Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals,

and Purpose in the Age of

Neuroscience Gregg Caruso
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/neuroexistentialism-meaning-morals-and-purpose-in-t
he-age-of-neuroscience-gregg-caruso/
Neuroexistentialism
ii
Neuroexistentialism
Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in
the Age of Neuroscience

Edited by
Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​046072–​3 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–046073–0 (pbk.)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
In memory of
Louis J. Caruso
vi
CONTENTS

Preface  ix
List of Contributors   xi

1. Neuroexistentialism: Third-​Wave Existentialism   1

Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

PART I: Morality, Love, and Emotion   23

2. The Impact of Social Neuroscience on Moral Philosophy   25
Patricia Smith Churchland
3. All You Need Is Love(s): Exploring the Biological
Platform of Morality   38
Maureen Sie
4. Does Neuroscience Undermine Morality?   54
Paul Henne and Walter Sinnott-​Armstrong
5. The Neuroscience of Purpose, Meaning, and Morals   68
Edmund T. Rolls
6. Moral Sedimentation   87
Jesse Prinz

PART II: Autonomy, Consciousness, and the Self   109

7. Choices Without Choosers: Toward a Neuropsychologically
Plausible Existentialism   111
Neil Levy
8. Relational Authenticity   126
Shaun Gallagher, Ben Morgan, and Naomi Rokotnitz
9. Behavior Control, Meaning, and Neuroscience   146
Walter Glannon
10. Two Types of Libertarian Free Will Are Realized in
the Human Brain   162
Peter U. Tse
viii

PART III: Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Meaning in Life   191
11. Hard-​Incompatibilist Existentialism: Neuroscience, Punishment,
and Meaning in Life   193
Derk Pereboom and Gregg D. Caruso
12. On Determinism and Human Responsibility   223
Michael S. Gazzaniga
13. Free Will Skepticism, Freedom, and Criminal Behavior   235
Farah Focquaert, Andrea L. Glenn, and Adrian Raine
14. Your Brain as the Source of Free Will Worth Wanting:
Understanding Free Will in the Age of Neuroscience   251
Eddy Nahmias
15. Humility, Free Will Beliefs, and Existential Angst: How We Got
from a Preliminary Investigation to a Cautionary Tale   269
Thomas Nadelhoffer and Jennifer Cole Wright
16. Purpose, Freedom, and the Laws of Nature   298
Sean M. Carroll

PART IV: Neuroscience and the Law   309

17. The Neuroscience of Criminality and Our Sense of Justice:
An Analysis of Recent Appellate Decisions in Criminal Cases   311
Valerie Hardcastle
18. The Neuroscientific Non-​Challenge to Meaning, Morals,
and Purpose   333
Stephen J. Morse

Index  359

[ viii ] Contents
P R E FA C E

An aim of perennial philosophy is to locate deep, satisfying answers that

make sense of the human predicament, that explain what makes human life
meaningful, and what grounds and makes sense of the quest to live morally.
Existentialism is a philosophical expression of the anxiety that there are no
deep, satisfying answers to these questions, and thus that there are no secure
foundations for meaning and morality, no deep reasons that make sense of
the human predicament. Existentialism says that the quest of perennial phi-
losophy to locate firm foundations for meaning and morals is quixotic, largely
a matter of tilting at windmills.
There are three kinds of existentialism that respond to three differ-
ent kinds of grounding projects—​grounding in God’s nature, in a shared
vision of the collective good, or in science. The first-​wave existentialism of
Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche expressed anxiety about the idea that
meaning and morals are made secure because of God’s omniscience and good
will. The second-​wave existentialism of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir was
a post-​Holocaust response to the idea that some uplifting secular vision of
the common good might serve as a foundation. Today, there is a third-​wave
existentialism, neuroexistentialism, which expresses the anxiety that, even as
science yields the truth about human nature, it also disenchants. The theory
of evolution together with advances in neuroscience remove the last vestiges
of an immaterial soul or self that can know the nature of what is really true,
good, and beautiful. We are gregarious social animals who evolved by descent
from other animals and who are possessed of all sort of utterly contingent
dispositions and features that result from having evolved as such an animal.
Our fate is the fate of other animals.
This collection explores the anxiety caused by this third-​wave existential-
ism and some responses to it. It brings together some of the world’s leading
philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars to tackle
our neuroexistentialist predicament and explore what the mind sciences can
tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free
x

will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in

life, and purpose.
The collection begins with an introduction to neuroexistentialism by
Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso. This chapter sets the stage for the chap-
ters to follow. It explains what neuroexistentialism is and how it is related
to, but differs from, the first two waves of existentialism. Eighteen original
chapters divided into four parts follow the introduction. There are contribu-
tions by Sean M. Carroll, Gregg D. Caruso, Patricia Smith Churchland, Farah
Focquaert, Shaun Gallagher, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Walter Glannon, Andrea
L. Glenn, Valerie Hardcastle, Paul Henne, Neil Levy, Ben Morgan, Stephen
J. Morse, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias, Derk Pereboom, Jesse Prinz,
Adrian Raine, Naomi Rokotnitz, Edmund Rolls, Maureen Sie, Walter Sinnott-​
Armstrong, Peter U. Tse, and Jennifer Cole Wright.
Readers will find that each chapter explores a different component of neu-
roexistentialism, and many draw on different traditions and disciplines. There
are several chapters, for instance, that combine insights from the European
traditions of existentialism and phenomenology with recent empirical work
in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences. There are others that draw on
legal scholarship to explore the implications of neuroscience for criminal pun-
ishment and the law. Others still take an empirical approach and report here
for the first time their findings. The result is a diverse collection of essays that
sheds new light on the human predicament and suggests new and potentially
fruitful areas of research. We hope you enjoy.

