Are We Beyond Good and Evil?

Abstract

In this essay, we criticize the tacit radical psychological materialist reduction of mental to brain behavior and the consequent ‘elimination’ of ethical categories from ‘scientific’ discourse. Our argument, following Wittgenstein, is that we do not know that a connection exists—causal or otherwise—between physical/brain and mental processes. Following Chomsky, we may never know whether it exists, because there is a crucial explanatory gap between, on the one hand, neuroscientific and genetic accounts of brain and human biology, and, on the other, our understanding of human action, ranging from simple motor functioning (like picking up a pencil) to moral deliberation. This is a gap that contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology have a hard time recognizing, much less overcoming. And, despite longstanding optimistic claims to the contrary, we cannot know at this time whether it will ever be overcome. We conclude that in order for moral deliberation and action to exist at all, brains and genes are necessary but not sufficient. We also require a language community from which ethical categories derive their meanings, a body with eyes, ears and limbs (as well as a brain), and a culture—a social environment (Umwelt) that interprets and constrains our choices of actions. We can never go ‘beyond good and evil’ because good and evil are social constructions, and, consequently,