Naturalism.org

As a longtime fan of Stephen Jay Gould, I could hardly resist attending his lecture on immortality at the Harvard Divinity School. (The lecture is a semi-annual affair, in which luminaries from various disciplines are invited to address the ever-popular topic of our prospects after death. Previous speakers have included William James and Josiah Royce.) What would the eminent geologist and neo-Darwinian venture to say on a topic so far outside his ordinarily naturalistic concerns?

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As I began reading Corliss Lamont's The Philosophy of Humanism, I was pleased to see his use of the the term "naturalistic". At the same time I wondered just how far he would extend this characterization. Would he balk, as so many others have, at an understanding of mankind as a completely natural creature, and reserve for us some special status? Or would he not flinch, and so conclude that even our highest capacities are explicable, at least in principle, by scientific generalizations?

As several contributions to this volume make clear, the problem of free will engages us deeply because it seems central to our conception of who we are, our place in the world, and our moral intuitions.

Are we free agents? Can we be morally responsible for what we do? Philosophers distinguish these questions and have all the answers. Some say YES and YES (we are fully free, and wholly morally responsible for what we do). Others say YES and NO (certainly we are free agents - but we cannot be ultimately responsible for what we do). A third group says NO and NO (we are not free agents at all; a fortiori we cannot be morally responsible). A strange minority says NO and YES (we can be morally responsible for what we do even though we are not free agents).

Ordinarily, most of us don't consider the extent to which we are chemical creatures, which is probably as it should be. However, the recent influx of heroin into Massachusetts is a pointed reminder of our vulnerability to the addictive power of opiates. A number of unfortunate individuals, some of them adolescents, have received a crash course in the neurobiology of dependence, and its consequences aren't pretty.

Marijuana and Teens

Recent surveys, both in Canada and the US, have documented a dramatic rise in marijuana use among adolescents since 1992. This increase has caused much official consternation, and after four years of relative silence on the issue the Clinton administration is mounting a new, 195 million dollar media campaign against drugs, with adolescent marijuana use a major focus.

Neural Materialism

Ordinarily, we don’t suppose that people are to blame for their illnesses. That is, prior to discovery, many diseases develop independently of what the sick person does or thinks. This is why the disease model of addiction, widely espoused in the therapeutic community, is so controversial. Commonsense suggests that a person’s choice to start using an addictive substance is often voluntary, and often made with the knowledge, either vague or specific, of the risks of getting hooked.

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