Reply #275: The moral animal by Robert Wright and How the mind works by Pinker [View All]

[Juche]

Yay, I'm referencing Pinker.

In Pinker's book he said evolution was about behaviors that help us survive, not behaviors that contribute to human happiness or that are morally acceptable. So he made that distinction, that there is a difference between the behavior that helps us survive in prehistoric times and the behaviors that are morally acceptable and conductive to human happiness.

Robert Wright, in his book, takes an even harder stance pretty much saying that anyone who chooses to associate destructive evolutionary tendencies with religious concepts like 'the Devil' would be right to do so and more or less (from what I remember) calling for a war against those tendencies.

So you have 2 major thinkers who have both said that evolution can drive us to engage in destructive urges, but that those urges are not morally acceptable just because they slightly increase the change of survival in an environment we no longer find ourselves in.

I don't have the books on hand so I can't give page numbers of these statements, but they were in the books.