[x] Preface
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Sean M. Carroll is a Research Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California

Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in 1993 from Harvard University.
His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, quantum gravity
and spacetime, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. He is the author
of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself; The
Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to
the Edge of a New World; From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory
of Time; and the textbook Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General
Relativity.
Gregg D. Caruso is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning and
Co-​Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network (JWRN) housed at
the University of Aberdeen School of Law. His research focuses on free will
and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and crimi-
nal punishment. He is the author of Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist
Account of the Illusion of Free Will (2012) and the editor of Exploring the Illusion
of Free Will and Moral Responsibility (2013) and Science and Religion: 5 Questions
(2014).
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the
University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct Professor at the Salk
Institute. Her research focuses on the interface between neuroscience and
philosophy. She is author of the pioneering book, Neurophilosophy (1986),
and co-​author with T. J. Sejnowski of The Computational Brain (1992). Her
current work focuses on morality and the social brain—​e.g., Braintrust: What
Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (2011). Touching a Nerve (2013) portrays
how to get comfortable with this fact: I am what I am because my brain is as
it is. She has been president of the American Philosophical Association and
the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and she won a MacArthur Prize in
1991, the Rossi Prize for neuroscience in 2008, and the Prose Prize for science
for the book Braintrust. She was chair of the Philosophy Department at the
University of California San Diego from 2000 to 2007.
xii

Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy, Duke

University, Durham North Carolina. He is the author of several books, includ-
ing The Science of the Mind (1984/​1991), Varieties of Moral Personality (1991),
Consciousness Reconsidered (1992), Self Expressions: Minds, Morals and Meaning
of Life (1996), The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile
Them (2003), The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007),
The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011), and most recently The
Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (2017).
Farah Focquaert obtained her PhD in 2007 from Ghent University in Belgium.
She is a Research Fellow at the Bioethics Institute Ghent, Ghent University.
Her work is predominantly situated in the domain of neuroethics and the
philosophy of free will. Her current research focuses on the ethics of moral
enhancement, the ethics of neuromodulation for treatment and enhance-
ment, and the implications of the philosophy and neuroscience of free will for
the criminal justice system. In the United States, she was a Visiting Research
Fellow at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, a visiting
scholar at the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health,
and a visiting scholar at the Department of Criminology and the Center for
Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Research
Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders, a member of the Belgian College
of Neurological and Biological Psychiatry, and a member of the ethics commit-
tee of the Forensic Psychiatric Center Ghent.
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in
Philosophy at the University of Memphis. His areas of research include phe-
nomenology and the cognitive sciences, especially topics related to embodi-
ment, self, agency and intersubjectivity, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of
time. Dr. Gallagher has a secondary research appointment at the University
of Wollongong, Australia, and is Honorary Professor at Durham University
(UK), and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He has held visiting positions
at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University; the Center
for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen; the Centre de Recherche
en Epistémelogie Appliquée (CREA), Paris; the Ecole Normale Supériure,
Lyon; the Humboldt University in Berlin; and, most recently, at Keble College,
University of Oxford. Professor Gallagher holds the Humboldt Foundation’s
Anneliese Maier Research Award (2012–​2018). Gallagher is a founding editor
and a co-​editor-​in-​chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Michael S. Gazzaniga is the Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of
Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1964, he received a
PhD from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked under the
guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility for initiating human
split-​brain research. In his subsequent work, he has made important advances

[ xii ] List of Contributors

in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the
cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. He has published many
books accessible to a lay audience, such as The Social Brain, Mind Matters,
Nature’s Mind, The Ethical Brain, and Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science
of the Brain. Dr. Gazzaniga’s teaching and mentoring career has included begin-
ning and developing Centers for Cognitive Neuroscience at Cornell University
Medical Center, University of California-​Davis, and Dartmouth College. He
founded the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute and the Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, of which he is the Editor-​in-​Chief Emeritus. Dr. Gazzaniga is
also prominent as an advisor to various institutes involved in brain research
and was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2009.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Institute of
Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences. His new book is Tales from
Both Sides of the Brain.
Walter Glannon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He is
the author of Bioethics and the Brain (2007), Brain, Body and Mind: Neuroethics
with a Human Face (2011), and editor of Free Will and the Brain: Neuroscientific,
Philosophical, and Legal Perspectives (2015).
Andrea L. Glenn, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Center for the Prevention
of Youth Behavior Problems and the Department of Psychology at the
University of Alabama. Her research focuses on understanding the biologi-
cal correlates of psychopathy and using biological information in the develop-
ment of interventions for youth with conduct problems. She is also interested
in the ethical implications of this research.
Valerie Gray Hardcastle is Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and
Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati. She
co-​directs the Weaver Institute for Law and Psychiatry there, as well as directs
the Program in Medicine, Health, and Society. An internationally recognized
scholar, she is the author of five books and more than 150 essays. She studies
the nature and structure of interdisciplinary theories in the cognitive sciences
and has focused primarily on developing a philosophical framework for under-
standing conscious phenomena responsive to neuroscientific, psychiatric, and
psychological data. Currently, she is investigating the implications neurosci-
ence should have on the criminal justice system. Hardcastle received a bache-
lor’s degree with a double major in philosophy and political science from the
University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree in philosophy from the
University of Houston, and an interdisciplinary PhD in cognitive science and
philosophy from the University of California, San Diego.
Paul Henne is a PhD student at Duke University. He received his bachelor’s
degree from Lake Forest College in 2011 and his master’s degree from Arizona

List of Contributors [ xiii ]

xiv

State University in 2013. He primarily works on causation and causal cogni-

tion, but he also has interests in moral psychology and metaphilosophy.
Neil Levy is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney, and
Director of Research at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He is the author,
most recently, of Consciousness and Moral Responsibility. .
Ben Morgan is Fellow and Tutor in German at Worcester College, Associate
Professor of German, and Co-​Convenor of the Oxford Comparative Criticism
and Translation Programme at the University of Oxford. He is author of On
Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (2013)
and articles on modernist literature, film, and philosophy in the German-​
speaking world (Trakl, Kafka and Kierkegaard, Benjamin and Heidegger, Fritz
Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, the Frankfurt School). He is also editor with Carolin
Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan of Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken
(2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky of a Special Issue of Poetics
Today on “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” (2017).
Stephen J. Morse is Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law, Professor
of Psychology and Law in Psychiatry, and Associate Director of the Center
for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He was pre-
viously Co-​Director of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience
Project and is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience
Research Network. Trained in both law and psychology at Harvard, Professor
Morse’s work focuses on individual responsibility in criminal and civil law and
social control. Dr. Morse has published A Primer on Neuroscience and Criminal
Law (with Adina Roskies), and he has written widely about the relation of neu-
roscience to law and social policy. Professor Morse is a Diplomate in Forensic
Psychology of the American Board of Professional Psychology, a recipient of
the American Academy of Forensic Psychology’s Distinguished Contribution
Award, and a recipient of the American Psychiatric Association’s Isaac Ray
Award for distinguished contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychi-
atric aspects of jurisprudence.
Thomas Nadelhoffer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, an Affiliate
Member of the Psychology Department, and a Roster Faculty in the
Neuroscience Program at the College of Charleston. Before teaching at the
College of Charleston, Professor Nadelhoffer spent two years as a postdoctoral
fellow with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project (2009–​
2011) under the direction of Michael Gazzaniga (UCSB) and Walter Sinnott-​
Armstrong (Duke University). Professor Nadelhoffer's main areas of research
include free will, moral psychology, neuroethics, and punishment theory. He is
particularly interested in research at the crossroads of moral and political phi-
losophy and the sciences of the mind. Professor Nadelhoffer co-​edited Moral

