Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

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...