Missing Shades of Grue

Following the press coverage and public discussion of the VT gunman, David Brooks writes about the "morality line" between individual responsibility and background forces. He worries that scientific explanations of human behavior leave something important out.

It's important knowledge, but it's had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self. "Man is the measure of all things," the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared millenniums ago. But in the realm of the new science, the individual is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces: evolution, brain chemistry, stress and upbringing. Human consciousness is merely an epiphenomena of the deep and controlling mental processes that lie within.

So where is free will, responsibility, choice, the self? He adds,

There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It?s just that these selves can?t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.

Maybe a line is the wrong thing to try and locate. It assumes that the scientific explanations of the processes of decision making and control are opposed to--or irrelevant to--an account of responsible agency. As Brooks sees it

The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.

But these aren't opposing sides, are they? Individual character is not outside the scope of science, and neither are selves, motives and norms. What's required here is not a defense of territory but a better attempt to understand the sense in which individuals can have the appropriate degree of control over their decisions and actions. Brooks, despite his interest in establishing boundaries, seems to acknowledge something along these lines.

We?re never going back. We?re not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons.

But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists? insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center.

I'm not sure what "monopolists" is supposed to mean here. Perhaps it is this recent focus on the atypical and very disordered brain of the VT gunman that makes Brooks and others worry that all science will reveal is that we are all criminals beneath the surface--lacking the ability to make socially responsible decisions and act on them appropriately. Or that we are all robotic slaves to a rigid set of hardwired behaviors. Unfortunately we rarely have the occasion to highlight what science is learning about healthy brains--the ones that don't act on their homicidal fantasies. While such new knowledge might undermine an attachment to Cartesian selves and quasi-religious myths about moral responsiblity, it might also help us better cultivate and promote responsible brains that more typically serve responsible people.

Politika Erotika: DAVID BROOKS: The Morality Line; Thanks to GFP.

No surprises here.

Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

The Bush administration's reaction is classic.

Bush administration officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study, saying the four programs, which are among several hundred across the nation, were some of the very first established after Congress overhauled the nation?s welfare laws in 1996.

Officials said one lesson they learned from the study was that the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years.

Yes, the study really shows we need more, not fewer, abstinence programs. We'll call it an abstinence program surge! I see a pattern here.

Conclusions Are Reported on Teaching of Abstinence - New York Times

John Dupre harshly critically reviews Alex Rosenberg's latest book Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology.

"The question then is whether Rosenberg's latest book, Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology, constitutes a useful attack on a dogmatic orthodoxy or merely represents a failure to understand why the views of an earlier generation of philosophers of science have been abandoned. Unfortunately I fear the latter is the case. More specifically, his portrayal of the genome as a program directing development, which is the centerpiece of his reductionist account of biology, discloses a failure to appreciate the complex two-way interactions between the genome and its molecular environment that molecular biologists have been elaborating for the past several decades."

American Scientist Online - Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?

First, suppose Darwin did believe in God as a divine creator. Now suppose he didn't. See, the evidence for evolution remains unchanged no matter what Darwin believed. So why are some so obsessed with Darwin's religious views? There is valid historical interest, of course, and recently released correspondence shows how Darwin expressed his own religious doubts.

Darwin himself had a trying relationship with God. Though he was a firm believer in his early years, his theories forced him to question his faith and any commitment to Christianity that remained was extinguished with the death of his daughter in 1851. In one letter to another correspondent, Charles Lyell, he made his position clear: "Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality & the existence of a personal God by intuition; & I suppose that I must differ from such persons, for I do not feel any innate conviction on any such points.""

Darwin's doubts revealed in his letters to friends - Independent Online Edition > This Britain