by Noam Chomsky
Abortion
MAN: You mentioned abortion—what’s your view about that whole debate?
I think it’s a hard one, I don’t think the answers are simple—it’s a case where there really are conflicting values. See, it’s very rare in most human situations that there’s a clear and simple answer about what’s right, and sometimes the answers are very murky, because there are different values, and values do conflict. I mean, our understanding of our own moral value system is that it’s not like an axiom system, where there’s always one answer and not some other answer. Rather we have what appear to be conflicting values, which often lead us to different answers—maybe because we don’t understand all the values well enough yet, or maybe because they really are in conflict. Well, in the case of abortion, there are just straight conflicts. From one point of view, a child up to a certain point is an organ of the mother’s body, and the mother ought to have a decision what to do—and that’s true. From another point of view, the organism is a potential human being, and it has rights. And those two values are simply in conflict.
On the other hand, a biologist I know once suggested that we may one day be able to see the same conflict when a woman washes her hands. I mean, when a woman washes her hands, a lot of cells flake off—and in principle, each of those cells has the genetic instructions for a human being. Well, you could imagine a future technology which would take one of those cells and create a human being from it. Now, obviously he was making the argument as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but there’s an element of truth to it—not that much yet, but it’s not like saying something about astrology. What he’s saying is true.
If you want to know my own personal judgment, I would say a reasonable proposal at this point is that the fetus changes from an organ to a person when it becomes viable—but certainly that’s arguable. And besides, as this biologist was pointing out, it’s not very clear when that is—depending on the state of technology, it could be when the woman’s washing her hands. That’s life, though: in life you’re faced with hard decisions, conflicting values.
Moral Values
MAN: Where do you think “values” come from in the first place?
That’s an interesting question. Any answer we give is based on extremely little understanding, so nothing one says is very serious. But just from the conditions of moral judgment, I don’t see how it can fail to be true that moral values are basically rooted in our nature—I think that must be true. And the reason why I say that is pretty elementary.
I mean, undoubtedly the way in which we look at things and make judgments about them and assess them has a significant and notable cultural factor. But that aside, we certainly are capable, and everybody does it, of making moral judgments and evaluations in entirely new situations—we do that all the time; we may not be consciously evaluating all the new circumstances we’re faced with, but we’re certainly at least tacitly doing it, and the results of those evaluations are the basis for our choices of action, our doing one thing and not another. So we’re constantly making all kinds of judgments, including moral judgments, aesthetic judgments, and all sorts of others, about new things and new situations. Well, either it’s being done just randomly, sort of like pulling something out of a hat—which certainly doesn’t seem to be true, either introspectively or by observation—or else we’re doing it on the basis of some moral system that we have built into our minds somehow, which gives answers, or at least partial answers, to a whole range of new situations.
Well, nobody knows what that system actually is of course—we don’t understand it at all—but it does seem to be rich and complex enough so that it can apply to indefinitely many new situations.
MAN: Obviously one couldn’t map it out in detail, hut how do you think such a system might be set up?
Well, again, we really don’t know at all. But a serious proposal for such a system, I think, would be that it might be something like what we know about language—and a lot is known. For example, there is a framework of basic, fundamental principles of language that are invariant in the species, they’re just fixed in our biological nature somehow—they hold for all languages, and they allow for only a very limited degree of modification, which comes from early experience. Then as soon as those wired-in options for variation are fixed, children have a whole linguistic system which allows them to say new things, and to understand new things, and to interpret new expressions that nobody’s ever heard before—all kinds of things like that.
Well, qualitatively speaking, that’s what our system of moral judgment looks like, so it’s conceivable that it has a similar kind of basis—but again, you have to find the answer, you can’t just guess.
MAN: Obviously the underlying principles can’t be simple—they can’t just be something like, “Thou shalt not kill.”
No—because we decide much more complex things than that. I mean, we really don’t know what the fundamental principles of moral judgment actually are, but we have very good reason to believe that they’re there. And that’s simply because we can, in fact, make relatively consistent moral judgments, judgments which are understood by other people, and appreciated by them (sometimes with disagreement, in which case we can have moral discourse), and we can do all of that under new conditions that we’ve never seen before, and facing new problems and so on. Okay, unless we’re angels, the structures that perform those functions got into the organism the same way other complex things did—namely, they’re largely part of a genetically-determined framework, which gets marginally modified through the course probably of early experience.
