Argument Analysis about the Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker - Essay Example

Topic: Argument Analysis about "The Moral Instinct" by Steven Pinker In analyzing the argumentative tactics used by Steven Pinker in the essay in the New York Times titled ‘The Moral Instinct,’ which proposes the hypothesis that “there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality,” it is evident that the author has constructed the reasoning from a number of classical rhetorical techniques focusing on historical analogy and authoritative referencing. As an essential example of the argument, Pinker describes a scientific experiment in neuroscience in which subjects are asked to ponder moral issues while their brain activity was recorded by MRI scans. He asserts that the distinct patterning of brain activity displayed in this and other experiments illustrates an instinctive moral sense that exists organically in the human brain, “hardwired” in a manner similar to how other theorists have posited grammar as fundamental to human instinct, yet distinct from other types of mental and emotional activity. Pinker invokes “history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance... (as well as) Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle,” numerous scientific studies from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and other disciplines to build his thesis from authoritative sources of reference, yet ultimately fails to prove conclusively why his hypothesis is differentiated from pure supposition. (Pinker, 2008) For example, in ‘The Moral Instinct,’ Pinker writes: “According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a ‘universal grammar’ that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness. The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.” (Pinker, 2008) Symbolically, Pinker begins his essay by introducing historical figures or pop culture icons such as Mother Theresa, Bill Gates, and Norman Borlaug to highlight the way the mind processes moral decision-making. Pinker assumes his readership will not recognize Borlaug who is the “Father of the Green Revolution” which has led to billions of people being provided with food resources due to advances in agricultural techniques. However, Pinker poses the example symbolically by explaining that Borlaug is “credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history”. (Pinker, 2008) The author poses the question in this manner using historical analogy not to point to the validity of such reasoning but to penetrate what he sees as an illusion in popular thinking - one that is based in moral processing. Pinker states that contrary to common logic, which would suggest that Mother Theresa is the most admirable of the three, Borlaug has technically saved the most human lives when looked at empirically or statistically. Thus, the author begins his proof by invoking a situation of doubt in which the mind must question its own assumptions and programming, and asserts an argumentation based on authority of proof which after further review lacks adequate or verifiable evidence to fully accomplish its purpose of argumentation, which is to establish morality as an organic part of human psychology. In many ways this would seem to be begging the question, for anyone familiar with popular psychology in any of the major schools of research will quickly be acquainted with research and surveys into the moral behavior of both individuals and groups. The author writes: “It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.” (Pinker, 2008) The author asserts that he is not begging the question because there still exists a major problem of human perception which leads it into being “fooled” when making moral judgments based on the example introduced first of the three heroes. Yet, where Pinker assumes that the popular wisdom is wrong in valuing Mother Theresa over Norman Borlaug, he is not overt in stating the source of the basis of his belief, which is in the implied superiority of scientific authority over the religious. The implication, also unstated, is that the popular valuation of the religious over the scientific, or faith over reason, is in fact based on a logic of its own. Though the author does not refute the religious authority directly, he does so subtly by undermining the emotional appeal with a statistical base. An example of Pinker’s argumentation can be seen by his quoting of Kant and then implying that “the human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.” (Pinker, 2008) Pinker builds on the historical authority of Kant who focused his writings on morality without describing the reasoning through which this leads to the view of the moral sense as an “organ”. In criticism of this argument, if the moral sense is an organ one should immediately be able to point to it in a physiological chart, dissect it, and map its functioning. Yet, obviously Pinker cannot present such a proof of a moral organ in any part of the human mind or body. As such, he offers no proof to differentiate his argument from mere supposition. He attempts to do so by stating: “Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (‘killing is wrong’), rather than merely disagreeable (‘I hate brussels sprouts’), unfashionable (‘bell-bottoms are out’) or imprudent (‘don’t scratch mosquito bites’).” (Pinker, 2008) This is an example of an argument from definition, yet the author gives no real evidence in backing up his assertions, as noted previously. Pinker goes on to write: “The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, ‘I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,’ but no one would say, ‘I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.’” “The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to ‘let them get away with it.’ People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral.” (Pinker, 2008) These examples of argumentation from a literal analogy can also be deconstructed and questioned with relative ease by the opponent in debate. The author writes that people do not draw moral judgments from brussels sprouts, but does not differentiate what leads them to draw the kind of moral judgments he describes from other types of prohibited plants, such as entheogens. Pinker concludes by stating that the will to invoke punishment, even divine punishment, is a hallmark of what is described a moral decision. Nevertheless, in the same manner he can assert divine authority for his own judgment, as no literal proof for the argument is possible in the scientific context, despite the slightly deceptive framing of the question as such by the author. For example, the reasoning that those issues for which people invoke the wish to punish others can be considered “moral” questions is unlikely to withstand repeated testing in the realm of anthropology or cross-cultural historical studies. Yet Pinker anticipates the criticisms to his argument in accepting that moral patterns evolve over time. He writes: “Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering ‘punitive damages.’” “At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called ‘bums’ and ‘tramps’; today they are ‘homeless.’ Drug addiction is a ‘disease’; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a ‘sexually transmitted disease’ and more recently a ‘sexually transmitted infection.’” (Pinker, 2008) These arguments may appear as a type of red herring in the overall context, for the reader can easily understand that the moral values of civilization change over time while keeping true to a core set of values. This is in fact how most people generate patterns of identity in consciousness. Yet, the author draws a conclusion that his own argument that a moral “organ” exists as a type of “pump” or “switch” that “gets turned on” in the body, like an adrenalin rush, when in fact he provides no direct evidence for the assertion. For this reason the evidence as given can be said to be unreliable or insufficient to prove the author’s case as stated. I found myself agreeing with the majority of examples and illustrations given by Pinker in “The Moral Instinct” but disagreeing with the conclusions that he draws from them. For example, he posits morality to be a type of organ in the human body when there is clearly no evidence of this being true. The author then engages in a type of intellectual distortion to collect facts that are accepted as true about morality and moral conduct and then tries to build them into an existent complex without giving an adequate reason as to why this should be considered different from supposition. The author plays on rhetorical devices to build doubt and sympathy in the reader but provides inadequate and insufficient evidence to convince in the scientific context in which he poses the framework of argumentation. Indeed, if there really is no literal ”switch” or “organ” that can be pointed to and dissected literally in the human body, then there is only subjective distinctions that distinguish thoughts, feelings, and emotions from terms in other languages for the same states of consciousness. I found Pinker’s argumentation ultimately unpersuasive on this basis and not sufficiently cross-referenced outside of the Western political and religious system of morality. In contemporary studies, lacking a multicultural perspective can lead to critical errors in positing the subjective as ultimate, a trap that Pinker both warns against and falls into in his essay on the moral instinct. Sources Cited: Pinker, Steven (2008), The Moral Instinct, The New York Times, Published: January 13, 2008, retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html Read More