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Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Moral
Individuals
Individual
Principle
Interchangeable
Humans
Claims
Constrained
Group
Empirical
Average
Properties
Property
Judged
Groups
Claim
Principles
Equality

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.
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An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
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There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.
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Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
Steven Pinker
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Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
Steven Pinker
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I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.
Steven Pinker
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As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Steven Pinker
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Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.
Steven Pinker
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It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.
Steven Pinker
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We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't believe in reason.
Steven Pinker
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I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
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Disgust is intuitive microbiology
Steven Pinker
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Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
Steven Pinker
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If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
Steven Pinker
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No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
Steven Pinker
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Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
Steven Pinker
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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
Steven Pinker
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It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
Steven Pinker
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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
Steven Pinker