Biology vs. the Blank Slate

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker deconstructs the great myths about how the mind works.

Nick Gillespie & Ronald Bailey from the October 2002 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

Now, the moral principle regarding equality is simply that people not be prejudged on the basis of certain group averages, the averages of the groups to which they belong. That is, you should not discriminate against someone based on gender or ethnicity. That doesn't say that all races and all ethnic groups and all genders are indistinguishable, although they may be. It says that you don't even have to worry about that; you should treat individuals as individuals.

Reason: The evolutionary psychologist's account of human behavior is clear and succinct, but as the physicist Steven Weinberg says, "The more comprehensible the universe becomes, the more pointless it seems."

Pinker: It may be pointless in some cosmic sense, in the same sense in which there's no point going on living because, as the young Woody Allen character in Annie Hall said, "The universe is expanding, and someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything, so why should I do my homework?" There's a point at which the Woody Allen anxiety -- what we might call the "Karamazov worry" -- is confusing two levels of analysis. The first scale consists of billions and billions of years and a universe which came into existence and which will go out of existence. The second is the scale of hours, minutes, days, and years in which we live our lives. Just as you don't worry about putting your laptop on the table after the physicist says that it's mostly empty space on an atomic level, you don't worry about life being a sham just because the neuroscientist says that morality comes from the brain.

We are looking inside our brains, and the moral sense is an inextricable aspect of human experience that we have to live with precisely because that's the way our brains are put together. We can go through the mental gymnastics of stepping outside our brains and looking at how it functions, but once we live our lives and deal with one another as individuals, these are the intuitions that we are stuck with. And again, not arbitrarily but for reasons that we can even gain some insight into when we do step outside ourselves.

Reason: That wonderful ability of recursion that we have -- that we are able to step outside and look at how our brains function -- still leaves us feeling a sort of ultimate meaninglessness?

Pinker: (laughs) Yeah.

Reason: In other words, except for science, we haven't really gotten much further than Descartes when it comes to grounding meaning and existence?

Pinker: Yes, in some sense. But what's the alternative? It's not as if there is some coherent alternative that we're abandoning. It's not as if God decreed on the day of creation that this is the meaning of life. The same curiosity that leads you to step outside yourself to ask, "Why do we have moral intuitions?" also makes you step outside God's world and ask, "Well, what told God to create that as the meaning of our existence?"

So you still have that gnawing existential anxiety. But let me go back to the question of whether seeing morality as a product of the brain licenses amorality. In practice, it is less dangerous than the idea that morality is ultimately vested in the commands of a religious authority. 9/11 is only the most recent example of a case where morality derived from religion leads to horrible atrocities.