[ xiv ] List of Contributors

Psychology (2010) with Eddy Nahmias and Shaun Nichols. More recently, he
edited The Future of Punishment (2013). Professor Nadelhoffer has also pub-
lished nearly fifty articles and chapters in top philosophy and psychology jour-
nals and with top academic presses.
Eddy Nahmias is a Professor in the Philosophy Department and the
Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. He specializes in philoso-
phy of mind and cognitive science, free will, moral psychology, and experimen-
tal philosophy, focusing on questions about human agency: what it is, how it
is possible, and how it accords with scientific accounts of human nature. He
has published numerous chapters and articles in these areas and is coeditor of
Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings (2010).
Derk Pereboom is Stanford H. Taylor ’50 Chair and Susan Linn Sage Professor
in the Philosophy Department at Cornell University. He is the author of Living
Without Free Will (2001), Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (2011),
Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014), and of articles on free will, phi-
losophy of mind, and in the history of modern philosophy. In his work on free
will, he defends the position that we lack free will defined as the control in
action required for attributions of desert, and he explores the implications of
this view for rational deliberation, ethics, personal relationships, and treat-
ment of criminals.
Jesse Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of
Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate
Center. His research focuses on the perceptual, emotional, and cultural
foundations of human psychology. He is author of Furnishing the Mind, Gut
Reactions, The Emotional Construction of Morals, Beyond Human Nature, and The
Conscious Brain. Two other books are forthcoming: The Moral Self and Works
of Wonder.
Adrian Raine is the Richard Perry University Professor of Criminology,
Psychiatry, and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He gained his
undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford
and his PhD in Psychology from the University of York. His interdisciplinary
research focuses on the etiology and prevention of antisocial, violent, and psy-
chopathic behavior in children and adults. He has published 375 journal arti-
cles and book chapters, 7 books, and given 335 invited presentations in 26
countries. His latest book, The Anatomy of Violence (2013), reviews the brain
basis to violence and draws future implications for the punishment, predic-
tion, and prevention of offending, as well as the neuroethical concerns sur-
rounding this work. He is past-​President of the Academy of Experimental
Criminology and received an honorary degree from the University of York
(UK) in 2015.

List of Contributors [ xv ]
xvi

Naomi Rokotnitz is the Massada Fellowships Programme Coordinator at

Worcester College, University of Oxford. Her work explores the intersections
of literature, philosophy, and science. She is author of Trusting Performance: A
Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (2011) and numerous journal arti-
cles that investigate how literature affects behavior and beliefs and influences
conceptions of subjectivity, agency, and authenticity. The most recent of these
are “ ‘Passionate Reciprocity’: Love, Existentialism and Bodily Knowledge in The
French Lieutenant's Woman” (Partial Answers: Journal of Literary History of Ideas
12.2), and “Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in
the Reading Experience: The God of Small Things” (Poetics Today 38.2).
Edmund T. Rolls is at the Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience,
Oxford, UK, and at the Department of Computer Science, University of
Warwick, UK, where he is a Professor in Computational Neuroscience and is
focusing on full-​time research. He has served as Professor of Experimental
Psychology at the University of Oxford and as Fellow and Tutor in Psychology
at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Rolls is a neuroscientist with research inter-
ests in computational neuroscience, including the operation of real neuronal
networks in the brain involved in vision, memory, attention, and decision-​
making; functional neuroimaging of vision, taste, olfaction, feeding, the con-
trol of appetite, memory, and emotion; neurological disorders of emotion;
psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia; and the brain processes under-
lying consciousness. These studies include investigations in patients and are
performed with the aim of contributing to understanding the human brain
in health and disease and of treating its disorders. He has published twelve
books on neuroscience, and more than 560 full-​length research papers on
these topics.
Maureen Sie is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Leiden University,
and Associate Professor of Meta-​ethics and Moral Psychology at the Erasmus
University, Rotterdam. From 2009 to 2014, she led a small research group
enabled by a prestigious personal grant from the Dutch Organization of
Scientific Research to explore the implications of findings in the behav-
ioral, cognitive, and neuroscience fields to our concept of moral agency.
Some publications include “Moral Hypocrisy and Moral Reasons,” in Ethical
Theory and Moral Practice (18(2), 2015); “Stereotypes and Prejudices, Whose
Responsibility? Personal Responsibility vis-​a-​vis Implicit Bias” co-​authored
with Voorst Vader Bours in Brownstein’s Implicit Bias and Philosophy (2016);
“The Real Neuroscientific Challenge to Free Will,” co-​authored with Arno
Wouters, in Trends in Cognitive Science (12(1), 2008); and “Self-​Knowledge
and the Minimal Conditions of Responsibility: A Traffic-​Participation View on
Human (Moral) Agency,” in Journal of Value Inquiry (48(2), 2014).

[ xvi ] List of Contributors

Walter Sinnott-​Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical
Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics
at Duke University. He holds secondary appointments in Duke’s Law School,
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Center for Interdisciplinary Decision
Sciences. He is a Partner Investigator at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics
and a Research Scientist with the Mind Research Network in New Mexico. He
has published widely on ethics, empirical moral psychology and neuroscience,
philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of law, epistemology, philosophy of reli-
gion, and informal logic. His current work focuses on moral psychology and
brain science, uses of neuroscience in legal systems, and moral artificial intel-
ligence. He is writing books on scrupulosity, on freedom and moral responsi-
bility, and on how arguments can overcome political polarization.
Peter Ulric Tse has been a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth
College since 2001, returning to his alma mater, where he graduated in 1984
with a degree in math and physics. He has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from
Harvard University and was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biological
Cybernetics. He wrote The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation (2013)
and is at work on a second book on free will titled Imagining Brains: The Neural
Sources of Human Freedom and Creativity, from which his chapter here has been
adapted.
Jennifer Cole Wright is Associate Professor of Psychology at the College
of Charleston. Her area of research is moral development and moral psy-
chology more generally. Specifically, she studies meta-​ ethical pluralism,
the influence of individual and social “liberal vs. conservative” mindsets on
moral judgments, and young children’s early moral development. She has
published papers on these and other topics in Cognition, Mind & Language,
Journal of British Developmental Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Journal of Moral
Education, Philosophical Psychology, Journal of Cognition and Culture, Personality
and Individual Differences, Social Development, Personality & Social Psychology
Bulletin, and Merrill-​Palmer Quarterly. She co-​edited, with Hagop Sarkissian,
Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology, and she is currently co-​authoring
a book titled Virtue Measurement: Theory and Application with Nancy Snow.
When she’s not writing, she is usually busy warping young minds in the class-
room, brainstorming experiments in her lab, or satisfying her lust for travel
by backpacking across Europe or South East Asia—​or sometimes just trekking
(with the help of a fuel-​efficient car) across the United States.

