Tag: Social Behavior

Steven Pinker On Morality

Steven Pinker on Morality

Posted on by jabittan
According to Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, morality comes from our ability to reason and our need to cooperate together. Without interactions and dependence on other human beings, we wouldn’t have a sense of morals. We would only have our individual self-interest. However, humans live in complex social groups within complex social communities and we have to live and work together for survival and general life satisfaction. As Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler argue in The Elephant in the Brain, social and political tribes drove the evolution and need for large rational brains, which Pinker argues allow us to reason from a point of mutual unselfishness, ultimately creating our ideas of morality.
 
 
To demonstrate, Pinker writes, “if I appeal to you to do something that affects me – to get off my foot, or not stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning – then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours.” All humans are self-interested, which conflicts with our social lives. We all want to act in our own self-interested ways, but we have to cooperate with others and work with others to get what we desire or need for survival. Therefore, you must demonstrate that your interests go beyond simply your own self-interest in order to get people to respect you, respect your interests, and to cooperate with you. Pinker continues, “I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not.” To work together we have to find ways in which our interests align. I may have to pay you to do some physical effort that I don’t want to do. I may have to agree to respect your property if I want you to respect my property. I may have to give up some level of individual rights if I don’t want you to abridge liberties of mine. “Mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests,” Pinker writes.
 
 
What Pinker argues, flowing from this discussion of mutual unselfishness, self-interests, and social cooperation, is that our morals are not given to us by a supernatural power and that our morals do not exist separate from humans. Morals are created through human rationality and through our ability to recognize that we have individual feelings and preferences, and therefore other people who are like us probably have the same capacity for all the feelings, emotions, preferences, and desires that we have. Our morals exist because we have to work together, to interact in social groups and organizations, and to rely upon institutions to order our relationships and collective efforts.
 
 
Pinker writes, “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.” By interchangeability of perspectives Pinker is referring to the human ability to consider that other people have thoughts and feelings and the human ability to imagine or adopt other perspectives. Positive-sum games are situations where everyone is made better through cooperation. By all working together and combining inert pieces of material, we can create a house which which shelter us, keep us warm in the winter and shaded in the summer, and will give us a place to meet and hang out. The total value of the house is greater than the individual value of each component piece. Much of our world is structured around positive-sum interactions that occur when we cooperate through mutual unselfishness. Our morals derive from our ability to reason and help us harness these positive-sum moments. But it all comes back to our desire to pursue our own self interests while having to compromise as part of a larger social group.
Flourishing In Positive-Sum Games

Flourishing In Positive-Sum Games

Posted on by jabittan
“A zero-sum game … leaves predation as the only way people could add to their wealth,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. One argument that Pinker makes in his book is that humans are social creatures because cooperation and living in a group creates more positive-sum scenarios for humans as opposed to zero-sum situations. Basically, when you have a group of people, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The collective abilities of people is greater than you might expect if you evaluated all the people and their individual skills on their own.
 
 
Pinker explains it this way, “a positive-sum game is a scenario in which agents have choices that can improve the lots of both of them at the same time.” If I am not very good at sewing, but have an excess of corn, and you are good at sewing but need food, we can engage in a trade where both of us win. I get new warm clothes for the winter, and you get food to survive the winter. We both are better off, but I now have warm food and can be productive outside by planting winter vegetables and you now have food and can continue to produce more warm clothes. The value we provided to the group we are a part of is greater than the clothes you sewed for me and the corn I gave to you.
 
 
Positive-sum games are much more complicated than the little example I just shared and are more common than we might think. We tend to simplify the world when we think about relationships between people and we often fall back on binary ways of thinking. We see the world as zero-sum because it is easier than seeing the complexities of the positive sum situations of our social world. In simplifid ways of thinking, people are either good or bad, you either win or lose, I either survive or a I die. The reality, of course, is that we don’t actually face a lot of zero-sum situations like these in our day to day lives.
 
 
“A key insight of evolutionary psychology,” Pinker continues, “is that human cooperation and the social emotions that support it, such as sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, and anger, were selected because they allow people to flourish in positive-sum games.” We are evolved for positive-sum games as social creatures. We are not evolved for zero-sum games as isolated individuals. We work together as teams, share surpluses, and work toward shared goals because most of our social interactions are positive-sum. Most of the day to day interactions we go through make the world better for everyone when we follow pro-social norms. We flourish in positive-sum games, and we often don’t even recognize how much of our lives are guided by such positive-sum moments.