Pluralism and Ambivalence in the Evolution of Morality

Much good work has been done on the evolution of human morality by focusing on how “selfish genes” can give rise to altruistic human beings. A richer research program is needed, however, to take into account the ambivalence of naturally evolved biopsychological motivators and the historical pluralism of human morality in religious systems. Such a program is described here. A first step is to distinguish the ultimate cause of natural selection from proximate causes that are the results of natural selection. Next, some proximate causes are suggested as possible conditions of biological and emotional valuing as well as of customary social morality and individual rational ethical thought. Finally, different moral perspectives of Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity are briefly presented in order to illustrate how one might inquire about the selection of a variety of biopsychological and cultural proximate causes that enable the evolution of a plurality of religious moral systems.     

PSYCHOANALYTICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY: Death in the afternoon

One afternoon, a patient who had been in three-times-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy for over fi ve years with the author left the offi ce after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile away, and sat down facing an oncoming train. Her suicide occurred a little over a year after 19 hijackers took over four passenger airplanes and fl ew two of them into the World Trade Center, and during the period of the massive buildup for a pre-emptive war with Iraq. This paper explores the very personal impact of these interlocking events of personal, political, and state-sponsored terrorism on the author. Interweaving the patient's and the author's personal struggle with the patient's overwhelming destructiveness-and how it ultimately failed-with the inability to stop the war despite the unprecedented mobilization of voices for peace across the world, it is a journey through the shattering impact of violence into the tentative discovery of a sustaining vision of hope. It explores the theme of terrorism, both personal and political, as a theater of violence designed to create maximum impact, and how fantasies of redemption, fueled and blinded by righteous certainty, can transmute into acts of breathtaking violence, and fi nd justifi cation in their own mad logic. Through the elaboration of the patient's story and its impact on the author, she offers a very personal attempt to understand and reckon with violence and destructiveness as manifested in these different forms, to grasp how openings of hope and new creative possibility are often followed by a violent regressive backlash, and to fi nd a way to survive them without losing heart for the work.     

Was Thomas Aquinas a Sociobiologist? Thomistic Natural Law,Rational Goods,and Sociobiology

Abstract. Traditional Darwinian theory presents two difficulties for Thomistic natural‐law morality: relativism and essentialism. The sociobiology of E. O. Wilson seems to refute the idea of evolutionary relativism. Larry Arnhart has argued that Wilson's views on sociobiology can provide a scientific framework for Thomistic natural‐law theory. However, in his attempt to reconcile Aquinas's views with Wilson's sociobiology, Arnhart fails to address a critical feature of Aquinas's ethics: the role of rational goods in natural law. Arnhart limits Aquinas's understanding of rationality to the Humean notion of economic rationality–that “reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.” On Aquinas's view, rationality discovers goods that transcend the merely biological, viz., the pursuit of truth, virtue, and God. I believe that Aquinas's natural‐law morality is consistent with some accounts of sociobiology but not the more ontologically reductionist versions like the one presented by Wilson and defended by Arnhart. Moreover, Aquinas's normative account of rationality is successful in refuting the challenges of evolutionary relativism as well as the reductionism found in most sociobiological approaches to ethics.     

Caring for Nature: From Fact to Value, from Respect to Reverence

Abstract. Despite the classical prohibition of moving from fact to value, encounter with the biodiversity and plenitude of being in evolutionary natural history moves us to respect life, even to reverence it. Darwinian accounts are value‐laden and necessary for understanding life at the same time that Darwinian theory fails to provide sufficient cause for the historically developing diversity and increasing complexity on Earth. Earth is a providing ground; matter and energy on Earth support life, but distinctive to life is information coded in the genetic molecules that superintends this matter‐energy. Life is generated and regenerated in struggle, persists in its perishing. Such life is also a gift; nature is grace. Biologists and theologians join in celebrating and conserving the genesis on Earth, awed in their encounter with this creativity that characterizes our home planet.     

Toleration vs. Doctrinal Evil in Our Time

Our time is characterized by what seems like an unprecedented process of intense global homogenization. This reality provides the context for exploring the nature and value of toleration. Hence, this essay is meant primarily as a contribution to international ethics rather than political philosophy. It is argued that because of the non-eliminability of differences in the world we should not even hope that there can be only one global religion or ideology. Further exploration exposes conceptual affinity between the concepts of intolerance, ideology, and doctrinal evil. The last concept is developed in contrast to pure evil and average evil, and under the assumption of the metaphysical necessity of free will. Doctrinal evil is found to represent the main source of intolerance as a result of a mechanism that tends to confuse doctrinal evil (or the competing conceptions of the good) with pure evil. This connection between doctrinal evil and pure evil provides ideologies with their forcefulness. Tolerance cannot be properly understood in terms of a simple opposition to intolerance, however. Tolerance emerges as a sort of vigilance, conscientiousness, and non-negligence based not on a supposedly correct interpretation of the good, but rather on the acceptance of the fallibility of any such attempted definition. Conversely, the principal evil in doctrinal evil is found in arrogance that accompanies the intolerance-inducing irresponsible thoughtlessness. With this conceptual topology in mind the paper also addresses questions regarding religious tolerance, the ideology of human rights and democracy, the right to self-defense, ways to face evil, the dialectics of using old names for novel evils, and related issues. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

论“自然剃刀”

直觉地看 ,生态伦理学的基本原则应该是 ,我们的行为应该有利于或无害于生态系统。然而 ,这个原则却在认识论和价值论上都存在着困难 ,首先 ,我们无法在原则上知道我们的行为是否有利或无害于生态系统 ,其次 ,我们不能保证我们的生态学知识可以充分地推出这个积极的原则。因此 ,“自然剃刀”的消极原则是 :如无必要 ,不应该增加对生态系统的人为干预。     

SOME THOUGHTS ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ETHICS

The author attempts to establish a framework for understanding the contribution of psychoanalysis to ethics through examining the work of certain philosophers, especially Kant. After reviewing the development of Freudian thought and going beyond the ‘psychoanalysis and/or psychiatry?’ question, he asserts that the space of the psychoanalytical cure revolves around an ethical problem. Thus, the limits of analysis should be determined by the subject's capacity for developing a structure of belief in the unconscious, with the concomitant capacity to go beyond equivocation in respect of an ethical conflict that underlies all cases where psychical suffering is manifested. Indeed, only human beings are called upon to deal with an ethical paradox “equally a logical one”which could be stated thus: there is Good in Evil and Evil in Good. This ethical paradox is the consequence of human subjection to the constituent laws of the Oedipus complex, which distances the human being, in his/her dealings with Evil and with Good, from any naturalist stance. In respect of the cure, then, we must take into account that Evil does not proceed from any particular drive‐based characteristic, but is rather the expression of specific subjection to an unconscious Other, towards which it directs its affects. Finally, the author proposes a principle that emerges from the preceding discussion: let us not impute to or place in the Other our own subjective splitting or pain at existing.     

Response to My Critics

My critics make serious and sensible points, all of which are undoubtedly true but not all of which I feel that I can accept.     

“桑美”台风下受创学生的特质应对方式对自杀态度的影响

为了探讨自然灾害事件下受创学生的特质应对方式对自杀态度的影响,采用创伤后症状反应问卷、特质应对方式问卷和自杀态度问卷对“桑美”台风重灾区的650名中小学生进行了测查,结果表明：（1）学生的创伤后症状反应与自杀态度有着显著的相关;（2）特质应对方式对创伤后症状反应与自杀态度关系的调节效应不显著。结果支持了应对的关联模式,应对具有情境化特点。