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:
“Curiosity engenders both science and scandal.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“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)