Science and Moral Realism
Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that the game theoretic advantages of ethical behavior support the idea that morality is "out there" in a certain sense (as part of the evolutionary fitness landscape). Journalist Robert Wright has similarly argued that natural selection moves sentient species closer to moral truth as time goes on.
Writer Sam Harris has also argued that ethics could be objectively grounded in an understanding of neuroscience.
Read more about this topic: Moral Realism
Famous quotes containing the words science and, science, moral and/or realism:
“If you have science and art,
You also have religion;
But if you don’t have them,
You better have religion.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)