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As we learn more and more about the extent to which heredity equips people with personality, attitudes, and convictions, what happens to free will and human agency? Will this new understanding undermine, if not destroy, the possibility of holding people morally and legally accountable? In short, will science defeat free
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will?
These are the questions that eminent scholar James Q. Wilson is asking today. In 1993, when he published his widely acclaimed book The Moral Sense--in which he argued that an innate moral sense is powerfully shaped by our social relationships and interactions--many of today's insights into the biology of behavior were glimmers on the neuro-technological horizon.
At this event, he will discuss the implication of neuroscience's boldest claim: that it can explain everything about the human condition. Responding will be columnist David Brooks of the New York Times and AEI's Charles Murray and Sally Satel, M.D.
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9:45 a.m. |
Registration | |
| 10:00 | Presenter: | James Q. Wilson, Pepperdine University |
| Discussants: | David Brooks, New York Times | |
| Charles Murray, AEI | ||
| Sally Satel, M.D., AEI | ||
| Moderator: | Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI | |
| 12:00 p.m. | Adjournment |
American Enterprise Institute
WASHINGTON, APRIL 30, 2009--The age-old nature-versus-nurture debate may take a new turn as we learn more about how we are shaped by heredity and neurobiology. On April 24, AEI held a conference to explore the extent to which scientific advances inform our understanding of free will and the human condition.
AEI's Christina Hoff Sommers, who moderated the event, said that the findings of neuroscience are proving equally troublesome to both liberals and conservatives--to liberals because they challenge the idea that humans are the products of social construction and to conservatives because they challenge the notions of virtue, right and wrong, and individual responsibility. "Today's free will deniers and moral skeptics are marshaling evidence in the form of genes and neurotransmitters and enzymes," Sommers said. But will this evidence undermine our belief in free will?
Not according to eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson. Research has demonstrated that intelligence, personality, entrepreneurial ambition, political ideology, and even political participation can be explained by heredity. Yet, this research is based on statistical generalizations, which apply to populations, not to individuals. "Understanding heredity for a population is a well-developed social science; understanding heredity in a given individual is a weakly developed aspect of neuroscience," said Wilson, the chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers. Neuroscience may thus explain the tendencies of certain groups, but it will not explain, for example, what prompts an individual to commit a specific crime. If we could successfully derive a genetic explanation for all human behavior, it would be difficult for society to hold individuals accountable for their behavior. But it would also make it difficult to reward people for exceptional accomplishments.
AEI's Charles Murray also made the case for free will, noting that the bundle of genes that contributes to the way humans behave is so complicated that we simply cannot add up all the forces at play to make behavior determinations. Murray argued that twenty-first-century social science will have to acknowledge and incorporate the research from the hard sciences, but he predicted that the results of the research will be "profoundly conservative." In other words, genetic research will confirm long-held beliefs about human nature.
Sally Satel, M.D., a resident scholar at AEI and psychiatrist, addressed how neuroscience has changed our views of addiction. In the last decade, as brain scan imaging has become more widespread, the "disease model" for treating addiction has been "hypermedicalized." Brain scans illustrating the "pathways of desire" in the brain imply that the behavior is not, in fact, mutable. The limitations of this technology, however, mean that clinicians continue to define addiction by behaviors. Satel noted that many addicts are still able to exercise free will and modify their behaviors based on the accompanying rewards or punishments, a response not compatible with the notion of brain disease. "Neurobiology is by no means destiny," she said.
David Brooks of the New York Times said that the most important aspect of the "neurorevolution" is that we now understand the power of unconscious processes. These unconscious processes--which are formed through genes, brain structures, home life, or emotional learning based on rewards and punishments--have led to the belief that we are not in control of our behavior. Brooks said this is true to some extent, that "our behavior is bounded by the power of unconscious processes" but that they do not eliminate free will altogether. We retain the ability to shift our attention from one thought to another and to choose between different actions.
--LAURA DRINKWINE
David Brooks first started his opinion-editorial column for the New York Times in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2001) and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (2005), both published by Simon & Schuster. He is the editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage Books, 1996). Mr. Brooks is currently writing a book on how unconscious processes influence social mobility and human flourishing.
Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at AEI. His first book, Losing Ground, which advanced the claim that the Great Society antipoverty programs were hurting the poor, was widely criticized when it was published in 1984. Twelve years later, it was being credited as the intellectual inspiration for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve, coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ on life outcomes in America, but it has found support from a growing body of scientific evidence in years since. Mr. Murray has written many books and scores of articles for publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Washington Post, and he has been the subject of cover stories by Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. He was named by National Journal as one of fifty people who make a difference in national policymaking.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. She has been a professor of philosophy at Clark University since 1981. Ms. Sommers specializes in ethics and contemporary moral theory and has published many scholarly articles in such journals as The Journal of Philosophy and The New England Journal of Medicine. She edited Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (Harcourt Brace, 1985), one of the most popular ethics textbooks in the country. Ms. Sommers became known to the wider public as the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Touchstone, 1994). Her book The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Touchstone, 2000) received widespread attention and praise and was excerpted for a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly. It was included in the New York Times’s “Notable Books of the Year.” Her most recent book, One Nation under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (St. Martin’s, 2005), coauthored with Sally Satel, M.D., has received a great deal of attention and critical acclaim. Ms. Sommers’s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, National Review, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard.
Sally Satel, M.D., is a resident scholar at AEI and the staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She serves on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Satel was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993. From 1993 to 1994, she was a policy fellow with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and medicine and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in numerous magazines and journals. Dr. Satel is the author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999); PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001); One Nation under Therapy, with Christina Hoff Sommers (St. Martin’s Press, 2005); and The Health Disparities Myth: Diagnosing the Treatment Gap, with Jonathan Klick (AEI Press, 2006). She is the editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors (AEI Press, 2009).
James Q. Wilson is chairman of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers and currently the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He was the James Collins Professor of Management at UCLA from 1985 to 1997 and the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University from 1961 to 1987. Mr. Wilson is the author of fifteen books, including The Marriage Problem (HarperCollins, 2002); Moral Judgment (Perseus, 1997); On Character (expanded edition, AEI Press, 1995); Crime and Human Nature, with Richard J. Herrnstein (Simon & Schuster, 1985); and Varieties of Police Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1968). He has also edited or contributed to books on urban problems, government regulation of business, and prevention of delinquency among children. Mr. Wilson has been a director of the Police Foundation, a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a member of the attorney general’s Task Force on Violent Crime, the chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention, and the chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime. He is a former member of the boards of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company and the RAND Corporation. Mr. Wilson has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Bradley Prize.
