Pinker's Moral Direction

One staple of cartoons is the hapless character who saws off a branch he is sitting on, only to discover that he was on the wrong end of the branch as he hurtles to the ground.

Such is the dilemna of the materialist who argues for a completely non-transcendant (i.e. purely physical) basis for morality. Once you convince people that moral choices are merely chemical reactions in the brain, dictated by genes, which are the result of purely impersonal evolutionary forces, how do you ever get them to put change in give-a-penny-take-a-penny dishes at the cash register again?

Steven Pinker* wrestles with this question in the New York Times. He claims there is hope! Morality does have a basis outside of our brains and it is...reason. Because everyone would be better off if everyone was nice. Here is how he sums it up:

Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

A couple of problems here. First, he dismisses God as a source of morality because of an old argument of Plato's. I won't go into the details, but his appeal to reason is just as vulnerable to Plato's argument as my appeal to supernatural power.

Second, it is blindingly obvious that everyone would not be better off if everyone were nice. And that is in the nature of things. The following people would be a lot worse off: Kim Jong-il, Nigerian e-mail scammers, Robert Mugabe, and Simon Cowell. Trust me, there are many, many more. I wish Pinker well if he ever finds himself under the power of some ruthless monster. Good luck explaining game theory then.

*Steven Pinker is a hotshot evolutionary psychologist at Harvard. His job is to make up stories that explain human nature from an evolutionary viewpoint.