Well, that’s what our moral system might look like. How much variation can there be in such moral systems? Well, without understanding, we don’t know. How much variation can there be in languages? Without understanding, we don’t know. I mean, in the case of languages, we know that it’s not much variation, and in the case of moral values I think we can make a fair guess that it also can’t be much variation—and the reason is quite elementary. Our moral system appears to be complex and determinate, and there are only two factors that can enter into determining it: one is our fixed biological nature, and the other is individual experience. Well, we know that experience is extremely impoverished, it doesn’t give a lot of direction—the logic being pretty much the same as when someone asks, “Why do children undergo puberty at a certain age?” Actually, nobody knows the answer to that: it’s a topic that’s unknown. But there are only two possible factors that can enter into it. One is something in children’s pre-puberty experience which sort of sets them off undergoing puberty—say, some effect of the environment such as peer pressure, or somebody told you it would be a good idea or something. And the other is that we’re just genetically designed so that under certain conditions and at a certain level of maturation, hormones take over, and at that point we undergo puberty: it’s wired in.
Well, without knowing anything, everyone just assumes the second possibility. Like, if somebody came along and said they think it’s peer pressure that causes puberty—it’s because you see other people doing it, and you want to be like them—without knowing anything, you’d just laugh. And the reason you’d laugh is very simple: the environment is not specific enough or rich enough to determine these highly specific changes that take place. And that logic also holds for just about everything else in growth and development too—that’s why people assume, without knowledge, that an embryo will become a chicken rather than a human being depending on its biological nature, not depending on the nutrition that’s fed in: because the nutrition doesn’t have enough information to cause those highly specific changes. Well, it looks as if moral values and our moral judgment system are of that character too.
Actually, contributing to this conclusion is just the fact that we can have moral discourse to begin with. So take an issue on which people were really split, take slavery. It wasn’t just an intellectual debate, obviously—there was a huge amount of struggle involved—but insofar as there was an i
ntellectual debate, it had a certain shared moral ground to it. In fact, the slave owners’ arguments are not so simple to answer—some of them are valid, and have a lot of implications. They were taken very seriously by American workers in the late nineteenth century, for example.
For instance, the slave owners argued, “You take better care of a slave if you own it than if you rent it.” Like, you take better care of your car if you own it than if you rent it, so you take better care of your worker if you own it than if you rent it—so slavery’s benevolent and “free market” is morally atrocious. And the slave owners in fact said, “Look, we’re a lot more benevolent than you guys with your capitalist wage-slave system.” And if you look back at the literature by workers who organized into, say, the Knights of Labor and other working-class organizations of the late nineteenth century, you’ll also see a strain running through their position which said: “We fought to end slavery, not to impose it” [i.e. the industrial wage-labor system became dominant after the Civil War]. 43 So the point is, on all sides of debates like these, people understand that they have to appeal to the same basic moral principles, even if what they’re doing is totally venal.
I mean, it’s extremely rare even for an S.S. guard or a torturer to say, “I’m doing this because I like to be a son of a bitch.” We all do bad things in our lives, and if you think back, it’s very rare that you’ve said, “I’m doing this just because I feel like it”—people reinterpret things in order to fit them into a basic framework of moral values, which in fact we all share.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that moral values are uniform—if you look across cultures, you do find some differences. But when you look at different languages, you also appear to find radical differences. You know they can’t be there—because if the differences really were great, it would be impossible to acquire any of the languages. So therefore the differences have to be superficial, and the scientific question is to prove what must be true by the basic logic of the situation. Well, I think the same must be true in the case of moral judgment as well. So to go back to the original question, I don’t think we can reasonably doubt that moral values are indeed rooted in our nature.
MAN: Then if people do have this shared set of moral values, you still have to explain why everything is as corrupt and hierarchical and war-laden as it is.
But why not ask another question? Why not ask how come there’s so much sympathy, and care, and love, and solidarity? I mean, that’s also true.
MAN: That’s the way I always answer the objection—there should he none of those things, because the institutions don’t breed them.
Well, there’s no such thing as, “why is there so much of this and so much of that?”—there is what there is. But what there is doubtless is conditioned by the opportunities and choices that are imposed and available to people under particular social, cultural, economic, and even physical settings. So the point is to try to get to a situation where the society and all its institutions and arrangements are set up so as to maximize the options for people to pursue the healthier alternatives. And I really don’t think there’s been a better period in modern history for organizing towards that than there is right now, actually.
I mean, there’s tremendous disillusionment all across the country—and it’s world-wide incidentally: there have been cross-national studies of this, and the level of pessimism across the entire industrial world is just extraordinary. In the United States, for example, about three-quarters of the population thinks that the future is going to be “objectively worse” than the past—in other words, that their children won’t live like they do. 44 About half the American population thinks that both political parties just ought to be disbanded, they’re useless. 45 The disaffection from institutions is always high, and it’s been going up very consistently in past years. 46 These are conditions under which organizing for social change ought to be very much possible—if we’re not doing it, it’s our own fault: these factors have not been true in the past.
