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Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract
Social Research, Winter, 2000 by Strachan Donnelley
This is not to say that Mayr's evolutionary perspectives escape all philosophical problems and solve all riddles. How to think together natural reality, human freedom, and responsibility continues to plague philosophers and has historically prompted speculative philosophical flights that Mayr, the philosophical naturalist, dismisses. Here he may remain in a genuine philosophical aporia. As a naturalist and avowed materialist, he has an interesting new matter on his hands: "informational" DNA. Whether or not this new form of matter and the natural world of which it is a part can support a philosophical interpretation of genuine, even if circumscribed, human freedom and responsibility and escape determinism is an open question. But at least Mayr has significantly refocused the terms of the argument and the frame of thinking from which we can retackle the issue. This is the philosophical bequest of the Darwinian revolution, as interpreted by Mayr. The demise of cosmic teleology, classical determinism, and essentialism and its replacement by populational, evolutionary, and ecological thinking offers a new framework and opportunity for reapproaching the question of human freedom and responsibility.
Isaiah Berlin
It is with the questions of free will (choice) and human responsibility that we can usefully turn to Isaiah Berlin. Throughout his long intellectual career, Berlin was adamant that unless we can save genuine, if circumscribed, freedom of choice and human responsibility from the clutches of universal determinism (of whatever sort), then logically we must radically revise our understanding of the human, cultural, and moral landscape (Berlin, 1969:14 ff., 77 ff.). In everyday life, however, no one does this, which is evidence that in fact or practice, no one--or very few-genuinely believes in determinism. Berlin does not set out to prove conclusively ("for certain") that determinism is false metaphysically or ontologically (he sees no a priori philosophically or epistemologically legitimate way to do this), but he suspects and is "morally" convinced that the thesis of strict determinism--that antecedents totally determine consequents, with no room for the spontaneity or responsibility of free choice (free will)--is a concatenation of overweening scientific, philosophical, and theological thinkers or ideologues. It is not a thesis of ordinary human life and everyday human beings--though the problem of free will is a genuine philosophical, perhaps unresolvable puzzle that recurrently plagues "the best and the brightest," including Berlin himself.
Berlin firmly takes his philosophical stand in everyday life and with ordinary people and views the human, cultural, and moral landscape from this worldly vantage point, which throws an interesting light on major and variously motivated thinkers and on the cultural history of the Western tradition (1969: 69, 87 ff.). Berlin, like Mayr, is an empirical thinker: he will accept only the evidence of recurrent human experience and reflection. He casts a skeptical, suspicious, yet often generous and critically appreciative eye on all those great (and small) thinkers, systematic or not, who invariably "wildly exaggerate" and distort their genuine insights into human life. Such wild exaggeration strikes Berlin as a characteristic feature of the human landscape, itself worthy of critical interpretation.
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