Science, Nihilism, and Sartre: On Steven Pinker’s “The Moral Instinct”
A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.
One of the central tenets of the New Atheist program lately being peddled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al., is that rational atheism does not entail moral nihilism. But what happens when scientists, working in the new field of moral psychology, find out that our moral thinking depends less on reason than it does on naturally-selected instinct?
Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine, recognizes the threat:
“Morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.
Pinker thinks that he can save the appearances, but his solutions aren’t very convincing. [Read more]
