Pinker/Goldstein on human moral progress

[inator]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk7gKixqVNU

Animated socratic debate between Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason. Pinker is gradually persuaded by Goldstein that reason, not empathy, is the key driver of human moral progress.

[NonZeroSum]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk7gKixqVNU

Animated socratic debate between Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason. Pinker is gradually persuaded by Goldstein that reason, not empathy, is the key driver of human moral progress.

It's a really great concise conversation that is a good introduction to the concepts. I don't however feel any great shift in philosophy took place, I don't know that Pinker would accept his argument going in that he believed empathy was 'the key' good thing that helped us progress to where we are. He simply views humanity as a non-zero sum game that at different times has either worked with reason towards good ends or used faulty reasoning towards bad ends. I think as an objective naturalist he was always going to be partial to explaining systems in reductionist terms of their constituent parts, hence the one with the most utility is highlighted, our capacity to reason.

Here's Pinker 2 years prior to the animation being critical of empathy:
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/13361?in=38:41&out=45:33

Paul Bloom went onto write Against Empathy: [he's for compassion]
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/37456

I'd like to see more debate between utilitarians and the softest scale of consequentialism, that of Aristotelian virtue ethics or a Camus/Wittgenstein existentialist argument for an antireductionist hierarchy of needs. Conversations I look out for on my side:

Daniel Kauffman and Massimo Pigliucci
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/32396
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/38638

Jakeet Singh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfiw53A3T2k

Cori Wong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-7GRDfbY8s

Saul Newman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVPL3RGY1WE

Duane Rouselle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3--egjsQA

[brimstoneSalad]

That was pretty good.
I assume he was referring to Jonathan Haidt when mentioning his colleague's argument that reason was a tool of ad hoc justification for beliefs we already hold.

[DarlBundren]

I assume he was referring to Jonathan Haidt when mentioning his colleague's argument that reason was a tool of ad hoc justification for beliefs we already hold.

Most likely. Haidt says that since we are so bad at moral reasoning we should steer clear of difficult moral questions (He used to be vegetarian, by the way). Which is like saying that since we are so bad at maths we should steer clear of difficult mathematical equations.

[brimstoneSalad]

Most likely. Haidt says that since we are so bad at moral reasoning we should steer clear of difficult moral questions (He used to be vegetarian, by the way). Which is like saying that since we are so bad at maths we should steer clear of difficult mathematical equations.

Yeah, that's pretty asinine.
I think he's right when it comes to political issues and the danger of losing conservative voices entirely; different opinions and an adversarial kind of system help produce better arguments. But when he extends that to an argument from futility for all moral reasoning he fails terribly; sounds like it's just a way for him to rationalize his behavior and avoid accountability... that just means he's bad at moral reasoning.

[NonZeroSum]

I assume he was referring to Jonathan Haidt when mentioning his colleague's argument that reason was a tool of ad hoc justification for beliefs we already hold.

Most likely. Haidt says that since we are so bad at moral reasoning we should steer clear of difficult moral questions (He used to be vegetarian, by the way). Which is like saying that since we are so bad at maths we should steer clear of difficult mathematical equations.

Yeah, that's pretty asinine.
I think he's right when it comes to political issues and the danger of losing conservative voices entirely; different opinions and an adversarial kind of system help produce better arguments. But when he extends that to an argument from futility for all moral reasoning he fails terribly; sounds like it's just a way for him to rationalize his behavior and avoid accountability... that just means he's bad at moral reasoning.

He is a psychologist, so by colleagues he's likely to be talking about people in the same field, so you know a simple psychological account of 'the self' working as press secretary for why it thinks different modules of the brain have come to a certain conclusion, think split brain experiments. A valuable tonic to where faulty reasoning and bluster fronts as moral intuition... 'Where of one cannot speak, one must remain silent.'

[DarlBundren]

I think he's right when it comes to political issues and the danger of losing conservative voice2s entirely; different opinions and an adversarial kind of system help produce better arguments

I agree. I'd rather he stuck to descriptive claims (which are often quite interesting). Instead, he starts talking about how liberals should appreciate conservatives' richer set of values, without realizing that such recommendations rest on a number of unexamined philosophical assumptions. (Why cooperate? Why should we value sanctity? and so on and so forth)

A valuable tonic to where faulty reasoning and bluster fronts as moral intuition... 'Where of one cannot speak, one must remain silent.'

I agree that their work is indeed valuable, but they aren't moral philosophers - I think they should refrain from making moral claims. Evolutionary psychologists may be able to illuminate the reasons why we can do maths, but they don't tell us anything about solving mathematical problems. That's what mathematicians do. As far as I know, Kahneman has never talked against statistics education. Why should ethics be different?

Moreover, as much as I love Pinker's work on linguistics and psychology, he may be outside his proper area of expertise when he writes about history and anthropology. I know, for example, that a lot of the statistics that he used in TBAOON have since been called into question.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15856746-war-peace-and-human-nature

http://bedejournal.blogspot.it/2011/12/this-is-bogus-statistic.html

[NonZeroSum]

A valuable tonic to where faulty reasoning and bluster fronts as moral intuition... 'Where of one cannot speak, one must remain silent.'

I agree that their work is indeed valuable, but they aren't moral philosophers - I think they should refrain from making moral claims. Evolutionary psychologists may be able to illuminate the reasons why we can do maths, but they don't tell us anything about solving mathematical problems. That's what mathematicians do. As far as I know, Kahneman has never talked against statistics education. Why should ethics be different?

I'm just not aware of how he supposedly talked against ethics. You can make the case that from his psychological perspective he delegitimised the public's grasp of what amounts to good ethics, but that's it. He was always primed to agree that society makes progress through adopting reasoned argument, he just was more interested at the start of the debate in describing the effects of that in positive nonzero-sum empathy, not that empathy is even a good utility, as he said before the live talk/animation got recorded.

[DarlBundren]

Sorry, I was actually referring to Haidt, who seems to be more didactic in his prescriptions.

As for Pinker, I agree with him on the importance of rationality (Haidt is far more skeptic), but I don't understand why he presupposes that the norm of cooperation is the basic means for deciding what we should do. Rationality has the narrow definition of ' the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.' Which, again, it seems to me to be a claim built on unexamined philosophical assumptions.

[NonZeroSum]

I agree with him on the importance of rationality (Haidt is far more skeptic), but I don't understand why he presupposes that the norm of cooperation is the basic means for deciding what we should do.

I don't know that he does that either, co-operation is simply an easy metric we can analyze and study, we can still come to the conclusion that the type of intuitive co-operation people are bias towards needs bootstrapping with a giant dose of rational arguments. If you disagree with a particular use of game theory models to describe moral behavior in reaction to material conditions, maybe you could provide a counter argument to Robert Wrights book 'The Moral Animal - Why We Are The Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology.'

Evolutionary Ethics by Robert Wright
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3186

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Not divine command, not deontology, for materialist consequentialism, can't see anything wrong with that.