 On behalf of the McLean Center for Political Ethics and the Grossman Institute of Neuroscience-Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior, I welcome you to this, our 18th lecture in our 2015-16 series on neuroweathers. The lecture series is organized by John Anselt, the director of the Grossman Institute by Peggy Mason, Professor of Neurobiology and my dad, Sylvaisi, from the McLean Center. It is now my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, an old friend and a colleague, Robert Pippen. Professor Pippen is the Evelyn Steppen-Signaf Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, and the College here at the University. Since 1998, Professor Pippen has been the chair and the director of graduate studies, out on the media on social thought. Professor Pippen works primarily on the modern German philosophical tradition, concentrating on legal impact. He is the author of many books, including books on German philosophy such as Conspirio Form, Hegel's Idealism, The Satisfaction of Self-Punctuousness, and Modernism as a Philosophical Prong. Professor Pippen has also written a book on literature and philosophy with Henry James and the modern moral life. And two wonderful books that I've read and understand entitled Hollywood Westons, and another one fatalism in American film noir, some cinematic philosophy. So one is about the Westons and one is about film noir. Professor Pippen's two most recent books are after the beautiful Hegel and the philosophy of pictorial modernism and interanimations, receiving modern German philosophy in 2015. Professor Pippen is a past winner of the Melon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Philosophical Society. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Today Professor Pippen is entitled, as you see behind me, the humanities and ethical knowledge. Please join me. I have two apologies to make. One is I have to teach right after this hour so I can't stay for the usual discussion. The second is that about an hour ago I had my eyes dilated for an eye exam. So I may have to do this and I can't really see you at all, various colored blurs out there. I thought I might get it done earlier, but there was a long delay at the eye doctors. And third, I hope the way I approach this problem, neuroscience and ethics, is of some interest to you. It's probably somewhat more abstract than what you're used to. From the vantage point I occupy in philosophy, the recent advances in neuroscience raised two different ethical issues. The first is one you may have been hearing most about, and that is what kinds of ethical problems arise with new potentials for cognitive enhancement, either through medication or other procedures. And those ethical issues are quite familiar already to those of you in medicine, I suppose, especially. That is that human beings are both objects, like all other material objects, extended in space and time and subject to the causal laws of the universe. But they're also in some way that is endlessly difficult to explain, subjects. And that treating them as if they were just extended material objects in space and not as subjects is ethically inappropriate. We don't want to reify people, to objectify them, or to treat them as objects. If you're in a dispute with someone and you begin using what you regard as effective techniques to manipulate them, we consider that ethically wrong. That we ought to address them as fellow mutual subjects. So that's a very large issue that comes up with the medicalization of any problem. The struggle to keep the balance right between what is happening to people and what they are able to do. As I know probably you know better than I, a difficult one. But the chief ethical issue raised, I would think, is if there are new technologies and medications that increase cognitive ability, the immediate problem is the maldistribution of those benefits. But it's the unequal distribution of those benefits. So if not only cognitive impairment is medicalized, but cognitive performance itself is medicalized, then the issue of who gets access to what will increase cognitive performance or not is a difficult ethical and political philosophy issue. I won't have much to say about this. Mostly I think because the problem is already such an endemic and difficult one, this will just be one more iteration of that problem. That is, we're already directly awash in so much inequality that the problem of the maldistribution of cognitive benefits is just one of many. I mean just the way we finance our public schools is a manifestation of a lack of a very vigorous commitment to equal opportunity. We're the only developed nation on the planet that finances public education by local property taxes. Thus ensuring that those in poor districts have poor schools and in rich districts have better schools. But as many of you know, especially those of you with college-age children or people who have gone to college recently, already the widespread use on college campuses of drugs for ADHD, especially Adderall, is a kind of chronic problem, especially at elite universities like this one where students get access to that medication a good deal easier. My children reported to me that the use of those medications at Yale and my daughter went to Chicago where my son went is rampant. And not only that, they work. They're effective. They retain the material they learn in the two or three nights they stay up and make use of these drugs. So that problem is a difficult one. It's connected to so many other problems and unequal distribution of benefits in the kind of society we have. I don't have any new ideas about that. But my issue is the second kind of problem that an increased optimism about neuroscience research has created in the university. And that's the beginning of what is built as a new form of interdisciplinarity with the humanities and the neurosciences, which I regard as a form of productive monodisciplinarity or, if you like, a more polemical way of putting it, a colonizing of the humanities by various neuroscientific enterprises. Not so much that neuroscience has any interest in this, but they do what they do and they do it very well. But many of my colleagues in humanities around the country are very excited about such things as neuro-aesthetics, neuro-ethics, neuro-pistemology. And finally I had one colleague when I taught at the University of California at San Diego who is the world's chief proponent of what she calls neurophilosophy. Perhaps the easiest way to express the skepticism that this represents a genuine form of interdisciplinarity rather than a reductive monodisciplinarity approach is simply to remark that we will have true interdisciplinarity when a neuroscience stands up at a neuroscience conference and says that he learned something about jealousy and self-deceit from reading proofs that affected and improved the way he did his neuroscience research. So that would be interdisciplinarity. What we have is something quite different. There's a kind of recommendation that we shut up and listen to a certain extent. I get it. There are a number of new possibilities on the horizon that are quite interesting. But what's happening is of much more historical