Politics & Power Quote by Steven Pinker

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.”