List of Contributors [ xvii ]

xvii
CHAPTER 1

Neuroexistentialism
Third-​Wave Existentialism
OWEN FL ANAGAN AND GREGG D. C ARUSO

J ean Paul Sartre (1946/​2007) was correct when he said existentialism is a

humanism. Existentialisms are responses to recognizable diminishments
in the self-​image of persons caused by social or political rearrangements or
ruptures, and they typically involve two steps: (a) admission of the anxiety
and an analysis of its causes, and (b) some sort of attempt to regain a pos-
itive, less anguished, more hopeful image of persons. What we call neuroex-
istentialism is a recent expression of existential anxiety over the nature of
persons. Unlike previous existentialisms, neuroexistentialism is not caused
by a problem with ecclesiastical authority, as was the existentialism repre-
sented by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche,1 nor by the shock of com-
ing face to face with the moral horror of nation state actors and their citizens,
as in the mid-​century existentialism of Sartre and Camus.2 Rather, neuroex-
istentialism is caused by the rise of the scientific authority of the human sci-
ences and a resultant clash between the scientific and the humanistic image
of persons. Specifically, neuroexistentialism is twenty-​first-​century anxiety
over the way contemporary neuroscience helps secure in a particularly vivid

This chapter includes some passages from Flanagan (2002, 2009) and Flanagan and
Barack (2010).
1. See Kierkegaard (1843/​1983, 1843/​1992, 1844/​2014, 1846/​1971, 1849/​1998),
Dostoevsky (1866/​2001, 1880/​1976), and Nietzsche (1882/​1974, 1883/​1975, 1886/​
1989, 1887/​1969).
2. See Sartre (1943/​1992, 1946/​2007), Camus (1942/​1989, 1942/​1991), de Beauvoir
(1949/​1989).
2

way the message of Darwin from 150 years ago, that humans are animals—​
not half animal, not some percentage animal, not just above the animals,
but 100 percent animal, one kind of primate among the 200 or so species
of primates. A person is one kind of fully material being living in a mate-
rial world. Neuroexistentialism is what you get when Geisteswissenschaften
reaches the stage where it finally and self-​consciously exorcizes the geist and
recommends that no one should take seriously the Cartesian myth of the
ghost in the machine (Ryle 1949/​2001).
In this introduction, we explain in Section 1 what neuroexistentialism is
and how it is related to two earlier existentialisms. In Section 2, we explain
how neuroexistentialism makes particularly vivid the clash between the
humanistic and the scientific image of persons. In Section 3, we discuss the
hard problem (Chalmers 1996) and the really hard problem (Flanagan 2007) and
how they relate to neuroexistentialism. In Section 4, we inquire into the causes
and conditions of flourishing for material beings living in a material world,
whose self-​understanding includes the idea that such a world is the only kind
of world that there is and thus that the meaning and significance of their lives,
if there is any, must be found in such a world. We conclude in Section 5 by pro-
viding a brief summary of the chapters to follow.

1. THIRD-​W AVE EXISTENTIALISM

Neuroexistentialism is the third wave of existentialism, defined here as a zeit-

geist that involves a central preoccupation with human purpose and meaning
accompanied by the anxiety that there is none. Aristotle’s biological teleology
is all about purpose—​humankind, like all kinds, has a proper function (e.g.,
reason and virtue), which can be seen, articulated, and secured. And when you
achieve it or have it you are eudaimon, a person who flourishes. Existentialists
in the West are all post-​Aristotelians who respond to the idea that eudaimonia
is not enough, there should be something more, something deeper and tran-
scendental but who are honest about the difficulty of finding where or what
this deeper, transcendental thing that would make sense of life and provide
meaning is or even what it could possibly be.
Traditionally, religion—​specifically monotheism in the West—​played the
role of supplying the something more, that which would make human life
more significant than, say, Aristotle thought was significance enough. In
some respects, now is a time when we are “Back to Aristotle,” back to a time
when secularists raise the question of what life means or could mean if there
is nothing more than this world, this life. Is a picture of persons as gregarious,
rational, embodied, social animals who seek to flourish enough to supply con-
tent and significance to what such flourishing could come to? Can the rational,
embodied image of humans give us meaning?

[2] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

1.1. The First Two Waves: Foundational Anxiety
and Human Nature Angst

Several centuries after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, after much
blood was spilled for religious reasons, Europe entered a secular age. Charles
Taylor (1989) characterizes what it means to live in a secular age in a useful
way: it is to live in an age when atheism is a real and not simply a notional
possibility—​which it is even biblically, for example, in the Psalms, where we
meet “the fool.” The religious wars were all between true believers. Infidels, her-
etics, and atheists were just monikers applied to theists who held different—​
but often nearby—​views of God and his nature. By the Enlightenment, there
were not just some people who were atheists, but some of them were very
smart, thoughtful, and morally decent. Hume, Voltaire, Diderot were such
people.
Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, both religious, and Nietzsche not, lived
in this secular age, and each explored in his own gripping way the anxiety
wrought by entertaining the possibility that there is no God who shores up
and makes sense of the human predicament. Either God as traditionally con-
ceived is insufficient to provide grounding for the human project or he is too
far away for us to comprehend his being. Nietzsche’s view is of the first sort,
and, of course, he famously predicts that people are too milquetoast to accept
this reality and to find meaning on their own, and so, as the message gets out,
an age of nihilism will commence. Similarly, when Dostoevsky allows Ivan, one
of the Brothers Karamozov to speak of the possibility of atheism, to speak out
loud about his foundational doubts, this causes his brother Dmitri to express
the horrifying thought that “if there is no God then everything is permitted.”
Meanwhile, Kierkegaard entertains the twin thoughts that the bureaucratic
Church is corrupt and that, in any case, the divine is beyond human under-
standing and may, at its most compelling spiritual moments, as in God’s
demands on Abraham, ask for actions that are inexplicable in normal ethical
terms and that even require the suspension of both reason and ethics. These
twin assaults on religiosity, on the existence or intelligibility of the divine,
together constitute the impetus behind the first wave of existentialism.
If first-​wave existentialism can be characterized as the displacement of
ecclesiastical authority and a consequent anxiety over how to justify moral
and personal norms without theological foundations, second-​wave existen-
tialism was a response to an overly optimistic thought that emerged from
the European enlightenment. The Enlightenment offered the idea that even
if there is no God, we can count on human goodness and human rationality to
make sense of meaning and morals. In fact, there was hope in the aftermath of
various political revolutions in the eighteenth century that reason and good-
ness were already leading to good democratic and egalitarian polities, which
can both ground and create the conditions for true fraternity, solidarity, and

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [3]
4

liberty. But this hope was dashed almost as soon as it was expressed by such
horrifying realities as the scourge of colonialism, the fact that a Christian
nation led by a democratically elected demagogue produced the Holocaust,
and that the egalitarian projects of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were as vicious
and inhumane as the religious wars and Crusades. Second-​wave existentialism
culminated in the aftermath of the Second World War and expressed the gen-
uine worry that humans might simply not be up to living morally or purpose-
fully. Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Fanon maintain glimmers of hope in
various liberatory projects at the same time as they worry that the quests for
meaning, equality, gender justice, and racial justice may simply require ongo-
ing revolutionary commitment. One cannot count on either God or human
nature to secure these ends.