significance. The basic conception of the modern research university founded by Humboldt in Berlin in the early part of the 19th century was the acknowledgment that there are separate and autonomous modalities of human knowledge. Natural scientific modalities of knowledge, knowledge about human behavior or social sciences, and the humanities, what the German tradition is called, the Gaisenswischen Shopping. Or in France it's known as the Science Humanity. And the idea was the university ought to represent each of these autonomous fields of inquiry, knowledge gaining, and keep to their respective domains. There's room for a kind of fertile communication between the domains, but I think what we're seeing pretty much is the breakdown of that consensus. The breakdown of the consensus that the humanities finally after all this time and a couple hundred years of the research university represent a modality of knowledge that they don't. And if there could be parts of the university, they should adopt the methods of the proven and established models, paradigms of knowledge in the natural sciences. Now if that's true, it raises the question I would like to discuss today, which is, does what we know and will know about how people actually decide what to believe and do have any relevance to the question of what we think people ought to believe in or do. Now in one sense the answer is obviously yes. If you're an advertising executive, the answer is obviously yes. You ought to maximize the benefits to your client of your advertising campaign and what you know about human susceptibility to suggestion, nudging, downright manipulation. In advertising techniques is very, very valuable. And if you're a political consultant for a campaign, it's also a very useful amount of potential body of knowledge for you to make use of. But of course I think it's immediately obvious that the mere existence of these potentials doesn't settle the question of whether they should be used in these ways. Going back to the subject-object question, how we are addressing ourselves to each other through the media, whether the potentials ought to be so used or used at all. I want to suggest today why they are completely separate questions. I mean some of this can sound just like tribal and territorialism. I wanted to get off my turf. But I want to try to suggest why I think the suggestion that there be such a thing as neuroethics or neuroesthetics based on the study of how people actually come to the commitments and views that they have is not a relevant response to the question of what people ought to do or ought to believe. So to do that I have to back up a little bit and talk about a longer philosophical tradition in which this question has been for a few hundred years now continually debated. Since the rise of modern natural science. So I myself work within a strand of the modern philosophical tradition that can be said to have begun with two extremely influential essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1749, Rousseau won first prize in a contest held by the Academy of Dijon. In answer to the question, quote, has the progress of the sciences and arts means technology contributed to the corruption or the improvement of human conduct. Rousseau's famous answer was corruption rather than improvement. And in 1754 responding again to an Academy question, he wrote his discourse on the origin and basis of inequality among men. Another blistering attack on modernization including what he regarded as the presumptions of scientific and technical modernization. These two essays represented one of the first attempts to mark out the limits. The limits in principle, not based simply on temporary empirical ignorance of modern scientific understanding in contributing to human self-knowledge and so to insist on an unusual sort of necessary independence and privileged importance of moral and normative matters in general. His argument was unusual because it did not rely on theology or revelation as in much of the European counter-enlightenment or in any form of traditional metaphysical dualism like the immaterial soul or the immaterial mind, not at all, which is of no use for such notions. In the way he argued for the distinctness of human being, Rousseau became a major influence on what I work on, on German philosophy in its classical period from the end of the 18th century to the first, third, or 19th century. And many of the arguments as formulated later by Kant and Hegel continue, I want to say, to be relevant to these new naturalizing enterprises, however powerful. Of course, the vast majority of such later objections to the natural scientific paradigm as holy and exclusively adequate for human self-knowledge were nowhere near as radical as Rousseau's. He seemed to be decrying the ethical insufficiency of the modern world we were busy creating in Europe in the 16th and 17th and 18th century, claiming that its required social organization and division of labor were creating forms of human dependence that weaken and innervate and degrade and emissary. That we were busily creating a whole novel way of life as unsuited for real human flourishing as the life of animals and zoos was for them. But in the tradition I'm interested in there was a common narrower concern that often derived from Rousseau and that persists today as a complex problem. Let us say that the basic problem is the status of normative considerations, considerations that invoke some sort of ought claim. And in order to get to the distinctly modern context for such an issue, let us assent to an even higher level of abstraction. Two such claims have always been more important than any others. What ought to be believed and what ought to be done. These claims, I believe, are at the heart of what in this country we call the humanities and they contribute to the traditional case that the humanities form the indispensable core of any incredible university education. The consensus I suggested is breaking down. That is, while these seem like distinctly philosophical questions and while philosophers have always been rightly accused of imperialist ambitions themselves treating everything else in the humanities as bad versions of philosophy rather than as possible good versions of what they are. I don't think the questions are rightly confined to philosophy. They turn up everywhere. How a literary text ought to be interpreted that is what it means to get a text right or wrong. How a character's professions of love in a novel ought to be assessed is he or she lying, a hypocrite, self-deceived, honest but naive, etc. Whether and if so how an abstract expressionist painting can be said to mean something and if so of what significance or importance is such patrily meaning. What ought we to believe about the significance of the crisis of modernism in music in the late 19th century? Why does so much contemporary art music sound so different from the way music had always sounded? What is, if anything, a value in the new music? And of course on into traditional philosophical issues like under what conditions is the state's use of coercive power justifiable? That will never be a natural scientific question. It will never be resolved