Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.
Interpretation
Commerce and trade enhance the value of individuals through mutual needs and altruism.
In this quote, Steven Pinker expresses the idea that commerce, trade, and exchange create a framework in which people are seen as more valuable in their living state rather than in death. This dynamic encourages individuals to consider the needs and wants of others, fostering a sense of reciprocal altruism, which contrasts with mere dominance and competition over resources.
In practice
This quote can be inspiring in a business seminar focusing on ethical commerce.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.
America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
No amount of rationalizing can change God's laws. No amount of fashion designing can turn immodesty into virtue, and no amount of popularity can change sin into righteousness.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
The meaning in life is not out there but inbetween our ears. In many ways this makes us the lords of creation.
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