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“The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. [...] But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error-moral illusions, as it were just like our other faculties.” — Steven Pinker
The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job.
That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. [...] But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error-moral illusions, as it were just like our other faculties.