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

Standard Equipment 55why should it be any different if the roulette wheel is inside his skull? Thesame problem arises for another unpredictable cause that has been suggestedas the source of free will, chaos theory, in which, according to thecliche, a butterfly's flutter can set off a cascade of events culminating in ahurricane. A fluttering in the brain that causes a hurricane of behavior, if itwere ever found, would still be a cause of behavior and would not fit theconcept of uncaused free will that underlies moral responsibility. Tv^^C^f-tEither we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition,^^^^h^jror we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with ^ r^v^responsibility and free will. I doubt that our puzzlement will ever be "\ **"•*;completely assuaged, bu: we can surely reconcile them in part. Like'^jv^j?many philosophers, I bel eve that science and ethics are two self-con- i itained systems played out among the same entitk s in the world, just as \J 'ipoker and bridge are difierent games played with the same fifty-two- . 'card deck. The science game treats people as material objects, and i t s ^rules are the physical processes that cause behavior through natural'""^'selection and neurophysiology. The ethics game treats people as equiva- *^ jlent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules are the calculusthat assigns moral value to behavior through the behavior's inherentnature or its consequences.Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethicsgame playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinitestraight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and usefuleven though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfectcircles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theoremscan usefully be applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations likefree, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused,and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, asseen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there isno outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is closeenough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfullybe applied to it.Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognizingthem as separate can we have them both. If discrimination iswrong only if group averages are the same, if war and rape and greed arewrong only if people are never inclined toward them, if people areresponsible for their actions only if the actions are mysterious, theneither scientists must be prepared to fudge their data or all of us must beprepared to give up our values. Scientific arguments would turn into the