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:
“Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The well-educated young woman of 1950 will blend art and sciences in a way we do not dream of; the science will steady the art and the art will give charm to the science. This young woman will marry—yes, indeed, but she will take her pick of men, who will by that time have begun to realize what sort of men it behooves them to be.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“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)
“Art is beauty, and every exposition of art, whether it be music, painting, or the drama, should be subservient to that one great end. As long as nature is a means to the attainment of beauty, so-called realism is necessary and permissable [sic], but it must be realism enhanced by idealism and uplifted by the spirit of an inner life or purpose.”
—Julia Marlowe (1866–1950)