GEM 2012: Steven Pinker on Emotion, Reason and Moral Progress

my remarks are very much complementary to those of my colleague josh on the role of emotion and reason in moral progress this is a topic that i've recently been obsessed with i've written a book called the better angels of our nature on an underappreciated historical phenomenon namely that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time believe it or not and i know most people do not i in the book i go through six historical developments in which violence has declined today i'll just briefly talk about three of them one of them is the changes in the way that we attempt to impose law and order on our societies several hundred years ago the uh typical form of criminal punishment would be cruel uh sadistic forms of corporal punishment like breaking on the wheel burning at the stake clawing with iron hooks sawing in half and impalement but in a process called the humanitarian revolution centered in the second half of the 18th century country after country abolished the use of torture as a form of punishment including the united states in its famous prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the eighth amendment to the constitution also abolished during this uh era was the profligate use of the death penalty for non-lethal crimes in 18th century england there were 222 capital offenses on the law books including poaching counterfeiting robbing a rabbit warren being in the company of gypsies and quote strong evidence of malice in a child 7 to 14 years of age by 1861 those had been reduced to four the death penalty itself has been abolished in every western democracy but the united states the red timeline shows the number of european countries that uh that have capital punishment on the law books from 1775 to 2000. most of the abolitions were in the 20th century but the blue line which shows the number of european countries that actually carry out executions show that even before politicians struck it from the law books the uh their governments had lost their taste for executing people and of course the most famous uh reform of the humanitarian revolution the age of enlightenment was the abolition of slavery which used to be legal everywhere on earth beginning in the 18th century there was a trickle of abolitions which grew into a cascade that eventually swept over the entire world it took until 1980 for the last country mauritania to abolish slavery but abolish they did and we're living in a unique era in human history in which slavery is not legal anywhere on earth a second example has been called the long piece referring to the fact that since 1946 there's been a historically unprecedented decline in interstate war here are some the most interesting statistic of this era is zero that refers to the number of wars between the united states and the soviet union contrary to every expert prediction that world war three was inevitable no nuclear weapons have been used since nagasaki there have been no wars between any two great powers since the the korean war in 1953 defying 500 years of history in which the great powers were almost constantly at war with each other no wars between western european countries nowadays we take it for granted that france and germany won't fight a war but needless to say through most of european history uh that was not the case in fact prior to 1945 western european countries alone started two new wars a year for 600 years that's 1200 wars as of 1945 that number went to zero and there have been no wars between developed countries the 44 nations with the highest gdp per capita have not fought a war since 1945. again contrary to centuries of history in which it was always the rich developed countries that were at each other's throats third phenomenon that that i'll talk about today are the rights revolutions the targeting of violence on smaller scales directed against vulnerable sectors of the population such as african americans and other racial minorities women children and animals the civil rights revolution in the united states put an end to the practice of lynching which at the during the end of the 19th century took place at a rate of 150 a year by 1950 that had fallen to zero racist attitudes that contribute to violence like uh in opinion polls that ask white americans should black and white students go to separate schools or would you move out if a black family moved in next door in the 1940s a majority of whites believe that by the 1990s the uh opinion was in the single digits the women's rights revolution has seen an 80 percent uh reduction in the rate of rape since statistics were first kept and a similarly dramatic decline in the rates rate of domestic violence the children's rights revolution has seen a steady set of abolitions of corporal punishment in schools like the strapping or pat and paddling of children spanking has been uh has fallen into disapproval in every western country and rates of physical and sexual abuse of children have gone down finally the animal rights revolution has seen a decline in hunting a rise in vegetarianism and a sharp decrease in the number of motion pictures in which animals were harmed well the question that that i try to address in the book is why has violence declined i don't think it's that uh human nature has changed but human nature is extraordinarily complex and it has always included inclinations toward violence and inclinations that counteract them what abraham lincoln called the better angels of our nature and uh over the course of history changes in institutions and uh uh technology and practices have increasingly engaged our better angels so what are our better angels when i first mentioned to people that rates of violence have gone down uh the first there are two immediate suggestions as to what has changed one of them is we must be getting uh more compassionate more empathic and uh indeed we are equipped with a faculty of empathy the ability to feel others pain the other suggestion is we're getting more moral we've we've bulked up our moral sense and our norms about right and wrong are more effectively engaged now i think there is some degree of truth to both of these but they can't be the primary drivers of these phenomena one thing empathy sounds like a great thing you can't seemingly have too much empathy but empathy actually has a dark side one of them is can you really feel the pain of all seven billion people on earth i mean who has the the time or the the heart um uh there's a phenomenon of compassion fatigue that you can only your heart can bleed only over so many pathetic stories in a given day and adam smith i think illustrated this more than 200 years ago with a classic