Pinker turns up in today's NY Times look at overrated and underrated ideas. To me, at any rate, he doesn't make a good showing. Overrated: the "slippery slope." Underrated: "amoral pragmatism". Pinker's argument against "slippery slope" rhetoric -- "When we lowered the voting age to 18, we didn't slip down a slope and give 5-year-olds the vote, too" -- doesn't seem convincing or much of an improvement over what he criticizes.
Every generation has some conflict between older moral codes and new, radical, more amoral ideas. This is where some of us walked in. In previous generations, Marxism was the "new" idea. Or pragmatism or logical positivism or psychoanalysis. Also at various times in recent decades, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Existentialism, Deconstruction, Marcuse, the Frankfurt School. Today Darwin, sociobiology, and genetic engineering are the "new" scientific shortcuts to understanding, human improvement, and liberation.
That may be true, but I can't help being skeptical, but I will try to read more of your article in my spare time. It certainly looks worth reading. I commend your efforts.
Pinker is just TOO disingenuous.... IMHO FWIW.
IMHO, Pinker leaves himself no basis whatever by which to criticize anything. Indeed, Pinker's entire point seems to be that, once we understand man as the machine he putatively is (according to Pinker's grotesquely reductionist view), then questions about the "ghost in the machine" (does he ever source this quip to Julian Huxley, its author?) become moot. Irrelevant.
Of course, he knows as well as you or I do that whatever moral vision man has ever expressed down the ages, he never entrusted its communication to the language of a "machine" as his mouthpiece -- unless he needed an insanity defense....
So, what do you suppose this guy is really up to?