12.8.08

The Moral Instinct



How much money would someone have to pay you to give an electric shock to yourself or an unknown child? Or how about this situation: you are hungry, you can get some food by pulling a chain but at the same time you pull the chain an electric shock is given to an innocent stranger? What would you do? What do you think a monkey would do?

The first link below is to an article by evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker on the moral instinct. It's a wide ranging discussion of morality and the ways psychologists have investigated moral reasoning, or the lack of it, and how evolutionary processes may have hardwired human beings with a universal moral grammar.

The Moral Instinct

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