1.2. Third-​Wave Existentialism

Both first-​and second-​wave existentialism continue to wash over modern con-

sciousness, even as the precise nature and degree of skepticism over ecclesias-
tical and political authority fluctuates. The third wave, however, comes from a
different source than the first two waves—​it comes from science, rather than
from questioning that undermines judgments about the honesty, goodness,
and authority of religious and political leaders and institutions.
Conflicts between science and religion are familiar in the West—​witness
Galileo Galilei and Darwin, each undermining the authority of the Churches,
but also even among nonbelievers by undermining a certain humanistic pic-
ture of persons. When one combines the neo-​Darwinian picture of persons
with advances in neuroscience, what one increasingly sees is the recognition
in public consciousness that the mind is the brain and all mental processes
just are (or are realized in) neural processes.3 For certain intellectual elites,
most philosophers, and many scientists, neo-​Darwinism (including genetics,
population genetics, etc.) combined with neuroscience (including cognitive
and affective neuroscience, neurobiology, neurology, etc.) brings the needle-
point of detail to the picture of persons anticipated by and accepted in the
physicalist or naturalist view of things—​which, as such, has been avowed as
the right metaphysical view ever since Darwin. But, for most ordinary folk and
many members of the nonscientific academy, the idea that humans are animal

3. The claim that the “mind is the brain” should be understood in terms of
what Eddy Nahmias calls neuronaturalism (see Chapter 14). As he describes
it: “Neuronaturalism . . . is meant to be compatible with various forms of physicalism
in philosophy of mind, including both non-​reductive and reductive varieties (Stoljar
2009).” For instance, neuronaturalism does not commit one “to a reductionistic episte-
mological thesis that says the best explanations are always those offered by lower-​level
sciences (e.g., physics or neuroscience)” (Chapter 14, fn. 2).

[4] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

and that the mind is the brain is destabilizing and disenchanting, quite pos-
sibly nauseating, a source of dread, fear, and trembling, sickness unto death
even. Darwin’s theory, on its own, has caused much dis-​ease: witness the con-
tinuing debate in the United States about teaching Darwin’s theory in schools
without at least also teaching the allegedly equiplausible alternative(s), crea-
tionism or intelligent design. But neuroscience edges out the little space for
the mind conceived as soul. And even if it does not turn out to be the case that
the mind is, literally, the brain, plausible alternative views of the mind–​brain
relationship—​such as “mind is a function of the brain” or “mind supervenes
on the brain”—​are no more likely to give comfort to those who wish to cling
to a supernatural metaphysics. The official position of the Roman Catholic
Church since the 1950s has been to accept Darwin with this caveat: When the
speciation event(s) occurred that created Homo sapiens, then God, who had
planned the whole thing, started inserting souls. This is considered a mature
religious response to Darwin, but it is not. It is preposterous, and contempo-
rary neuroscience shows why and how, every day in every way, as it removes
all serious work that a soul might do—​except, that is, the purported afterlife
part. This scientific view results in the same feeling of drift and anchorless
search for meaning that is a hallmark of all existentialisms and thereby con-
stitutes the third wave of existentialism.

2. THE SCIENTIFIC AND MANIFEST IMAGES

Wilfrid Sellars famously wrote, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated,

is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang
together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1963: 2). In this quote,
we get the picture of the philosopher as a kind of synthesizer, or, if not that,
one who keeps his eye on the whole so that the Weltanschauung of an age is
not inconsistent, not fraught with incoherences. There is another image of the
philosopher’s vocation familiar from Socrates: the philosopher as gadfly. The
two vocations can be linked up, especially since Plato’s Socrates is all about
the role of rational coherence and attention to destabilizing lacunae in the
assumptions we make in living a good life overall.
Neuroexistentialism, like earlier existentialisms, is characterized by an
anxiety arising from a clash between two or more sets of practices that con-
tain internal to themselves certain commitments about the way things are,
about metaphysics and ontology, and which are or at least seem inconsistent.
The quickest way to understand the problem that is at the root of the cultural
anxiety is to think once again about the conflict between the scientific image
of persons and the humanistic image of persons.
The conflict between science and religion is well-​known in the West.
Galileo was imprisoned twice for his claim to have empirical evidence for

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [5]
6

Copernicus’s heliocentric theory and died under house arrest. Descartes sup-
pressed Le Monde, his work on physics and astronomy, because of the treat-
ment Galileo received. And Descartes’s own work was put on the Index of
the Roman Catholic Church thirteen years after his death, despite that fact
that his Meditations contain two (still) famous proofs for the existence of
God and three proofs for mind–​body dualism, which he advertises as proofs
for the immortality of the soul. The case of Darwin is the most familiar con-
temporary zone of this conflict, especially in America, where creationists and
intelligent design advocates continue to argue about which theory is scien-
tific and what should be funded by tax dollars and taught in schools. What
the advocates of Darwin’s theory of descent and modification by natural
selection sometimes fail to see is that the opponents of the Darwinian view
are right that there is a conflict between their antecedently held picture of
persons and the one they ought epistemically to believe if Darwinians are
right (i.e., if Darwin’s theory is true). The stakes are extraordinarily high and
pertain to how one understands oneself. The problem becomes understand-
ing and facing directly the question of whether and how one is to find a con-
ception of meaning and purpose for finite beings, literally animals, smart
mammals, living in a material world.
Consider this list of commitments, which are typical of those who accept
the humanistic picture of persons—​which includes most of us. The humanistic
image involves commitment to these beliefs:

• Free will
• Humans ≠ Animals
• Soul
• Afterlife
• Made in God’s image
• Morality is transcendental
• Meaning is transcendental

The scientific image is a substantive one, not simply the negation of the
humanistic image—​one could read Darwin, Freud, contemporary naturalis-
tic social science, philosophy, and neuroscience to get a feel for the positive
picture—​and as such it is an alternative to the humanistic image. But, for
present contrastive purposes, it can be understood as denying the tenets that
are constitutive of the humanistic image, and thus the scientific image asserts:

• No metaphysical free will

• Humans are completely animal
• No soul
• No afterlife
• Not made in God’s image

