The Source of Law -- A Timely Rejoinder

My ruminations on the source of law were timely — the psychologist Steven Pinker published a feature-length article in the January 13, 2008 New York Times Magazine on precisely the same issue.  In his article, Pinker offers up some very challenging moral dilemmas that challenge the idea that there can be a “universal morality.”  However, Pinker ultimately supports a kind of universal morality grounded in evolutionary biology.  He terms this a “new science of the moral sense.”  The article, entitled “The Moral Instinct,” provoked me to submit a letter to the Times:

The source of morals, a problem addressed by Steven Pinker (“The Moral Instinct”), has bothered me since college, when a philosophy professor of mine raised one of the same moral problems (a commandment to torture a child) on the first day of class.  Like Pinker, I tend to come down on the evolutionary or biological side of things but still squirm at mere biological reductionism.  Something seems irredeemably unacceptable about the torture of a child.  Breaking through our gut feelings here is difficult, and I doubt we’ll ever get access to the mind of the creator – “is this right?”.
One assumes that all conscious beings in our universe will be much like us, fragile, oozy bags of guts and fluids resulting from an improbable process of natural selection rather than from the spontaneous generation of mechanical devices (robots, for example).  Given the high unlikelihood that consciousness should arise at all, and given also the enormous amount of energy and information expended by nature in the processes giving rise to conscious beings, wouldn’t it be bizarre if the resulting consciousness could tolerate, for example, the torment of its offspring? 

I suspect that any process of sufficient duration and energy expenditure would generate a self-correcting mechanism for events that threaten to halt that process.  Morals might be such a self-corrective.  That doesn’t mean that morals don’t still echo the sentiments of a creator, but it does suggest that any creator is more involved up-front in affairs than later on, once the process has been set in motion.

Pinker’s article spurred my thinking on the matter of algorithms as applied to evolutionary biology.  Readers of Stephen Wolfram will recognize this line of reasoning.  I will address this in more detail in another post.