The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will

In this stimulating treatise on ethics and psychology, Ravven (Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, co-editor), a religion professor at Hamilton College, subjects the belief that humans choose freely between starkly opposed moral principles to a vigorous, wide-ranging critique. Starting with an account of moral behavior in the Holocaust, she moves on to a detailed contrast between the Christian doctrine of free will and a rival ethical tradition, stretching from Aristotle to Spinoza, that grounds human morality in nature and social influences. She connects these ideas to findings in cognitive psychology and brain science that undermine the picture of a rational self making free decisions and reveal the determining role of unconscious neural processes and the environment; these results suggest to her an alternative ethics that highlights the power of social relations and institutions in shaping individual choices. Ravven’s dense, scholarly, but very readable text intertwines history, philosophy, and science in insightful and provocative ways. She gives too short a shrift to the motivating force of explicit moral doctrine; despite its lack of realism, free-will dogma captures the moral imagination better than her “systems theory of moral agency” does. Still, she poses a powerful challenge to conventional notions of individual responsibility. (June 13)