“Real autonomy, real freedom, requires the chooser be somehow suspended, isolated from the push and pull of…causes, so that when decisions are made, nothing causes them except you!”.
New York Times regular David Brooks expresses this view perfectly, writing in his May 15, 2004 column, “Columbine: Parents of a Killer,” that
“My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior.”
By claiming Klebold was self-initiating, Brooks isolates Klebold from the causal push and pull of school and parents, disconnecting him from the world so that he can count as a “real” moral agent. Brooks seems to think that Klebold’s choices are morally condemnable only if he wasn’t determined to make them. But as Dennett, myself, and others continue to point out, such supernatural moral levitation isn’t in the least necessary to sustain judgments of right and wrong, or to justify holding persons responsible. Causal determinism – being fully caused to be who you are, and do what you do – isn’t a threat to moral agency, although it undermines certain justifications for punishment which Brooks and other conservatives may not want to give up.”
FmH readers will recall I reacted similarly to the Brooks column when it came out, albeit far less eloquently and not couched in the formal language of moral philosophy. Of course, the issue of whether moral agency and causal determinism are opposed informs our purview on the Abu Ghraib torturers as well, as I have tried to suggest in my agonizing over the issue.
give a naturalistic account of ethics. Not just a science-based description of
what we do and think and feel that we ought to do, but in some sense a
justification of these feelings of ought-ness or morality. One way to do this —
a way suggested by the late John Mackie and supported by (among others)
myself — is to argue for some kind of ethical non-realism. We deny that there
are really ethical facts – we argue that, in some sense, a claim like “rape is
wrong” is a fiction (perhaps a very useful fiction) in a way that a claim like
“roses smell nice” is not. Casebeer will have none of this. Arguing from what
he claims is an updated version of the theory of the great Greek philosopher
Aristotle, using the findings of modern evolutionary biology, Casebeer thinks
that he can go all of the way and provide a full-blooded, biology-based — that
is, naturalistic — account of morality.” Human Nature
