Evo­lu­tion has endowed us with eth­i­cal impulses. Do we know what to do with them?

In Steven Pinker’s New York Times arti­cle, The Moral Instinct, this ques­tion is raised and dis­cussed as he takes us on a guided tour of ‘moral psy­chol­ogy’ — a recently invig­o­rated field.

The start­ing point for appre­ci­at­ing that there is a dis­tinc­tive part of our psy­chol­ogy for moral­ity is see­ing how moral judg­ments dif­fer from other kinds of opin­ions we have on how peo­ple ought to behave. 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”).

via Mind Hacks (Pinker is the author of The Blank Slate and The Lan­guage Instinct, both books on my 2008 read­ing list.)