0:12["Rebecca Newberger Goldstein"] 

["Steven Pinker"] ["The Long Reach of

Reason"] Cabbie: Twenty-two dollars. Steven Pinker: Okay. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:
Reason appears to have fallen on hard times: Popular culture plumbs new depths of
dumbth and political discourse has become a race to the bottom. We're living in an era of
scientific creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and a resurgence of religious
fundamentalism. People who think too well are often accused of elitism, and even in the
academy, there are attacks on logocentrism, the crime of letting logic dominate our thinking.

1:07SP: But is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps reason is overrated. Many pundits have
argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of
overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire
of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our
species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and
conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a
brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our
emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the
fact.

1:51RNG: How could a reasoned argument logically entail the ineffectiveness of reasoned

arguments?Look, you're trying to persuade us of reason's impotence. You're not threatening us
or bribing us,suggesting that we resolve the issue with a show of hands or a beauty contest. By
the very act of trying to reason us into your position, you're conceding reason's
potency. Reason isn't up for grabs here. It can't be. You show up for that debate and you've
already lost it.

2:23SP: But can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you
pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's
passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace
and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in
conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?

2:50RNG: All on its own, the answer is no, but it doesn't take much to switch it to yes. You
need two conditions: The first is that reasoners all care about their own well-being. That's one
of the passions that has to be present in order for reason to go to work, and it's obviously
present in all of us. We all care passionately about our own well-being. The second condition is
that reasoners are members of a community of reasoners who can affect one another's well-
being, can exchange messages, and comprehend each other's reasoning. And that's certainly
true of our gregarious and loquatious species,well endowed with the instinct for language.
3:33SP: Well, that sounds good in theory, but has it worked that way in practice? In particular,
can it explaina momentous historical development that I spoke about five years ago here at
TED? Namely, we seem to be getting more humane. Centuries ago, our ancestors would burn
cats alive as a form of popular entertainment. Knights waged constant war on each other by
trying to kill as many of each other's peasants as possible. Governments executed people for
frivolous reasons, like stealing a cabbage or criticizing the royal garden. The executions were
designed to be as prolonged and as painful as possible, like crucifixion, disembowelment,
breaking on the wheel. Respectable people kept slaves. For all our flaws, we have
abandoned these barbaric practices.

4:16RNG: So, do you think it's human nature that's changed?

4:19SP: Not exactly. I think we still harbor instincts that can erupt in violence, like greed,
tribalism, revenge, dominance, sadism. But we also have instincts that can steer us away, like
self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of
our nature.

4:37RNG: So if human nature didn't change, what invigorated those better angels?

4:41SP: Well, among other things, our circle of empathy expanded. Years ago, our ancestors
would feel the pain only of their family and people in their village. But with the expansion of
literacy and travel, people started to sympathize with wider and wider circles, the clan, the
tribe, the nation, the race, and perhaps eventually, all of humanity.

5:02RNG: Can hard-headed scientists really give so much credit to soft-hearted empathy?

5:07SP: They can and do. Neurophysiologists have found neurons in the brain that respond to
other people's actions the same way they respond to our own. Empathy emerges early in
life, perhaps before the age of one. Books on empathy have become bestsellers, like "The
Empathic Civilization" and "The Age of Empathy."

5:25RNG: I'm all for empathy. I mean, who isn't? But all on its own, it's a feeble instrument for
making moral progress. For one thing, it's innately biased toward blood relations, babies and
warm, fuzzy animals. As far as empathy is concerned, ugly outsiders can go to hell. And even
our best attempts to work up sympathy for those who are unconnected with us fall miserably
short, a sad truth about human naturethat was pointed out by Adam Smith.

5:57Adam Smith: Let us suppose that the great empire of China was suddenly swallowed up
by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe would react on
receiving intelligenceof this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very
strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people. He would make many
melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and when all these humane
sentiments had been once fairly expressed,he would pursue his business or his pleasure with
the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. If he was to lose his little
finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight, but provided he never saw them, he would snore
with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren.

6:38SP: But if empathy wasn't enough to make us more humane, what else was there?

6:43RNG: Well, you didn't mention what might be one of our most effective better angels:
reason. Reason has muscle. It's reason that provides the push to widen that circle of
empathy. Every one of the humanitarian developments that you mentioned originated with
thinkers who gave reasons for why some practice was indefensible. They demonstrated that
the way people treated some particular group of others was logically inconsistent with the way
they insisted on being treated themselves.

7:17SP: Are you saying that reason can actually change people's minds? Don't people just
stick with whatever conviction serves their interests or conforms to the culture that they grew
up in?

