"Does moral action depend on reasoning?"
That is the question answered by thirteen distinguished neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians in the latest Big Questions essay series sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Advertisements publicizing the project have been running since early May in the print and online editions of the Atlantic, Discover, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and other leading general-interest and scientific publications in the United States and the UK.
The goal? To spark a public conversation about the origins and nature of moral intuition and the extent to which we consciously control our moral behavior. Among the contributors: the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein; USC neuroscientist and best-selling author Antonio Damasio; Jean Bethke Elshtain, a theologian and political theorist at the University of Chicago Divinity School; Joshua D. Greene, the director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab; the Florida State University philosopher Alfred Mele; the Muslim theologian Aref Ali Nayed; the literary and cultural theorist Stanley Fish; and the UC-Berkeley psychologist John F. Kihlstrom. The essays are available online at www.templeton.org/reason, where they can also be requested in a free printed booklet.
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“This is a very old question with great contemporary relevance,” said Gary Rosen, the Templeton Foundation's chief external affairs officer. “Neuroscience is making philosophers and theologians rethink some of their long-held presuppositions. At the same time, the new brain sciences often have difficulty engaging with ethics.”
In her essay, Christine M. Korsgaard, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, argues that human beings “can exert a kind of control over our beliefs and actions that other animals, even very intelligent ones, cannot.” Reason, she writes, “requires that you act only on principles that would be acceptable if anyone acted on them.” Robert P. George, a political and legal theorist at Princeton, suggests that “natural law” ethics, with its emphasis on “basic human goods,” provides the proper foundation for rational moral judgment.
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By contrast, Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to recent brain research showing that the processes of moral decision-making are “carried out before one becomes consciously aware of them.” Science journalist Jonah Lehrer explains that psychopaths are dangerous not because they lack the capacity to reason but because they lack empathy. For his part, Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the UK, writes that it was “one of the great errors of the Enlightenment to underestimate the power of those irrational forces that are part of our genetic heritage.”
The new essay series is the sixth “Templeton conversation” on Big Questions. The previous questions, which can be found on the Foundation’s website at www.templeton.org/bigquestions, include Does evolution explain human nature?; Does the free market corrode moral character?; Does science make belief in God obsolete?; Will money solve Africa's development problems?; and Does the universe have a purpose?
Slow Down, Think Creatively
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| Rex Jung |
The New York Times reports that the neuroscientist Rex Jung, a Templeton grantee, has “produced some surprising results” at his University of New Mexico lab. Jung and his team have been using MRI technology to study the relationship between creativity and intelligence. They have found evidence that creative thought processes take longer to move through the brain than other forms of cognition.
“The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B,” Jung told the Times. “But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours and meandering little byways.” John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, believes that looking for a correlation between creativity and one particular part of the brain is an “old-fashioned approach,” but he credited Jung with doing “original and interesting work.” (Photo: Mark Holm/The New York Times/Redux)
A "Second Form" of Life?
For decades, scientists have been scanning the heavens, searching the rest of the universe in vain for any sign of life or, better still, intelligence. But perhaps they have been going about their task in the wrong way.
That is the view of the cosmologist and astrobiologist Paul Davies, the 1995 Templeton Prize laureate. In his new book, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, Davies argues that our methods for trying to find other life forms are outdated and misdirected. In a recent New York Times op-ed, he suggests that, rather than looking to other planets, we should focus our efforts on the possibility that an insufficiently studied corner of the Earth itself may yet harbor some surprising “second form of life.”
