Self delusions: does morality require a soul? - Book Review

The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them, by Owen Flanagan, New York: Basic Books, 364 pages, $27.50

HUMANISTS HAVE ALWAYS eyed science a bit warily. Just over a century after the 1687 publication of Newton's Principia, we find Wordsworth complaining, "Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--/We murder to dissect." His Romantic fellow traveler Keats, disturbed that science had included even the rainbow in "the dull catalogue of common things," lamented that physics and philosophy would "clip an Angel's wings,/Conquer all mysteries by rule and line ..."

Such concerns now seem a bit quaint: Few of us think rainbows any less pretty for being understood as refracted light. But if optics has lost its terrors, many remain uneasy when we begin to focus the scientific lens on ourselves. Do physics, neurology, and biochemistry leave any room for theology and spirituality? Can we continue to think of ourselves as beings endowed with free will and distinguished from the rest of the animal world by our immortal souls?

Well, no, we can't, for reasons laid out with brutal precision in Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul Flanagan, who holds professorships at Duke University in philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, brings all three disciplines to bear in a tightly argued quest for rapprochement between the "manifest image" of the self inherited from millennia of philosophy and the very different image presented by contemporary philosophy and neuroscience. As scientists continue to confirm that human beings are just an especially clever species of animal, philosophers have hammered away at the old picture of the mind as an immaterial, unconstrained substance for which the body is merely a fleshy garment.

On the scientific front, souls seem increasingly in danger of being banished to the trash heap of redundant hypotheses. The problems on the philosophical end are, in a sense, still more disturbing to the conventional picture, because they go to the conceptual root of the manifest image. Many philosophers now believe that radical free will or fixed "true selves" are incoherent concepts.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the tension between the two worldviews presents a problem only for religious believers. As Flanagan notes, the manifest image has so permeated Western culture that even avowed secularists are likely to have at least implicitly adopted parts of it. Core tenets of liberalism, such as the emphasis on free, autonomous choice and individual rights, were originally closely tied to the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the individual soul and still bear the mark of that origin. Indeed, in a thoroughly secular age, the main challenge of Flanagan's book is really directed at people who trace their political ideology to the Enlightenment's classical liberal tradition.

Fragments of the manifest image show up in the most unlikely places. The aggressively atheistic Ayn Rand grounded her theory of enlightened self-interest on the premise that there's something uniquely rational about making decisions on the basis of one's interests over the course of an entire lifetime. That position becomes more difficult to sustain when we cannot appeal to a transcendent permanent "self," a subject of experience who remains "the same person" from childhood through old age. We can't identify that self with the contents of the mind or any specific personality traits, since those are always subject to change. But something more general, such as formal or structural features of the mind, would leave nothing to distinguish one person's self or soul from another's.

Flanagan endorses the view that there is no "further fact" of personal identity. When you strip away all of a person's experiences, memories, thoughts, and dispositions, there is no "self" left over who has all these things: The person just is these things. Yet Flanagan underplays the consequences of adopting this view. Among other things, it means that you may not have any reason either to care about the welfare of your future self or to feel bound by contracts or agreements made by your past self. Our inclination now is to create those reasons, partly out of a desire to situate ourselves in some coherent life narrative, but probably also because the idea of the persisting self or soul continues to influence the way we conceive ourselves. Whether that conception and the reasons it generates will outlast the manifest image remains to be seen.

The human capacity for free choice is another cornerstone of liberal thought that seems threatened by a thoroughly naturalized conception of persons. Real choices are supposed to be undetermined by what came before. When I make a genuinely free decision, no set of antecedent causes predetermines what I must do. But an exercise of free will is also supposed to be something that the agent does, not merely something that happens. It would not count as an act of free will if some nondeterministic quantum fluctuation in my brain caused me to do good rather than evil. These two conditions--indeterminacy and authorship--together define free will as traditionally conceived; but as Flanagan observes, they are mutually incompatible. To the extent that my actions are undetermined--that I could have turned right just as easily as left--they are not bound to any of my own past mental states. To the extent that my own experience and reasoning do explain my actions, those actions are determined and, therefore, not "free" in the radical sense.