Yesterday, I posted my review of The God Delusion on chapters that dealt with morality. See Review: The God Delusion: memes, Moral Zeitgeist, and Spiral Dynamics.
Serendipitously, Steven Pinker had just published a very insightful and lengthy article on the New York Times entitled, The Moral Instinct. For those who are interested in the science of morality, this article is a must-read. Here are some of the key points:
"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, authority, 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."….
"The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of
liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of
contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from
the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the
left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web
survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm
and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity.
Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s
not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical
values and that the other side is base and unprincipled."….
"The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the
way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to
put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to
understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular
philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including
those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that
these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive. And “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."….
"Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral
sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral
reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications
for our moral universe are profound."
[read more]
Even if Pinker didn’t argue about it specifically, I think his article is a very compelling argument against the principle of Stephen Gould’s NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). That’s why I think Dawkins (in The God Delusion) is onto something bigger than the old and tired "Does God Exist?" debate.