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Home Center for Naturalism
Applied Naturalism
Spirituality
Philosophy
Personal and Social Consequences of Naturalism Limits
and connection: A naturalistic view of yourself places you completely and
irrevocably in the physical world, a fully-connected, card-carrying participant in the
unfolding of the material universe. Your life is bounded by birth and death, your
consciousness solely the product of your brain, your will the product of thousands of
influences, some traceable to the long natural history of our evolution. If your limits
are made clear under naturalism, so too is your lineage. The first might keep you humble,
the second might give you a sense of place as unbounded as the universe described by
science. See the Spirituality page for more on this. Pride
and shame: Seeing that your behavior arises on its own - out of your
particular biologically given traits and your particular career through life, not from a
non-material controlling self - might pry you loose from excessive pride and shame. Your
successes resulted from personal characteristics given to you in their entirety by nature
and nurture, combined with circumstances in which you could express your talents.
Likewise, your failures arose not from some weakness of will that could have been
otherwise, but out of conditions which can be understood as the natural unfolding of
physical and psychological processes. Anyone with the same internal and external
circumstances would have done as well, or as badly. Understanding this won’t change
the fact that you enjoy success and regret failure, but it may loosen the grip of ego and
ease the burden of self-blame. Blame
and envy: Just as your own behavior can be understood as the natural
unfolding of physical and psychological processes, so can the behavior of others, and your
attitudes toward them might change in the light of this understanding. Seeing exactly how
someone got to be the way they are, and knowing that their virtues and faults arise out of
circumstances, not from an autonomous, non-physical agent, can help to reduce the time
spent on unproductive blaming and envy. The
threat of fatalism: If you don't have
contra-causal free will, what about fatalism?
See The Flaw of Fatalism to see why giving up free will need not, and usually cannot, lead to a fatalistic passivity.
For reassurances about other worries that arise when
considering naturalism, see
here.
Behavioral Health: Mental illness, addiction, obesity, and
other behavioral disorders are too often misunderstood
as failures of will. Instead, we can understand
dysfunctional behavior as
fully caused by the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. This
understanding reduces the stigma associated with behavioral disorders,
while pointing the way toward effective treatment.
Naturalism supports the development of
psychotherapeutic and self-change techniques that
apply a causal view of behavior. Properly presented,
challenging conventional wisdom about the self and free will
is a powerful means to increase life
satisfaction and deepen interpersonal relationships. See
Addiction and Behavioral Health. Punishment:
Since the retributive justification for punishment is based largely on the
notion that behavior is originated by a causally autonomous self, the motive to impose
such punishment may diminish once it is seen that such a self does not exist. In
particular, support may drop for punitive measures such as the death penalty or prison
sentences without rehabilitative amenities. More attention will be paid to the
conditions which create crime, and to approaches that redeem offenders instead of further
brutalizing them. See the
Criminal
Justice page. Social
Policies: If persons are not self-made, but entirely the product of
genetic and environmental conditions, this means that their virtues and faults are not a
matter of will or self-chosen character. Rather, individuals are shaped by circumstances that
can themselves be modified to produce people that are happier, more productive, more
creative, and less needy. The myth of ultimate self-determination (contra-causal
free will) blocks the
design of a more humane society by blaming persons for their shortcomings instead of
understanding the conditions that create them. Likewise, this myth touts material
success as the triumph of free will, so that it's
thought to be justifiably restricted to those who "deserve" to succeed.
Under naturalism, the allocation of resources is understood not to reflect what is deserved
on the basis of self-caused virtue,
but what is needed for each of us to live a desirable life. Therefore social policies will be encouraged which seek to
maximize the opportunities for each person's development, independent of differences in
inherited
talent or social status. See the
Social Justice page.
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