by any discovery in neuroscience. Now first, well before we reach any question of interdisciplinary cooperation with the sciences, I should note that it's also become extremely controversial within the humanities along my colleagues to treat the humanities like this the way I just summarized. As if we were all contributing to a common conversation about various live normative issues. For one thing, the idea that literary products, say, or paintings could be said to imply or presuppose or require in a critical response, truth or value claims has in itself very little purchase on the contemporary academic mind including in the humanities. The idea that these are truth claims about normative matters, but there simply could be truth claims about normative matters that ought to be pursued and that these ought to be discussed and assessed as such, rather than only as deeply historically contextualized bits of evidence about what people believed at a time and place. The contrary all now sounds to many of my colleagues as rather stale humanism as it's sometimes put and it's often immediately assumed that any proponent of such views must serve a conservative agenda. This is so for a number of complex reasons. One is a great suspicion that there is any way to address or engage these normative issues, ought claims, at a first order level. That is by simply taking them on, trying to think about them and make up one's mind in conversations with texts and others about what one ought to believe or what one or some character ought or ought not to do or have done. The contrary idea is that this would be naive, uncritical, unreflected. This suspicion derives from the collapse of the notion of an objective natural moral order, a hierarchical chain of being and of natural purposes linked in this harmonious whole, providing an objective basis for such normative judgments. Without such a secure natural whole and harmony, how could there be any objective basis, any independent truth makers for any such conversation? I'm not saying this is a particularly good objection, but it's been very, very influential. Another is the suspicion that first order normative claims have been so various in our past and have changed so often. But it's much more likely that we might have much more of a chance to explain why people have come to have various views. About what ought to be believed or ought to be done, then we do of assessing the quality of their answers. Paul Recour, former member of the Committee on Social Thought, once referred to the 19th century thinkers who inspired this skepticism as the masters of suspicion, that is Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. And it is such an assumption that it has had the most lasting impact on the study of art and literature and some philosophy in the Western Academy, prompting sometimes a kind of shadow of science, tracing the meaning of various representative activities to their psychological or social conditions of their production. In fact, I would suggest that this skepticism about the independent or autonomous status of the normative, the world that philosopher Wilfred Sellers described as fraught with ought, is something like a necessary condition for the ever more popular empirical study of why people have come to believe what they generally do believe or did believe at a time. That's all one would really think there is actually to study, to research, as we say, if there is no way to resolve first-order questions of normative truth. I mean, there's no accepted, received body of results from 2000 years of humanistic inquiry, and that naturally creates, quite understandably, a suspicion that it's not inquire, that there are not research, research results for the enterprise. In addition to all this, many people have come to believe, as well, that any defense of anything other than a strictly naturalist perspective on human animals will unfairly and dangerously and for many immorally privilege the human animal above all others, and so plays an ideological role in farming and eating and experimenting on them. Others believe that any such enterprise, autonomous inquiry into value and meaning, must be ideological, uncritically accepting the views of the modern west, unaware of how contingent and possibly otherwise such views are and could be. This is all understandable in a more general sense, too. A great deal of what the humanities study are objects not created to be studied, not academic research projects in conversation with professors, but Greek plays written for communal religious festivals, church music, wall hangings for the rich and mighty, commercial story writing, Hollywood films, and so on. It's only very recently in the thousand-year history of the university that it came to be considered appropriate, roughly in the 20th century, to devote university resources to the study of not merely Greek and Latin classics, which is all that used to be studied until this time, but vernacular art and literature, to study not just Christian texts and Christian apologists, but the issue of secular morality in the university. It is perhaps understandable that while we have some vague sense that an educated person should be familiar with some such famous objects, we have not settled on anything remotely like a common research program for studying. And this sort of uncertainty accompanied often within the humanities by a vague lack of confidence have recently led to even more serious qualifications on any claim for a putative independence of such normative issues, all in favor of more naturalist or empirical accounts. That is, if truth claims are at issue, if we want to know why a particular picture of human life appeals to us or not, why a certain character repels us, why we cannot make up our mind about another issue, whether a character sacrifices his self-interest for the greater good with rational or foolish, what form of pleasure we take in reading a poem or looking at a manet, then so goes an often unexpressed assumption, why shouldn't we assume that some advanced form of the evolutionary, biological, and neurological, or at least the social sciences will explain all of that to us. I'm not trying to dispute that there are valuable things that can be learned when some of the social and natural sciences take as their object of study various representational and imagination-driven human activities. It is a very strange thing for people to gather in the dark because other people pretend to be yet other people and do ghastly things to each other, sometimes while singing about it all. Or to care so much about what happens to little now or how to gather, or to travel thousands of miles to stand in front of a temple in Kyoto. And these aesthetic appreciators are all human animals who occupy space and time like other bits of extended, causally-influensible matter. The problem I'm interested in is what happens when such explanatory considerations are understood to have replaced or superseded or actually to contribute to what I've been calling first-order normative questions, what ought to be believed and or done. In favor of such sideways on or second-order questions, what explains why people do this or that, believe