greater "moral" legitimacy. But what we see, if we are honest, is that both killing and cooperation have evolutionary utility in different contexts. So which do we chose, and why? Mass murder seemed to work well for the Carthaginians and the Aztecs for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why are current evolutionary sociologists so averse to recognizing that as a viable moral option?
Thanks for the post. I had not seen this.