“The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker

At the heart of Pinker’s book is the debate of how much of the human mind is a tabula rasa and how much of human nature is imprinted upon us before birth. Pinker’s core argument is that although both nature and nurture play their parts, nature has gotten the short end of the stick. Social scientists have tried to imagine the mind as a blank slate for their own moral and political purposes. If nothing is innate than anything is possible. We are all born equal. Pinker suggests this does a disservice to science, the truth, and can skew morality in unintended ways. Saying people have different innate capabilities in no way diminishes the need to treat all people equitably. Some ethics are cultural artifacts, but others cross most cultures and seem to be expressed in babies even before they can speak. All human societies put a primacy on familial ties, communal sharing is limited in scope to kinship bonds at first, dominance and violence is displayed in threat if not in fact, and there is in-group vs. out-group rivalry. In fact, the only people who seem to not possess certain universal morals are ones whose brains have been damaged at birth or by an accident. Innate imprinting can also explain different deviant behaviors without excusing them. Evolutionary dispositions are not written in stone.

Humanity's moral circle has expanded over time. Pinker makes the case that humans have evolved to be less and less violent with every generation. These are adaptive techniques to increase the chance of reproductive success. Humans, more so than bonobos and chimpanzees, developed effective strategies to punish alpha (male) bullies and so the brain has evolved to become more social. Free will can still exist in a world where genes largely determine intelligence and even personality. Twin studies and adoption studies have shown that genetic resemblance can account for half of intelligence, personality, and life outcome similarities, while living in the same household accounts for close to zero. Non-shared experience, most importantly peer relationships, account for most of the rest. The fact that humans are born with innate capabilities and desires might mean we can not be molded like putty to the whims of social engineers, but it in no way reduces the imperative to treat every human equally, with the same moral and ethical compass.