this or that, where explains means what it does in the natural sciences, nomological ultimately, causal explanation. I should say at this point there's usually an objection that represents a profound misunderstanding of the argument being made and that's quite common, especially among my colleagues back in the Neuro-Philosophy days at San Diego. The idea is not that the brain cannot do these various evaluative or normative activities, resolving what to believe, resolving what to be done. Of course, if it's done, our entire neurological and biological system is doing it. The question is whether reference to the inherent properties and activities of the brain explains what ought to be believed or what ought to be done. So there's no sort of metaphysics involved. The idea is not because these look like autonomous questions, the argument must be that we need some account of what's doing them other than the meat machine to use their familiar term for. That's not the issue. The issue is one about explanation, not substantial metaphysics. I hope I'm clear on that. The suspicion is always you must be saying the brain is inadequate to explain this because it's the brain. No, it's whether it produces a satisfying explanation when an ethical or normative issue in general comes up. Well, the idea is that the two sorts of questions, what explains why people believe and do what they do and how do we resolve a question about what people ought to believe and do is that they're logically distinct and irreducibly different questions. The confusion is not a metaphysical one. It's just a confusion about what an explanation is or would be. It doesn't have to do just with humanity. Our colleagues in the economics department aren't interested in what physics might end up telling them about the microstructure of brain activity during trading at a Wall Street firm. That explanation is not of any use to them. So it's not just humanity. This reductionist problem. The idea is that the questions are practically unavoidable and necessarily linked to the social practice of giving and demanding reasons for what we do with each other, especially when something someone does affects changes or limits what another would otherwise have been able to do. But irreducibly first personal, I mean that whatever may be our snap judgments or immediate deeply intuitive reactions, whenever anyone faces a normative question, which is the stance from which normative issues are an issue, what ought to be believed or what ought to be done, no third-person fact about why one as a matter of fact has come to prefer this or that can be relevant to what I must decide, unless it's relevant for good practical reasons. What I count as a relevant practical consideration in the justification of what I decide ought to be done or ought to be believed, knowing something about evolutionary psychology might contribute something to understanding the revenge culture in which Arestes finds himself in Escalus' Horistiah trilogy. And so why he feels both polled to avenge his father's murder by his mother, Pleitimnestra, and also feels horrified at the prospect of killing his mother in cold blood. But none of that can be, would be, just in itself, at all helpful to Arestes, or anyone in his position. Knowing something about the evolutionary benefits of altruistic behavior might give us an interesting perspective on some particular altruistic act, but for the agent, first personally, the question I must decide is whether I ought to act altruistically, and if so, why? I cannot simply stand by, as it were, and wait to see what my highly and complexly evolved neurobiological system will do. It doesn't do anything. I do. And this for reasons I have to find compelling, or at least ones that outweigh countervailing considerations. Now, of course, in ordinary life, people act very irrationally all the time, but they don't act irrationally deliberately, is part of the point. I mean, if someone says, I have very good reasons for doing this, or no good reasons for doing this, and very good reasons for not doing it, and doesn't, we know something's gone wrong, that there's a mystery there, a mystery to the person, him or herself. Of course, there are times when I cannot produce such reasons. I'm at a loss to know what to do. Perhaps I'm surprised that, given what I thought were my commitments and principles, I acted as I did. The point is, we cannot leave the matter there, especially when confronted by another's demand for a reason, given that what I did affected what she would otherwise have been able to do. It is in this sense that the first person perspective that I've been arguing about is strictly unavoidable. I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled hither and yon by impulses and desires. I have to steer. I might come to think that since it's been demonstrated that altruistic behavior results an adaptive advantage over generations, I should act altruistically. But aside from the fact that this is very terrible reasoning and portrays a great deal of confusion about the factual claim, it is altogether root and branch different from merely instantiating a law about social behavior. The famous formulation of all of this was, everything in nature happens according to law. Human actions happen in accordance to a conception of normative law. There is another fine example of this in Freud's famous remark about psychoanalysis and the third personal explanatory stance that seems to encourage persons to adopt toward their own motivations. The remark is in effect to confirm the unavoidability of the distinction we've been discussing if one is actually to take up the position of, as we say, leading their own life. Freud's phrase was, what was it, or it, should become I, or ego, as the purpose or the endpoint of therapy. The subject evaluation of herself and of what attitude should be taken up toward herself and others in one such I or ego is the goal of therapy. Something is going wrong, haywire, if these determinations are the result of the it or it. Precisely what is going wrong when a subject experiences her own deeds as not hers, as the product of such psychological forces from the outside, outside her intentional control, is what psychoanalysis is trying to cure. I mean that this problem, as it displays itself, someone comes to Freud and says, I can't move my right arm. Freud does a battery of tests and says, there's nothing wrong with your right arm. You're not moving your right arm. For a reason you have no access to, let's find it. And then 13 years of therapy, $400,000 or $500,000 later, you discover if this therapy is successful what you were doing. For a reason. But a reason you had no access to by not being able to move your arm. That it was something you did. It's a wonderfully poetic, blunt phrase. Where there was it, there should be I. We can be confused about our status as objects and confused what are in fact manifestations of subjectivity for object disorders in a way that Freudian psychoanalysis helps to correct. Even if it turns out that there is no value in psychoanalysis, which I don't, as a matter of fact, I don't believe that. I think there is a lot of value in the theory and in the