7:27RNG: Here's a fascinating fact about us: Contradictions bother us, at least when we're
forced to confront them, which is just another way of saying that we are susceptible to
reason. And if you look at the history of moral progress, you can trace a direct pathway from
reasoned arguments to changes in the way that we actually feel. Time and again, a thinker
would lay out an argument as to why some practice was indefensible, irrational, inconsistent
with values already held. Their essay would go viral,get translated into many languages, get
debated at pubs and coffee houses and salons, and at dinner parties, and influence leaders,
legislators, popular opinion. Eventually their conclusions get absorbedinto the common sense
of decency, erasing the tracks of the original argument that had gotten us there. Few of us
today feel any need to put forth a rigorous philosophical argument as to why slavery is
wrong or public hangings or beating children. By now, these things just feel wrong. But just
those arguments had to be made, and they were, in centuries past.

8:45SP: Are you saying that people needed a step-by-step argument to grasp why something
might be a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake?

8:52RNG: Oh, they did. Here's the French theologian Sebastian Castellio making the case.

8:58Sebastian Castellio: Calvin says that he's certain, and other sects say that they are. Who
shall be judge? If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? But then, why does he
write so many books about manifest truth? In view of the uncertainty, we must define
heretics 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 each is sure of himself.

9:19SP: Or with hideous punishments like breaking on the wheel?

9:22RNG: The prohibition in our constitution of cruel and unusual punishments was a response
to a pamphlet circulated in 1764 by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria.

9:34Cesare Beccaria: As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like
fluids always adjust to the level of the objects that surround them, become hardened, and after
a hundred years of cruel punishments, breaking on the wheel causes no more fear than
imprisonment previously did. For a punishment to achieve its objective, it is only necessary that
the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that derives from the crime, and into this
calculation ought to be factored the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good that the
commission of the crime will produce. Everything beyond this is superfluous, and therefore
tyrannical.

10:09SP: But surely antiwar movements depended on mass demonstrations and catchy tunes
by folk singersand wrenching photographs of the human costs of war.

10:17RNG: No doubt, but modern anti-war movements reach back to a long chain of

thinkers who had argued as to why we ought to mobilize our emotions against war, such as the
father of modernity, Erasmus.

10:31Erasmus: The advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and
reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage redounds only
to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. One man's safety is owing to the destruction of
another. One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made
by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so
indeed, and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good
fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe.

11:04SP: But everyone knows that the movement to abolish slavery depended on faith and
emotion. It was a movement spearheaded by the Quakers, and it only became popular when
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" became a bestseller.

11:17RNG: But the ball got rolling a century before. John Locke bucked the tide of
millennia that had regarded the practice as perfectly natural. He argued that it was
inconsistent with the principles of rational government.
11:31John Locke: Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live
by common to everyone of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it, a liberty
to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the
inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be
under no other restraint but the law of nature.

11:54SP: Those words sound familiar. Where have I read them before? Ah, yes.

11:59Mary Astell: If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in

a family? Or if in a family, why not in a state? Since no reason can be alleged for the one that
will not hold more strongly for the other, if all men are born free, how is it that all women are
born slaves, as they must be if being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary
will of men be the perfect condition of slavery?

12:25RNG: That sort of co-option is all in the job description of reason. One movement for the
expansion of rights inspires another because the logic is the same, and once that's hammered
home, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to ignore the inconsistency. In the 1960s, the
Civil Rights Movementinspired the movements for women's rights, children's rights, gay rights
and even animal rights. But fully two centuries before, the Enlightenment thinker Jeremy
Bentham had exposed the indefensibility of customary practices such as the cruelty to animals.

13:02Jeremy Bentham: The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they
suffer?

13:08RNG: And the persecution of homosexuals.

13:11JB: As to any primary mischief, it's evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the
contrary, it produces pleasure. The partners are both willing. If either of them be unwilling, the
act is an offense,totally different in its nature of effects. It's a personal injury. It's a kind of
rape. As to the any danger exclusive of pain, the danger, if any, much consist in the tendency
of the example. But what is the tendency of this example? To dispose others to engage in the
same practices. But this practice produces not pain of any kind to anyone.

13:43SP: Still, in every case, it took at least a century for the arguments of these great
thinkers to trickle down and infiltrate the population as a whole. It kind of makes you wonder
about our own time. Are there practices that we engage in where the arguments against them
are there for all to see but nonetheless we persist in them?
14:00RNG: When our great grandchildren look back at us, will they be as appalled by some of
our practicesas we are by our slave-owning, heretic-burning, wife-beating, gay-bashing
ancestors?

14:13SP: I'm sure everyone here could think of an example.

14:16RNG: I opt for the mistreatment of animals in factory farms.

14:20SP: The imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders and the toleration of rape in our
nation's prisons.

14:24RNG: Scrimping on donations to life-saving charities in the developing world.

14:29SP: The possession of nuclear weapons.

14:31RNG: The appeal to religion to justify the otherwise unjustifiable, such as the ban on

contraception.

14:38SP: What about religious faith in general?

14:40RNG: Eh, I'm not holding my breath.

14:42SP: Still, I have become convinced that reason is a better angel that deserves the
greatest credit for the moral progress our species has enjoyed and that holds out the greatest
hope for continuing moral progress in the future.

14:55RNG: And if, our friends, you detect a flaw in this argument, just remember you'll be
depending on reason to point it out.

15:04Thank you. SP: Thank you.

15:07(Applause)