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Gregory of Nyssa on the Trees in the Garden →

Posted on March 19, 2012 by David Opderbeck

The Wall Street Journal’s today featured a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind.  Haidt, the reviewer says, suggests that humans “are selfish primates who long to be part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education features several columns on neuroscience and free will.

Haidt’s perspective seems to offer a helpful corrective to some reductionistic accounts of morality in which all “moral” actions are revealed as merely selfish.  The Chronicle columns offer some standard reductionstic physicalist fare, such as Jerry Coyne’s entry.  Coyne argues that “free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics. Your brain and body, the vehicles that make “choices,” are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment.”

This, of course, assumes that the “laws of physics” are the full and final composition of reality — an assumption that is metaphysical and not within the purview of empirical science.

In contrast, philosopher Alfred Mele correctly observes that the empirical evidence for brain-state determinism is flimsy at best.  Yet even Mele assumes the metaphysical starting point of physicalism.  He just isn’t willing to accept reductive physicalism on empirical grounds.

Michael Gazzinga agrees that free will is an illusion, but argues that we should act as if it were real.  Gazzinga states that, notwithstanding brain determinism,

Holding people responsible for their actions remains untouched and intact since that is a value granted by society. We all learn and obey rules, both personal and social. Following social rules, as they say, is part of our DNA. Virtually every human can follow rules no matter what mental state he or she is in.

Gazzinga is one of the more subtle thinkers on the relation of law, ethics and neuroscience.  In my doctoral research, I’ll spend some time addressing his arguments.  In short, what he is saying here seems to me to be literally non-sensical.  To use terms like “value” and “granted” is to slip into the language of metaphysics and agency.  In a deterministic universe, there are no “values” — stuff just happens.  And nothing is “granted,” for that implies a decision whether to give or withhold consent — again, in a deterministic universe, stuff just happens.

The best Chronicle entry is by philosopher Hilary Bok, who correctly argues that “free will” is a philosophical rather than strictly scientific-empirical question.  Bok offers a compatibilist framework for “free will” in a physicalist universe.  Here, I think, Bok’s approach (and all “compatibilist” approaches drawn from analytic philosophy) is grossly inadequate.  She assumes, as do Gazzinga and Coyne, a materialist metaphysic.  She should recognize that whether materialism is true also is not properly a scientific-empirical question.

This is a place at which theology and “science” are indeed in conflict, at least insofar as “science” purports to circumscribe metaphysical questions.  Theology unabashedly asserts that the physical universe is not all there is.  We might debate the nature and existence of the “soul” (I believe in the “soul,” though with some careful qualifications against pseudo-Cartesian dualisms), but by definition “theology” implies God and not just physics.

But really, there shouldn’t be a conflict at this point.  “Science” should recognize its limits.

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