[6] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

• Morality is not transcendental
• Meaning is not transcendental

The scientific image is disenchanting and destabilizing for a number of famil-

iar reasons. It denies that the mind is res cogitans, thinking stuff, and it denies
that the mind conceived as brain could have any other fate than other smart
mammals have: namely, death and decomposition.
It also rejects familiar conceptions of free will, such as the following one
put forth by René Descartes in the seventeenth century:

But the will is so free in its nature, that it can never be constrained. . . . And the
whole action of the soul consists in this, that solely because it desires some-
thing, it causes a little gland to which it is closely united to move in a way req-
uisite to produce the effect which relates to this desire. (Descartes 1649/​1968)

And this conception held by Roderick Chisholm in the twentieth century:

If we are responsible . . . then we have a prerogative which some would attribute

only to God: each of us when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what
we do, we cause certain things to happen, and nothing—​or no one—​causes us
to cause those events to happen. (Chisholm 2002: 55–​56)

Both of these quotes are expressing a libertarian conception of free will

according to which we are capable of exercising sui generis kinds of agency and
an unconditional ability to do otherwise. While such a conception of free will
is often associated with dualistic and theistic thinking, second-​wave existen-
tialists like Sartre (no friend to theism) also embraced a libertarian conception
of free will. In Being and Nothingness (1943/​1992), Sartre rejects any and all
forms of causal determinism—​even the “psychological” determinism which
finds the immediate causes of action and choice in the desires and beliefs of
agents (see Morriston 1977). Sartre’s existential freedom, or so-​called radi-
cal freedom, maintains that I (as a responsible agent) am not simply another
object in the world. As a human being, I am always open to (and engaged with)
things in the world: that is what Sartre means by saying that I am a “being-​
for” itself (rather than a “being-​in-​self,” which is when one allows oneself to
be determined by facticity). According to Sartre, how I exist in the world is
a function of my free decision to create meaning out of the facts with which
I am confronted. Hence, for second-​wave existentialists, the existence of free
will is disturbing since I must take full responsibility for the meaning of the
world in which I exist.
For third-​wave existentialists, on the other hand, the reverse is the case: the
possibility that we lack libertarian free will is what is disturbing and causes in
us existential anxiety. As the brain sciences progress and we better understand

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [7]
8

the mechanisms that undergird human behavior, the more it becomes obvious
that we lack what Tom Clark (2013) calls “soul control.” There is no longer any
reason to believe in a nonphysical self which controls action and is liberated
from the deterministic laws of nature—​a little uncaused causer capable of exer-
cising counter-​causal free will. While most naturalistically inclined philoso-
phers, including most compatibilists, have long given up on the idea of soul
control, eliminating such thinking from our folk psychological attitudes may
not be so easy and may come at a cost for some. There is some evidence, for
example, that we are “natural born” dualists (Bloom 2004) and that, at least
in the United States, a majority of adults continue to believe in a nonphysi-
cal soul that governs behavior (Nadelhoffer 2014). To whatever extent, then,
such dualistic thinking is present in our folk psychological and humanistic
attitudes about free will and moral responsibility, it is likely to come under
pressure and require some revision as the brain sciences advance and this
information reaches the general public.4
The scientific image is also disturbing for other reasons. It maintains, for
example, that the mind is the brain (see fn. 4), that humans are animals, that
how things seem is not how they are, that introspection is a poor instrument
for revealing how the mind works, that there is no ghost in the machine, no
Cartesian theater where consciousness comes together, that our sense of self
may in part be an illusion, and that the physical universe is the only universe
that there is and it is causally closed. Many fear that if this is true, then it is
the end of the world as we know it, or knew it under the humanistic regime
or image. Neuroexistentialism is one way of expressing whatever anxiety
comes from accepting the picture of myself as an animal (the Darwin part)
and that my mind is my brain, my mental states are brain states (the neuro-​
part). Taken together, the message is that humans are 100 percent animal.
One might think that that message was already available in Darwin. What
does neuroscience add? It adds evidence, we might say, that Darwin’s idea is
true and that it is, as Daniel Dennett says, “a dangerous idea” (1995). Most
people in the West still hold on to the idea that they have a nonphysical soul
or mind. But as neuroscience advances, it becomes increasing clear that there
is no place in the brain for res cogitans to be nor any work for it to do. The uni-
verse is causally closed, and the mind is the brain.
The next step, a consequence of the general undermining of the idea there is
any nonphysical, nonnatural furniture in the universe, is the vertigo caused by
the denial that morality, well-​being, and life’s meaning have anything outside

4. Predicting what revisions will be made is difficult. It is possible that relinquishing

the humanistic idea of “soul control” and libertarian freedom will cause some to accept
free will skepticism (see Pereboom and Caruso, Chapter 11). But it is also possible that
some might adopt a free-​will-​either-​way strategy causing them to accept compatibilism
on pragmatic grounds, fearing the alternative.

[8] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

the natural world to shore them up. Relinquishing the last reserve of an extra-​
bodily foundation for meaning and morality is the culmination of a process
which started in the nineteenth century with the recognition of the inabil-
ity of ecclesiastical authority to provide such a foundation and continued in
the middle of the twentieth century with the rejection of the polity as such
a source. If the soul does not exist, and it does not, then where do we derive
our morals, our meaning, and our well-​being? This problem is the “really hard
problem,” the special problem for those of us living in the age of brain science;
of making sense of the nature, meaning, and purpose of our lives given that
we are material beings living in a material world.

3. THE HARD PROBLEM AND THE REALLY HARD PROBLEM

The hard problem is ancient and turns on intuitions that, for centuries and
across many different traditions, support dualism. Mind seems nonphysical,
so it is. It is simply too hard to explain how agency, as it seems from the first-​
person perspective, could be analyzed as, or reduced to, physical processes.
Here, the idea is that it is too hard to imagine how we could reduce mind to
brain, so we can’t. Thus we need metaphysical dualism.
In recent decades, as the physicalist view of the universe extends its reach
to persons, and, despite dualist intuitions, mind-​science advances under the
guidance of the regulative idea that the mind is the brain, the intuition returns
in two guises. First, there is the old intuition that mental events don’t seem
like brain events, followed by disbelief at the idea that some think they might
be or in fact are brain events. So we are asked to wonder: How is consciousness
possible in a material world? How could subjective experience arise/​emerge
from brain tissue? How could subjectivity arise from objective physical states
of affairs? The questions are supposed to strike the audience as eternally
bewildering and thus as questions that show that physicalism is not a view
that we can really comprehend. Second, there is the intuition that, even if
mental events are brain events, our concepts of the mental cannot be mapped
onto or reduced to physical concepts, and this perhaps because mental con-
cepts carry connotations of nonphysicality. Fair enough, but this conceptual
problem is not a metaphysical problem. The morning star is the evening star,
and it is not a star but, in fact, the planet Venus. All three concepts refer to
the same heavenly body, but they mean different things. If my poem says that
your eyes are like the morning star, I cannot replace those words with “eve-
ning star” and get the same meaning. So what? This explanatory or conceptual
gap problem is commonplace when we are learning a new way of speaking.
The various difficulties associated with treating the hard problem are to be
expected when major conceptual change is called for, as it is by the scientific
image of persons. From the perspective of the scientific image, the question of

