Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our noble behaviors may be driven by self-interest rooted in evolutionary psychology.
Steven Pinker argues that what we often consider to be altruistic or noble behaviors, such as love for children, compassion for others, and a sense of justice, may actually be strategies shaped by evolution to ensure the survival of our genes. This perspective challenges the notion of pure altruism by indicating that even our most cherished values could be deeply intertwined with biological imperatives, linking kindness to a fundamental aspect of our existence in the natural world.
In practice
In a discussion on the motivations behind charitable behavior.
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.
This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.
No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other.
Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.
Justification by religious performances, and meritorious deeds, is nothing better than the old Pharisaism with a Christian name stuck upon it. . . That doctrine makes the Lord Jesus Christ to be practically a nobody; for if salvation be of works, then the way of salvation through faith in a Savior is superfluous, and even mischievous
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
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