pinkalicious
August 15th, 2007 by 
abbas
From the Chicago Sun-Times, Steven Pinker discusses what hangs and what doesn’t on looking at “dangerous” ideas.
- Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
- Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe’s nuclear waste?
- Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?
- Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?
- Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?
- Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?
- Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things. Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up. These are dangerous ideas — ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order.
- By “dangerous ideas” I don’t have in mind harmful technologies, like those behind weapons of mass destruction, or evil ideologies, like those of racist, fascist or other fanatical cults. I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age. The ideas listed above, and the moral panic that each one of them has incited during the past quarter century, are examples. Writers who have raised ideas like these have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted.
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