practice. Nevertheless, the general point is this insistence on the difference between said now very crudely, the in perspective and the I perspective. This is all compatible with the possible discovery of neurologically based dispositions to have certain attitudes or to act in certain ways. The point is just that no such discovery can of itself count as a reason to us to do or forbear from doing anything. Unless it does. Unless it counts as a reason rather than a fact. It cannot eliminate the agent's perspective whenever she has to decide what to believe or do. And it's also compatible with the fact that people are often self-deceived or grossly ignorant of why they do what they do and that they often fabulate afterwards in what we have come to call the process of rationalization. But there is simply no translation or bridge law that would get one qua agent from such facts to a claim like, well, they've just discovered at MIT that people often act without being able to explain or justify what they do, so the hell with it. I'm just going to steal Sam's idea and pass it off as my own. We know that people act that way, so I'm going to act that way. That's a terrible reason for acting that. It doesn't justify your acting that way at all. The claim is I can no more say it would be incoherent to say about an action in answer to the question, why did you do that? No reason. I just didn't. As it is impossible to say, incoherent to say, I think we all agree, in answer to the question, what caused the fire to start, there was no cause. It just started. That's impossible, incoherent. We can't say that. Something's going wrong at a deeply fundamental level. The same thing is going wrong at the same fundamental level, if we say, not only did not know why I did that then, but there was no reason for me to do it. For many philosophers, that's the distinction between what I do and what happens to me. What I do is subject to the why question. What happens to me, I got cancer. Why? Medical explanation follows. Not why in the sense of what reason did you have or getting cancer. This is all much clearer to us in social relations. None of us, I would venture to bet. When we offer what we take to be compelling moral reasons to a friend concerning an action the friend is contemplating, would be at all happy for our friend to respond with an explanation of why such reasons seem to us compelling based on some account of biology-based evolution. That's simply not an answer. It is in that context an evasion and we would feel right to be upset, to feel treated like an object by such a claim rather than as a co-equal subject. So if somebody behaved in a sexist manner in the department meeting and were called on it and the person responded by evolutionary biology it demonstrates this pattern of behavior between male and females is universal and hopelessly entwined with our biological and neurological structure. I don't think the offended party would find that a sufficient justification for what happened. The point I'm making is a simple one, that the autonomy or possible self-rule at issue in these discussions is not a metaphysical one but involves the practical autonomy of the normative. But it's apparently a point that needs to be made and I'll close with a recent extended look at an example. Now the example I'm going to give you is in a way of wonderfully ironic because you will remember five or six years ago there was a period where the Harvard biologist Mark Hauser caused a great stir with a book called Moral Minds How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. I keep using this example because there's no more perfect example of the confusion I'm trying to get at than this book. Now some of you also know that it turned out that all the research on birds on which this book was based or most of it was fraudulent. It was made up. It was discovered. It was fired. His career was ruined. I have no idea what happened to him. But the point he's making in this book is the same one made by people like friends to walls or Terry Sinovsky or many other people who venture out of the neurosciences into what they think of as the application of the neurosciences to normative matters. My former colleague Patricia Churchill is a big-case point. Dr. Hauser made it so that the logic of this issue remains the same even though Hauser turned out to be a fraud. Dr. Hauser made his reputation in animal communication working first with monkeys in Kenya and then with birds. His book is an almost perfect example of what goes wrong with some of the purported interdisciplinary work we are now encouraged to do. Hauser proposes that people are born with a quote moral grammar, as Chomskyan term is delivered, wired into their neural circuits by evolution and that this grammar generates instant moral judgments which in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in many situations are inaccessible to the conscious mind. Since Hauser argues that this moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal linguistic grammar proposed by Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language, he has to claim some sort of common Chomsky-like universes for all suitably evolved human animals capable of a moral sense. This he does with breathtaking sweep even while conceding some local variations of emphasis or local so-called parameters. Human behavior is said to be so tightly constrained by this hard wiring that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society. Do as you would be done for, care for children in the week, don't kill, avoid adultery and incest, don't cheat, steal or lie. These are his examples. Moreover he claims that the moral grammar now universal probably evolved in its final shape at a particular stage of the human path during the hunter-gatherer phase in Northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. Houser is willing to concede that from the point of view of the agent one often does not do what one is powerfully inclined to do, however quickly comes the inclination and that one can often do what one feels an aversion to do. But he nevertheless remains wedded to a view about what he calls the core or biological basis of our moral response and motivation. And he never concedes that the perspective of an agent indeed cannot but be that of a practical reasoner, not an animal differential responder. Animals of course act for reasons. An animal takes feeling fear or reason to flee or fight, but not reasons as such as deliberative considerations that may be acted on or not depending on the justificatory force the compellingness and persuasiveness of the reason. One of the great literature from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Henry James is not just about moral conflict and tragic dilemmas, but concerns the extreme difficulty of moral interpretation about which more in a minute that is correctly interpreting or describing what is going on. Not so easy. Only the hopelessly Jejun assumptions operative here about what the moral point of view consists in could allow Houser to give ideas about moral universals and their relation to evolutionary fitness. I mean, if Houser is a fraud then you can pick any recent book by Steven Pinker