thought experiment very much tied to the real experiment that josh mentioned with the suffering people uh in the next valley versus the one you hear about over the uh smartphone in fact adam smith anticipated this dilemma perfectly where he advanced the following thought experiment let's say you opened the paper one day or looked on your computer screen and you heard about an earthquake in china that killed 100 million people be honest what would be your reaction it is well you'd probably be you know very upset you would deplore the fragility of life you would feel bad for all the people whose lives were snuffed out then you probably go and have dinner and you know watch tv answer your email and uh that would be the end of it but now let's say you were in an accident and your little finger got mangled and had to be amputated well you probably would not be able to stop thinking about it uh for for quite a long period of time uh he didn't endorse this as the right way that we should react but he advanced it as a plausible hypothesis about how the typical person would react another limitation of empathy is that it can conflict with fairness the social psychologist daniel batson who's the world's expert on empathy did the following experiment he said that there were two girls waiting for a rare and expensive operation uh and he then had people he gave people a lot of details about one of the little girls so they could uh were encouraged to empathize with her well if they were encouraged to empathize with the girl who actually didn't need the operation as badly and in fact had was much farther down on the list then when asked who should get the operation they picked the girl they empathized with instead of the girl who really needed the operation and there are everyday examples uh the phenomena that we call nepotism and cronyism which of course saps the economies and democracies of many countries especially in the developing world is really just the application of empathy you're giving a job to your your brother your cousin someone who did you a favor instead of the heartless action of giving it to a perfect stranger so this is a case in which empathy leads you to do the exact wrong thing what about morality uh should we all uh exercise our conscience more would that drive violence down well there too it is very much a mixed blessing in fact i argue in in the book that the moral sense is the source of much perhaps a majority of the world's violence uh the reason being there are only so many opportunities that you can really there is something in it for you to hurt someone else i mean if i just pick a random person in this room and hit them over the head i mean what's in it for me uh and that is a that kind of selfishness is a major limitation on my temptation toward violence the other one if i have a moral reason there is an unlimited number of things that people could do that could offend me that could give me a license to harm them homicides from so-called self-help justice where people take the law into their own hands account for the largest category of one-on-one homicides retaliation for insults revenge for slights and harms sexual jealousy people who kill a a boyfriend or girlfriend who has had an affair or who's been flirting someone calls you a nasty name when when you're fighting over a parking space and so you give them what they deserve namely shoot them in the head this accounts for a massive proportion of the homicides on police blotters religious and revolutionary wars punishment for victimless crimes like burning heretics imprisoning homosexuals killing unchased sisters and daughters not to mention the ideological genocides whether from religious nationalist communist or fascist ideologies which account for the worst atrocities in human history all carried out for a moral cause uh it uh leads me to endorse a conclusion from the great philosopher and comedian george carlin who said uh if you ask me moral motivation is overrated you show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and i'll show you someone who's not causing any trouble well i'm very quite sympathetic to that uh so what what in human nature has brought rates of violence down well um adam smith continued his thought experiment with a variant which again ties very nicely into uh josh's argument said now let's change the thought experiment now instead of you picking up the paper and reading about uh a calamity or suffering a minor one yourself let's say you were given a choice kind of a trolley problem on one branch 100 million chinese would be killed the other branch uh you someone would chop off your little finger now which would you choose now i don't know someone should do this experiment josh maybe you're one of your students as a no no it's a thought experiment well smith anticipated the result and he said he predicted that no one would actually choose to sacrifice 100 million chinese over their little finger even if their emotional response would be greater for the little finger than the hundred million chinese and he had a wonderful quote explaining why it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which nature has lighted up in the human heart that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love it is reason principle conscience the inhabitant of the breast the man within the great judge and arbiter of our conduct it is he who shows us the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own for the yet greater interests of others and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves so smith identified reason as a humanitarian force and this may sound very idealistic and nerdy and uh hyper-intellectual but i think there is evidence over the course of history that many of these humanitarian reforms were driven by reason rather than by emotion and morality just to give you one example a few hundred years ago uh in europe and still today in some parts of the world if you had the wrong religious belief then you could be executed in the most grisly way such as being burned alive well then in europe they thought the better of doing that and the question is why now you might think could there do you really need a rational argument as to why something might be a wee bit wrong with burning a heretic at the stake and the answer is yes they did uh so in the 16th century a writer named sebastian castellio laid out the argument he said calvin john calvin who has endorsed burning people at the stake says that he is certain and other sects say that they are who shall be judge if the matter is certain to whom is it so to calvin then why does he write so many books about manifest truth in view of the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree