Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Standard Equipment 47held responsible for their actions. If the rapist is following a biologicalimperative to spread his genes, it's not his fault.Aside perhaps from a few cynical defense lawyers and a lunatic fringewho are unlikely to read manifestos in the New York Review of Books, noone has actually drawn these mad conclusions. Rather, they are thoughtto be extrapolations that the untutored masses might draw, so the dangerousideas must themselves be suppressed. In fact, the problem withthe three arguments is not that the conclusions are so abhorrent that noone should be allowed near the top of the slippery slope that leads tothem. The problem is that there is no such slope; the arguments are nonsequiturs. To expose them, one need only examine the logic of the theoriesand separate the scientific from the moral issues.My point is not that scientists should pursue the truth in their ivorytower, undistracted by moral and political thoughts. Every human actinvolving another living being is both the subject matter of psychologyand the subject matter of moral philosophy, and both are important. Butthey are not the same thing. The debate over human nature has beenmuddied by an intellectual laziness, an unwillingness to make moralarguments when moral issues come up. Rather than reasoning from principlesof rights and values, the tendency has been to buy an off-the-shelfmoral package (generally New Left or Marxist) or to lobby for a feel-goodpicture of human nature that would spare us from having to argue moralissues at all.The moral equation in most discussions of human nature is simple:innate equals right-wing equals bad. Now, many hereditarian movementshave been right-wing and bad, such as eugenics, forced sterilization,genocide, discrimination along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines, and thejustification of economic and social castes. The Standard Social ScienceModel, to its credit, has provided some of the grounds that thoughtfulsocial critics have used to undermine these practices.But the moral equation is wrong as often as it is right. Sometimes leftwingpractices are just as bad, and the perpetrators have tried to justifythem using the SSSM's denial of human nature. Stalin's purges, theGulag, Pol Pot's killing fields, and almost fifty years of repression inChina—all have been justified by the doctrine that dissenting ideas