The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,400

have the emotions in mind so much as the intellect. He is a philosopher’s philosopher, and argued that over the aeons people had the power to literally think their way into greater respect for the interests of others. And that respect cannot be confined to the interests of the people with whom we rub shoulders in a small social circle. Just as you can’t favor yourself over someone else when holding up ideals on how to behave, you can’t favor members of your group over the members of another group. For Singer, it is hardheaded reason more than softhearted empathy that expands the ethical circle ever outward:Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end....

If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The idea of a disinterested defense of one’s conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.225

In the historical sequence that Singer adduces, the moral circle of the early Greeks was confined to the city-state, as in this unintentionally comical epitaph from the mid-5th century CE:This memorial is set over the body of a very good man. Pythion, from Megara, slew seven men and broke off seven spear points in their bodies.... This man, who saved three Athenian regiments . . . having brought sorrow to no one among all men who dwell on earth, went down to the underworld felicitated in the eyes of all.226

Plato widened the circle a bit by arguing that Greeks should spare other Greeks from devastation and enslavement, visiting these fates only on non-Greeks. In modern times Europeans expanded the no-taking-slaves rule to other Europeans, but Africans were fair game. Today, of course, slavery is illegal for everyone.

The only problem with Singer’s metaphor is that the history of moral concern looks less like an escalator than an elevator that gets stuck on a floor for a seeming eternity, then lurches up to the next floor, gets stuck there for a while, and so on. Singer’s history finds just four circle sizes in almost two and a half millennia, which works out to one ascent every 625 years. That feels a bit jerky for an escalator. Singer acknowledges the bumpiness of moral progress and attributes it to the rarity of great thinkers:Insofar as the timing and success of the emergence of a questioning spirit is concerned, history is a chronicle of accidents. Nevertheless, if reasoning flourishes within the confines of customary morality, progress in the long run is not accidental. From time to time, outstanding thinkers will emerge who are troubled by the boundaries that custom places on their reasoning, for it is in the nature of reasoning that it dislikes notices saying “off limits.” Reasoning is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application. Unless crushed by countervailing forces, each new application will become part of the territory of reasoning bequeathed to future generations.227

But it remains puzzling that these outstanding thinkers have appeared so rarely on the world’s stage, and that the expansion of reason should have dawdled so. Why did human rationality need thousands of years to arrive at the conclusion that something might be a wee bit wrong with slavery? Or with beating children, raping unattached women, exterminating native peoples, imprisoning homosexuals, or waging wars to assuage the injured vanity of kings? It shouldn’t take an Einstein to figure it out.

One possibility is that the theory of an escalator of reason is historically incorrect, and that humanity was led up the incline of moral progress by the heart rather than the head. A different possibility is that Singer is right, at least in part, but the escalator is powered not just by the sporadic appearance of outstanding thinkers but by a rise in the quality of everyone’s thinking. Perhaps we’re getting better because we’re getting smarter.

Believe it or not, we are getting smarter. In the early 1980s the philosopher James