and you'll get the same. I'm looking for a polite word for pseudo philosophy. So in Henry James' novel Washington Square a father, a widower forbids future contact between his shy and not his daughter and a young suitor. And James confronts us with a number of interpretive possibilities. Is he protecting his daughter from a fortune hunter? Or does he have some important stake in continuing to infantilize his daughter? Is he romantically jealous of the suitor? Thus revealing that his daughter has become a kind of white substitute. Might he simply be reluctant to give up his companion afraid of loneliness? Is he simply attirent able to accept any challenge to his authority and rule over his household? He is in fact such attirent and the situation in the novel is so complicated because all these possibilities are plausible explanations and they could all be true. To add to the complication the suitor is a fortune hunter but it remains very hard to know just how that fact is relevant to the father's conduct. But it looks to be very unlikely that he has allowed intention simply to protect his daughter is fully true and it's quite possible that he has some sense that any one of the other possibilities might more correctly describe what he's after. But it would not be correct simply to say that he knows he is motivated by something other than his professed commitment and that he is hiding them from himself. The situation is far too unstable, complex and subjected to many various interpretations for that to be the right thing to say. We, and more interestingly the father himself will not know what you to settle on until we and he come to learn much else about what he does in this and other situations and even then the matter will remain quite difficult. So the very issue of the proper description of the actions taken before we worry about their motivation can be and very often is great works of literature endlessly complex and unstable for the figures involved for the father in this case. So the idea that there is a single morally relevant universal grammar of responsiveness working through the father looks to be the height of to say the least simplification. What really takes one's breath away though is the claim that we are hardwired with moral universals. Do as you would be done to care for children in the week and so forth. This banal list of modern Christian humanist values was written by a Harvard professor in a contemporary world still plagued by children sold into slavery by parents who take themselves to be entitled to do so by the acceptability of burning to death childless wives, by guilt free spousal abuse by the morally required murder of sisters and daughters who have been raped by morally sanctioned ethnic cleansing undertaken by those who take themselves to be entitled to do so and one can go on and on. Now again, Howzer concedes what he calls variations and local parameters but he thinks the essential picture of our moral nature and these moral universals has now come into focus and this is a long story going back to people like Piaget it's not it's picked on Howzer because he seemed to be a fraud he turned out to be a fraud so I don't want to give him up. At one point where he deals most directly with the problem of very wide variations in moral intuition in a discussion of evidence brought against claims of moral universals by the philosopher Jesse Prince, graduate of the Chicago philosophy department by the way, it becomes increasingly unclear what would count for Howzer as any sort of empirical disconfirmation of his basic claim here is the argument he gives against Howzer Prince, for example chops out many examples of close relatives having sex of individuals killing each other with glee and of peaceful societies lacking dominance hierarchies these are indeed interesting cases but they are either irrelevant or insufficiently explained with respect to the nativist position they may be irrelevant in the same way that it's irrelevant to cite Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi as counter examples to the Hobbesian characterization that we are all brutish, nasty and short sick this is a quote from him what Hobbes meant that we were all brutal, nasty and little people he leaves out the part about life being short there's already a sign there something's going wrong with this guy's intelligence but Prince is not cited in the article that Howzer is referring to one or two individuals but whole societies existing over many generations what could possibly count as counter examples to Howzer's theory except voluminous evidence is that so-called trotted out by Prince at least Chomsky's theory is open to possible disconfirmation as the recent discussion and then failure about the putative absence of recursion in the Peral language studied in Brazil by Dan Everett seemed for a few months to make clear since it's been thoroughly demolished by the great pack of Chomsky defenders at every major university in the world but it turned out to be right that he was wrong about this being a counter example to Chomsky but Howzer seems but they did the fight, they argued they produced the evidence Howzer seems to have arbitrarily insulated himself and there's no need to appeal only to contemporary evidence well over 1500 years ago the Greek historian Herodotus reported with amazement about cultures where it was considered morally abhorrent to bury or burn one's dead relatives rather than eat them and the many others where nothing could be imagined more abhorrent than eating your dead relatives if we are really talking about interdisciplinary collaboration on say moral universals perhaps the first most reasonable suggestion would be that Howzer spent a quiet Sunday with Herodotus and Henry James that's not what people usually have in mind when they encourage cooperation between contemporary science and the humanities as noted at the outset they usually mean something like applying the exciting new discoveries to that area of the academy that does not seem to ever make any progress I want to say that this attitude reveals a profound confusion about the humanities from the outset reveals especially a lack of appreciation for the permanently unsettled and irreducibly normative nature of much of the humanities so some final remarks the curriculum of the first universities formed in the 11th and 12th centuries in Europe simply reflected the organization of what was known and considered important at the time the trivium had priority grammar, logic and rhetoric but all the seven liberal arts were eventually taught those three plus arithmetic, geometry astronomy and music theory and soon thereafter the Aristotelian branches of philosophy physics, metaphysics and moral philosophy were also included there was no more deep rationale for this structure than there is in universities today animal husbandry and criminal science can be taught along with courses on 12th century Baghdad the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre and hip-hop music nothing about this is surprising or alarming for one thing the tertiary educational system in the US cannot be compared with Europe's or anyone else's it's extraordinarily very good there are