But at the same time, it’s also true that people feel hopeless. I mean, part of the disillusionment is that they just don’t see anything else—they don’t see a solution, or any alternatives. Even at the depths of the 1930s Depression, which was objectively much worse than today, people were never hopeless the way they are today. Most people felt it’s going to get better, we can do something about it, we can organize, we can work. I mean, they had illusions too, like there were a lot of illusions about Roosevelt, for example—but the illusions were combined with something real going on. Today what people mainly feel is, it’s going to get worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
So what we’re faced with is a combination of a very high degree of disillusionment, and a very low degree of hope and perception of alternatives. And that’s exactly where serious organizers ought to be able to step in.
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Turning Point
Based on discussions in Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland in 1994 to 1996 and 1999.
Bringing the Third World Home
WOMAN: What would have to happen for people to be able to do more of the real work of society—like supporting each other and educating children—instead of just spending our whole lives working at lame jobs for corporations?
Actually, a lot of countries tend to emphasize those things, even today—we don’t have to look very far for models. For example, take Western Europe: those are societies not very different from ours, they have the same corporate-run economy, the same sort of limited political system, but they just happen to pursue somewhat different social policies, for various historical reasons. So Germany has a kind of social contract we don’t have—one of the biggest unions there just won a 35-hour work-week, for example. 1 In the Netherlands, poverty among the elderly has gone down to flat zero, and among children it’s 4 percent, almost nothing. 2 In Sweden, mothers and fathers both get substantial parental leave to take care of their children, like a year or something—because taking care of children is considered something that has value in that society, unlike in the United States, where the leadership elements hate families. 3 I mean, Newt Gingrich and the rest of these people may talk about supporting “family values,” but they actually want families destroyed—because families are not rational from the point of view of profit-making.
So even within the range of existing societies set up almost exactly like ours, there are plenty of other social policies you could have—and I think our system could tolerate those things too, it really just depends if there’s enough pressure to achieve them.
Actually, you might want to take a look at an interesting volume published recently by U.N.I.C.E.F. [the United Nations Children’s Fund], about treatment of children in the rich countries—it’s yet to be reviewed in the New York Times, or anywhere else in the United States, but it’s really quite revealing. It was written by a very good American economist named Sylvia Ann Hewlett, and she identifies two basic patterns of treatment, a “Continental-European/Japanese” model and an “Anglo-American” model—which just are radically different. Her conclusion is, the Continental-European/Japanese pattern has improved the status of children and families; the Anglo-American pattern has been what she calls “a war” against children and families. And that’s particularly been true in the last twenty years, because the so-called “conservatives” who took over in the 1980s, aside from their love of torture and misery abroad, also happen to be passionately opposed to family values and the rights of children, and have carried out social policies which have destroyed them. 4
Well, that’s just the wrong story for the New York Times—so that study never gets reviewed. Instead what the Times editors devote the cover-story of their Book Review to is another extremely deep problem the United States is facing—in case you aren’t aware of it, you’d really better read this. We’re facing the problem that “bad genes” are taking over the United States—and part of the proof of that is that scores on S.A.T.s and I.Q. test
s have been steadily declining in recent years, children just aren’t doing as well as they used to.
Well, somebody who’s really unsophisticated might think that the problem could have something to do with social policies that have driven 40 percent of the children in New York City below the poverty line, for example—but that issue never arises for the New York Times. 5 Instead the problem is bad genes. The problem is that blacks, who evolved in Africa, evolved in kind of a hostile climate, so therefore they evolved in such a way that black mothers don’t nurture their children—and also they breed a lot, they all breed like rabbits. And the effect is, the gene pool in the United States is being contaminated, and now it’s starting to show up in standardized test scores. 6
This is real hard science.
The Times’s review starts off by saying, well, maybe the facts in these books aren’t quite right, but nonetheless, one thing is clear: these are serious issues, and any democratic society which ignores them does so “at its peril.” 7 On the other hand, a society doesn’t ignore “at its peril” social policies that are depriving 40 percent of the children in New York City of the minimal material conditions which would offer them any hope of ever escaping the misery, destitution and violence that surround them, and which have driven them down to levels of malnutrition, disease and suffering where you can predict perfectly well what their scores are going to be on the “I.Q.” tests you give them—none of that you even mention.
In fact, according to the last statistics I saw about this, 30 million people in the United States are suffering hunger. 30 million is a lot of people, you know, and that means plenty of children. 8 In the 1980s, hunger declined in general throughout the entire world, with two exceptions: sub-Saharan Africa and the United States—the poorest part of the world and the richest part of the world, there hunger increased. And as a matter of fact, between 1985 and 1990, hunger in the United States increased by 50 percent—it took a couple years for the Reagan “reforms” to start taking hold, but by 1985 they were beginning to have their effects. 9 And there is just overwhelming evidence, in case it’s not obvious from common sense, what the effects of this kind of deprivation are on children—physically, emotionally, and mentally. For one thing, it’s well known that neural development simply is reduced by low levels of nutrition, and lack of nurturance in general. So when kids suffer malnutrition, it has permanent effects on them, it has a permanent effect on their health and lives and minds—they never get over it. 10