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Politics & Power Quote by Steven Pinker

"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones"

About this Quote

Pinker’s move here is to puncture a stubborn category error that keeps resurfacing in equality debates: the idea that treating people as equals requires believing they are literally the same. By calling political equality “not an empirical claim,” he yanks the argument out of the lab and back into the realm it belongs to - moral and civic philosophy. It’s a scientist’s rhetorical feint: he grants biology its territory while denying it the right to govern citizenship.

The line also smuggles in a critique of bad-faith polemics. “Clones” is deliberately cartoonish, a word chosen to make the opposing position sound not merely wrong but unserious. Pinker is signaling that the “gotcha” style argument - pointing to average differences, then declaring egalitarianism disproven - is intellectually lazy. Equality before the law isn’t a hypothesis waiting to be falsified by IQ distributions or sex-linked traits; it’s a decision about how power should treat the person standing in front of it.

Context matters: Pinker has spent decades defending Enlightenment liberalism against both reactionary determinism and certain strains of progressive rhetoric that imply all disparities must be oppression or else nature itself is taboo. This sentence sits in that crossfire. The subtext is pragmatic: you can acknowledge human variability without sliding into a caste system. Political equality is a rule for institutions, not a claim about skulls, genomes, or personalities - and insisting otherwise is often a way to rebrand hierarchy as “science.”

Quote Details

TopicEquality
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Pinker, Steven. (2026, January 15). As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-many-political-writers-have-pointed-out-157395/

Chicago Style
Pinker, Steven. "As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-many-political-writers-have-pointed-out-157395/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-many-political-writers-have-pointed-out-157395/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Steven Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Scientist from Canada.

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