well over 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the United States more than 18 million students and 1 million faculty members there are about 1200 community colleges in this number and they enroll by far the highest number of these students we also need to remember that most students in American colleges and universities concentrate their study in what is now by far the largest major business programs in most of this system there are no real controversy about disciplinary problems they each do simply what they do as the kind of university or community college there are but universities especially the elite and so world historically expensive private research universities and elite liberal arts colleges have to stand for something must propose an ideal of the well educated person the major site of a crisis in this attempt I've been suggesting lies in how universities propose to organize studies of meaning and value enterprises which do not lend themselves to machine graded multiple choice tests and which offer no clear criteria for when a person might have become a better reader interpreter or reflective evaluator all of this becomes even more complicated when universities begin to study and require study of vernacular literature contemporary philosophers and paintings more complicated still when post 60's the study of popular culture was added along with familiarization courses designed to introduce a multicultural appreciation of other civilizations and traditions again the question how one might demonstrate the right level of appropriate appreciation is a very difficult one given that by comparison with the natural and money of the social sciences the humanities and the interpretive social sciences cannot test improvements in the understanding of such things clearly or at least clearly enough that 40 or 50 thousand dollar a year tuition might well make tempting especially when John or Jane gets a C in 18th century painting complicating his or her chances for dental school Facilities might lose confidence in their ability to respond to such concerns and so be susceptible to might even want to embrace the forms of the phony interdisciplinarity I've been discussing this is especially the case in the application much more limited for humanities faculty than any other faculty for research grants the kind that can get you an extra year of leave or a full year of leave unless you have a couple of semesters or a couple of quarters in the bank it's almost impossible to get those except from Guggenheim and the NEH unless you apply for some hybrid that has to do with the new the new achievements of the sciences does this mean I'm encouraging a return to traditional disciplinarity or even deep mutually exclusive disciplinary not at all I agree that the disciplinary boundaries as they're currently drawn can be pretty arbitrary and pretty stifling but realizing this and being open to non-traditional ways of organizing research and thinking about something must always be careful about the greatest current danger to a thriving disciplinary atmosphere of interdisciplinarity the temptation to reductive disciplinarity genuine interdisciplinarity I would suggest is best thought of as always ad hoc never programmatic there have to be programmatic structures that allow for it and that even grant degrees in it and so grants it academic credibility there must be programs that make available advice and an evaluation by faculty who have some experience in what is required for doing genuine interdisciplinary research well and any genuine interdisciplinarity has to be based on deep disciplinary training all that means is that one had better know what one's talking about have studied an issue in depth in a concentrated way the ways that a discipline teaches and nothing should be off the table even given my suspicions about if someone thinks a game theoretic analysis can help us understand what's going on with the characters of Pride and Prejudice all the better let them try typically in this example in a story a couple of years ago by the New York Times about a UCLA political science professor who claimed to do just that with great results the result is this when Lady Catherine de Bourg tries to get Elizabeth to promise not to marry Mr. Darcy and she refuses and Lady de Bourg reports this to Darcy he thereby learns that she is still interested and so it helps Elizabeth plans Elizabeth has succeeded in thinking strategically that is the result is something any 8th grade boy or girl with half a wooden brain can't see without learning anything from Faun Neumann and there will be times when the study of a complex problem is not suited even for interdisciplinary approaches when the form of the question asked is so novel that it cannot be asked inside of or in any combination of traditional disciplines that project would be genuine transdisciplinary activity well as Mark was saying my own meager attempts in this regard have to do with the bearings of literature, painting and especially film on philosophy I propose once that we consider commercially produced film as artworks to be concerned with a modality of collective self-knowledge in historical time a modality that is both distinct and indispensable what is distinctive about such a modality is quite complicated as complicated as the logical peculiarities of self-knowledge and self-much less collective self-knowledge but the form of collectively expressed self-knowledge at issue in film is not propositional or even discursive it seems closer to something like a picture of ourselves pictorial intelligibility available whenever we understand whatever is appropriate to understanding Raphael, Sistine, Madonna or Manet's Olympia whatever mistake we make when we understand the Raphael as a great picture of what Mary must have looked like or when we complain about the Olympia that she looks like a cutout pasted onto the canvas is of the same order of mistake we make when we understand John Ford's films to be about how Cowboys treated Indians moreover the self-knowledge is not first otherwise available, formulatable in propositions and then merely represented or expressed in a sensible medium it's realized in film made available to us as what it is through the medium and unavailable in any other way. Films should not be understood as they regularly are when they are used in classrooms as just illustrations of philosophical or sociological points or as pedagogical aids to interest students or to explain things to them these are ways of rendering matters intelligible that can be rendered intelligible in no other way and matters we need deeply to have rendered intelligible thanks for your attention I have few minutes yet I thought that was terrific I'm not sure I understood it all in this very room we've heard about an attempt to deal with the issue of free will and I gather you believe strongly in free will but science is examining this and I wonder if you have any thoughts about that kind of science Should I go back and put it three chairs for science and technology this might not sound like a satisfying answer but the way that problem is traditionally posed is spontaneous uncaused initiation of bodily movement