and if then we are going to kill heretics the logical outcome will be a war of extermination since since each is sure of himself and it was arguments like this that eventually uh carried the day likewise you can see hundreds of years ago uh moral briefs logically arguing for the untenability of war from erasmus john locke gave arguments against why slavery was incoherent cesare bakaria on cruel punishments why disemboweling someone alive was not the best crime control measure uh in particular even though intuitively you might say well it's the prospect of an unpleasant punishment that deters people from committing a crime bacharia noted first of all that the probability of punishment is much more effective than the severity of punishment if it's extremely unlikely that you'll be caught for a crime and if you are caught then it's a gruesome punishment well just like some accident could always befall you you don't really factor it into your behavior but if there's something that is mildly unpleasant but a high probability of it occurring to you that's much more likely to clamp down on the rate of crime he had other arguments as well and by the way he was a not only a utilitarian following josh's argument but the in in a sense the first utilitarian the phrase the greatest good for the greatest number was coined by him mary astell gave an argument for women's rights in the early 18th century jerry jeremy bentham on why it made no sense to persecute homosexuals and also why uh cruelty to animals was unjustifiable as he noted the question is not can they reason nor can they talk but can they suffer well the final question is how do the these rational arguments from admittedly elites people with lots of education influence verbal fluency and audience how does that actually turn around an entire society so they change their behavior and here's a recent case study that i think catches this process in the act because it's recent enough that we can study it and that is capital punishment capital punishment used to be pretty much universal i think every civilization uh executed people who they thought had uh committed some wrong it is now morbund as i showed you a graph that it's virtually non-existent in europe the united states is a bit of an outlier but even there 17 states have abolished it and the momentum is definitely in the direction of more states abolishing it if you extrapolate the trend line by the year 2026 capital punishment will be gone from the face of the earth well how did this happen did capital punishment gradually become unpopular because people be the population as a whole stopped supporting it maybe they empathized with uh condemned criminals or were afraid of wrongful executions well that's not actually how it happened and a man named andrew hamill traced out the process in every in most of the european countries that abolished capital punishment and he called it a norm cascade a term from martha finnemore and catherine sickink the first stage is that there's intense controversy about capital punishment while it's still legal and in fact in just about every european country if you took a public opinion poll a majority of the citizens were in favor of capital punishment makes sense eye for an eye tooth for a tooth life for life then the elites the politicians the academics the pundits influenced by rational arguments as to why capital punishment was indefensible defied public opinion and pushed through abolition over the objections of the majority of their population the united states is a little bit more democratic than european countries so we're kind of stuck with capital punishment because we actually do what the people want what happens well nothing terrible happens the crime rate does not go uh go up people in the press get bored with the issue kind of a done deal the politicians realize that it's no longer a way to a cheap way to get votes to advocate it because it's no longer a live issue uh no one wants to actually reopen the issue and unabolish something that with lots of uh emotion and controversy got abolished you don't want to open the can of worms again people then get used to it they grow up with no capital punishment it seems like no big deal they start to favor the status quo and as a result their norms change so that going back to capital punishment seems unthinkable barbaric we just don't do that around here except for radical fringe groups whose extremism only cements the popular consensus because for many other reasons they're seen as being on the fringe other recent norm cascades ones that some of us in this room have lived through are racial segregation people actually used to debate uh segregated schools and jim crow laws that debate is now over and it's pretty much unthinkable that would ever come back use of nuclear weapons as an ordinary tactic in war like tactical battlefield nukes is not a matter of debate anymore criminalization of homosexuality that used to be a live issue uh the the proponents of criminalization of homosexuality lost and that's not going to be reopened women in the workplace in the military and you can probably think of other examples there are some that are still ongoing gay marriage i think it is very likely that in a decade that will no longer be an issue capital punishment in the united states universal health insurance perhaps even interstate war wars between countries is definitely on the way out if you look at the trend perhaps even eventually possession of nuclear weapons as opposed to use of nuclear weapons factory farming might be next and so on so um to sum up history has seen many declines of violence human nature i would argue has not changed but the better angels of our nature have been increasingly engaged which better angels empathy yes moral norms and taboos yes but recent argument may be the most influential of all despite the intuitive appeal of empathy in the moral sense i think they are probably not the primary causes of many of these declines declines often begin with rational arguments which influence elites the elites implement humanitarian reforms which set off normcast gauge cascades which then feed back to influence moral norms in the population at large thanks very much

Channel: CID Harvard

Views: 24,434

Rating: 4.8433733 out of 5

Keywords: Steven Pinker, Global Empowerment Meeting, Harvard University, Harvard Kennedy School

Id: hgGEKBSOeEY

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/thatirishguyjohn]

I think Pinker is wrong about a lot of things but you gotta respect that hair

[u/[deleted]]

Anyway we can get Pinker to do an interview with Chris Ryan?

Ryans reddit account: http://www.reddit.com/user/dudeinhammock