possible or not seems to me fraught with so many conceptual confusions about freedom that it's not the right way to pose the question so neither free will nor unfree will when posed in those terms the basic idea is that where what we care about when we care about freedom is that in the actions that we produce we somehow see ourselves in them we understand them as reflections of what we not only what we do but what we regard as proper to do as a result of the liberation by us that would eventually terminate a view of freedom as a kind of self-knowledge what we really care about is not what causal mechanisms are going on producing it but whether we understand what we produce in the world the bodily movements and effects of those bodily movements as ours and that means having a kind of understanding of them so a factory worker might go to work every day voluntarily and might do every aspect of the task he or she is required to do in the factory voluntarily but be in a way so completely constrained by the necessities of the form of life that that person has grown up in that there's no other alternative than that particular job and what we care about, what we care about freedom I think is that the person is not doing what the person would have done were the action to be the result of the person's own deliberative exercise so I know that people think punishment and responsibility depend essentially on establishing a could have done otherwise sense of freedom I don't I think there are other ways of thinking about why we punish people and hold them to account for doing what they did then to be committed to having to prove a could have done otherwise conception of freedom and that the spontaneous initiation of bodily movement there is no such spontaneous initiation of bodily movement but we're free from the sense in which we're saddled with as that conception of freedom but that's like a five seminar kind of issues but I reject the terms of the way the question is posed following on that wouldn't somebody like your former colleague Patricia in Churchland say all of that is actually a grand delusion that there is this sense that evolution has created us as creatures that have this sort of delusion that can give reasons to each other and have possibility that actually has an evolutionary basis to do that explicable to really has a by a lot of explanation or can come sociology etc and so what's your counter argument to same kind of response I'm perfectly happy if our dispositions to regard each other as interacting agents is governed by a demand to give each other reasons and to demand them from others that that's all a product of a kind of evolutionary selection process that allows for a kind of social stability and peace that's not what interests me what interests me are the quality of the reasons and there's nothing that Pat has ever written that I know I haven't seen the newest book on ethics but I don't have a lot of hope for it because I used to have these conversations with her I really want to understand this not whether the actual practice is a delusion it doesn't matter if it's a delusion or if it isn't we need from other people whose actions stop us from doing what we would otherwise have been able to do reasons and what we're concerned with is not whether they come up with the reasons themselves but whether they're good reasons that's what we should be talking about I like your your liking the colonization of the neuropsychology into the humanities I'd like you to hear how you would imagine a real interdisciplinary movement between neuropsychology and the humanities you mentioned Proust what would that look like how would that manifest itself? I mean you have me here because I am not I make no pretension to knowing enough about current research in the neuroscience but the one example I gave in the paper James novel and the enormous difficulty of fine grained interpretations of what other people are doing in very complicated situations where they're multiply motivated and the descriptions of their motivations are very fine grained and difficult to give I just think it would be very very interesting to know neurologically how we do that I mean again there's separate questions these are all tremendously fascinating questions but I don't think anything about the neurology and settled the question of why the father prevented his daughter from seeing the suitor it's just the question itself I concede immediately it's intensely fascinating about how such multiple layers of meaning can be held in mind at the same time by a sophisticated reader of the novel and weighed and balanced as the person reads further along it would just be fascinating to know how that's done and it might be the case that knowing how it's done we might learn something more about the interpretive possibilities that we haven't seen but I don't know enough about how we would even begin to do the neuroscience about our interpretive capacities to know what a result would look like that might say we also systematically miss things that if we were more sophisticated about how the brain works we might be able to know that that would just be a guess it's just intensely interesting neuroscience is doing that, it's fantastic but there's no reason for it to be fantastic in the way that it is being built and marketed as it's fantastic in itself I mean most of the neuroscientists that I know when I was at UCSD were asked about Pat's work said I don't understand anything I'm a neuroscientist I just like doing neuroscience and I don't like my results being reported as if there were breakthroughs in other fields but I wouldn't deny that it's just that the level of the example we were just talking about the level of responsiveness in a human self understanding is so enormously complicated and verbal and expressible in language there seems that some quantitative point is a qualitative there's a qualitative difference and the humanism of Freud's approach is to actually extend the range of psychological explanation beyond what had been set so that there are instances that look like organic disturbances that Freud thought he was able to demonstrate are actually motivated action I mean motivated irrationality but that there were ways of discovering what the person was trying to do by obsessively repeating an action over and over again that preserved some sense of the person's subjectivity or humanity that this was really still an action not a mere event in space and time and I perfectly concede that there could be some neurological account of why the whole process of having access to your reasons breaks down and there could be even some neurological explanation of how therapy over a long period of time reconnects you to them that something happens in the brain as a result of therapy that allows an access to why you're obsessively repeating dating the same woman or something like that whatever it is, whatever the neurosis is over and over again the actual analysis might help us characterize better but the actual preservation of the notion of the deed as an action that it has a reason behind it that the person simply has lost touch with that I wouldn't want to give up what a Freud's great insights