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [9]
10

how subjectivity is realized in persons with brains is a problem for the human
sciences, most especially neuroscience.
Assuming that the details of the answer to the question of how conscious-
ness is realized is to be given, and is already being given, by neuroscience, a
second problem remains—​the really hard problem (see Flanagan 2007). It can
be stated in these more or less equivalent forms: How—​given that we are nat-
ural beings living in a material world and given that consciousness is a natu-
ral phenomenon—​does human life mean anything? What significance, if any,
does living our kind of conscious life have?
The really hard problem can be put more forcefully, in a way that enhances
the already felt anxiety: Is there anything upbeat and truthful we can say in
this post-​Darwinian age about the meaning of life or about the meaning(s) of
lives given that:

• We are short-​lived animals.

• When we are gone, we are gone for good (i.e., forever).
• Even our species is likely to be short-​lived, certainly not eternal.

One difference between the hard problem of consciousness and the really hard
problem of meaning in a material world is that the first is a problem in science,
whereas the second is a problem about how we humans can best understand
our situation. Given that we are material beings living in a material world and
given that we have every reason to believe that there is only this one life and
then we are gone, gone for good, gone for all eternity, why and how does any-
thing matter? This is a question that we are asked to answer with only the
resources available, given a materialistic picture of things, but it is not itself
a purely scientific question. It asks us what attitude, what philosophical atti-
tude, we ought to adopt given what we think to be the true facts about our
situation, our predicament.

4. THE NATURALISTS’ RESPONSE TO THE

NEUROEXISTENTIALIST PREDICAMENT

Historically, answers to questions of value and meaning were answered meta-

physically and/​or theologically. The humanistic image insists that humans are
not animals, the mind is not the brain, and that meaning and morals need to
be grounded—​propped up—​transcendentally. The scientific image says that
humans are animals, the mind is the brain, and that there are no transcen-
dental sources for meaning and morals. What there is, and all there is, is the
natural world. Neuroexistentialism involves an acknowledgment of this con-
flict and a recognition of the anxiety it creates. It also involves an attempt to
regain a positive, less anguished, more hopeful image of persons. While the

[ 10 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

contributors to this volume will likely disagree on the exact nature of that pos-
itive response, all share a fundamental commitment to naturalism and all hold
that a proper response to our neuroexistentialist predicament should draw on
insights from the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences.
During the Enlightenment, we saw the beginning of a movement toward
naturalism, according to which morals and meaning are to be analyzed and
understood psychologically—​really in terms of history and the other human
sciences more broadly, not metaphysically or theologically. Over the past few
centuries, this movement has continued, and, most recently, we have seen the
rise of moral psychology and other interdisciplinary attempts to understand
moral development and human values, norms, judgments, and attitudes natu-
ralistically. Contemporary moral psychology, for example, is methodologically
pluralistic: it aims to answer philosophical questions about competing ethical
perspectives, the structure of character, and/​or the nature of moral reason-
ing, but in an empirically responsible way (see Doris and Stich 2006; Flanagan
1991, 2017). There is, in such an approach, a fundamental commitment to
naturalism and the belief that moral philosophy should pay more attention
to psychology and philosophy of mind (Flanagan 1991, 2017; Harman 2009).
If mind, morals, and the meaning of life are to be understood as problems
inside the naturalistic view of things, not problems that require transcen-
dental sources, then this three-​part question arises: (1) How do we combine
and harness the growing knowledge and insights of the human sciences with
(2) the universal existential concern with meaning and flourishing in order to
yield (3) a truthful, liberating, enlightened picture of our problems and our
prospects as meaning-​finders and meaning-​makers. Understood this way, the
central question becomes: Are there naturalistic resources that can quell the
anxiety produced by the ascendancy of the scientific image generally and, spe-
cifically, the picture that comes from combining neo-​Darwinism with neuro-
science, which produces the new and nerve-​racking anxiety associated with
neuroexistentialism?
One promising approach is to pursue a kind of descriptive-​normative
inquiry into the causes and conditions of flourishing for material beings liv-
ing in a material world whose self-​understanding includes the idea that such a
world is the only kind of world that there is and thus that the meaning and sig-
nificance of their lives, if there is any, must be found in such a world. We can
call such an inquiry eudaimonics (Flanagan 2007, 2009). Aristotle famously
said that when he asked his fellow Greeks what they want (if anything) for
its own sake, not for the sake of anything else, they all answered eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia is best translated as flourishing or fulfillment, not as happiness.
There are, of course, numerous ways one could go about developing a natural-
istic eudaimonics, and this collection includes several different proposals on
how we may be able to achieve eudaimonia and preserve meaning, morals, and
purpose in a material world. Whether or not these proposals succeed, we leave

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [ 11 ]
12

it to the reader to decide. But we can say that neuroexistentialism, at least in

its constructive stage, attempts to make use of the knowledge and insights
of the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences to satisfy our existential con-
cerns and achieve some level of flourishing and fulfillment.
In the following chapters, some of the world’s leading philosophers, neuro-
scientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars tackle our neuroexistential-
ist predicament and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality,
love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsi-
bility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.
The following section provides a brief summary of the chapters to come.

5. SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS

The book is divided into four main parts: Part I, Morality, Love, and Emotion;
Part II, Autonomy, Consciousness, and the Self; Part III Free Will, Moral
Responsibility, and Meaning in Life; and Part IV Neuroscience and the
Law. While there is some overlap among the various sections—​as would be
expected in a collection like this—​the four parts provide a rough and fairly
accurate grouping of topics, one that identifies and highlights the key existen-
tial areas of concern.
Part I begins with Patricia Churchland exploring the impact of social neu-
roscience on moral philosophy. One tradition in moral philosophy depicts
human moral behavior as unrelated to social behavior in nonhuman animals.
Morality, on this view, emerges from a uniquely human capacity to reason.
By contrast, recent developments in the neuroscience of social bonding sug-
gest instead an approach to morality that meshes with ethology and evolu-
tionary biology. According to Churchland, the basic platform for morality is
attachment and bonding and the caring behavior motivated by such attach-
ment. Churchland argues that oxytocin, a neurohormone, is at the hub of
attachment behavior in social mammals and probably birds. Not acting alone,
oxytocin works with other hormones, neurotransmitters, and circuitry adap-
tations. Among its many roles, oxytocin decreases the stress response, mak-
ing possible the trusting and cooperative interactions typical of life in social
mammals. Although all social animals learn local conventions, humans are
particularly adept social learners and imitators. On Churchland’s account,
learning local social practices depends on the reward system because, in social
animals, approval brings pleasure and disapproval brings pain. Subcortical
structures, she argues, are the key to acquiring social values, and quite a lot
is known about how the reward system works. Acquiring social skills also
involves generalizing from samples so that learned exemplars can be applied
to new circumstances. Problem-​solving in the social domain gives rise to eco-
logically relevant practices for resolving conflicts and restricting within-​group

[ 12 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

competition. Churchland argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom
that explicit rules are essential to moral behavior, norms are often implicit
and picked up by imitation. This hypothesis connects to a different, but cur-
rently unfashionable tradition, beginning with Aristotle’s ideas about social
virtues and David Hume’s eighteenth-​century ideas concerning “the moral
sentiment.”
In Chapter 3, Maureen Sie builds on Churchland’s account and argues that
our nature as loving beings can explain our nature as moral beings. First, she
points out that scientists have discovered the brain circuits and chemistry
that are involved in not only regulating male and female sexuality and feel-
ings of attachment but also in our sociability more broadly speaking, such as
how we interact with strangers. Second, love and morality seem to be similar
phenomena in many ways, and some of the properties that philosophers have
traditionally struggled to understand in the case of morality seem much eas-
ier to explain when love is its source. She goes on to argue that if we can make
sense of the claim that “love is the source of morality,” then we would have a
naturalized account of morality that leaves space for a variety of philosophi-
cal views. In an attempt to develop such an account, she distinguishes several
kinds of loves and explains how they relate to different moral dimensions of
our existence. She takes as her starting point C. S. Lewis’s work on the sub-
ject. She elaborates on this framework in relation to the claim that love is
the source of morality but completely abandons his Christian framework and
renames his fourth kind of love “kindness.” She argues that recent findings in
affective neuroscience suggest that this fourth is a natural kind of love. She
discusses the dynamics of Lewis’s account, showing that each of the loves that
he distinguishes requires the fourth love (kindness) to keep them from tak-
ing a nasty turn. She concludes by explaining why the fourth love that Lewis
distinguishes actually fits the naturalist picture quite well if the recent finding
that oxytocin is involved in our trusting interactions with strangers is correct.
In Chapter 4, Paul Henne and Walter Sinnot-​Armstrong explore whether
neuroscience undermines morality. Recent findings in neuroscience and psy-
chology suggest that many kinds of moral judgments are deeply flawed—​they
are emotional, inconsistent, based on our distant evolutionary past, suscep-
tible to racial and gender biases, and so on. Henne and Sinnot-​Armstrong
distinguish, analyze, and assess the main arguments for neuroscientific skep-
ticism about morality and argue that neuroscience does not undermine all of
our moral judgments. After quickly addressing several skeptical challenges,
they focus the majority of their attention on one argument in particular—​the
idea that neuroscience and psychology might undermine moral knowledge by
showing that our moral beliefs result from unreliable processes. They argue
that the background arguments that are needed to bolster the main prem-
ise fail to support it in the way that is required for the argument to succeed.
They conclude that the overall issue of neuroscience undermining morality is

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [ 13 ]
14

unsettled—​we need more scientific research and philosophical reflection on

this topic. Still, they contend, we can reach some tentative and qualified con-
clusions. First, neuroscience and psychology do not undermine all moral judg-
ments as such, but they still might play an ancillary role in an argument that
undermines some moral judgments. Second, they might lead us to think about
moral judgments in new ways, such as by suggesting new divisions among
moral judgments. Neuroscience is, then, “not a general underminer—​but a
trimmer and a categorizer.” In these ways, “neuroscience can play a construc-
tive role in moral theory, although not by itself. In order to make progress,
neuroscience and normative moral theory must work together.”
In Chapter 5, Edmund T. Rolls builds on evidence and theories he developed
elsewhere about the neural base of emotions and explores what they can tell
us about purpose, meaning, and morals. He begins by noting that one process
to which “purpose” can refer is that genes are self-​replicating. Another process
to which “purpose” can apply, he contends, is that genes set some of the goals
for actions. These goals are fundamental to understanding emotion. Another
process to which “purpose” can apply is that syntactic multistep reason pro-
vides a route for goals to be set that are to the advantage of the individual, of
the phenotype, and not of the genes. He proceeds to argue that meaning can
be achieved by neural representations not only if these representations have
mutual information with objects and events in the world, but also by virtue
of the goals of the “selfish” genes and of the individual reasoner. This, he pro-
poses, provides a means for even symbolic representations to be grounded in
the world. He concludes by arguing that morals can be considered as principles
that are underpinned by (the sometimes different) biological goals specified
by the genes and by the reasoning (rational) system. Given that what is “nat-
ural” does not correspond to what is “right,” he argues that these conflicts
within and between individuals can be addressed by a social contract.
Jesse Prinz concludes Part I with his chapter on moral sedimentation. He
begins by noting that existentialism is often regarded as a philosophy of rad-
ical freedom—​that is, leading existentialists emphasized the human capacity
for choice and self-​creation. At the same time, there is a countercurrent in
existentialist thought that calls freedom into question. This countercurrent
draws attention to the ways in which behavior is determined by forces out-
side of our control. This is especially vivid in the moral domain. Prinz, for
instances, explains that beginning with Nietzsche’s claim that Christians are
self-​deceived and extending through feminist and decolonial perspectives
within postwar existentialism, we find key authors pointing to ways in which
deeply held values get shaped by social forces. Borrowing a term from phe-
nomenology, Prinz calls this phenomenon “sedimentation.” After tracing the
idea of sedimentation and related concepts in existentialist thought, with
special emphasis on the moral domain, Prinz argues that recent work in neu-
roscience, psychology, and other social sciences adds support to the thesis

[ 14 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

that we are vulnerable to sedimentation. He concludes by considering various
tactics against sedimentation that have been proposed, arguing that some of
the more prominent historical tactics are problematic while also pointing to
some alternatives.
Part II begins with Neil Levy’s chapter on “Choices Without Choosers: Toward
a Neuropsychologically Plausible Existentialism.” While existentialists are
often accused of having painted a bleak picture of human existence, Levy con-
tends that, in the light of contemporary cognitive science, there are grounds
for thinking that the picture is not bleak enough. For second-​wave existen-
tialists, we live in a meaningless universe, condemned to be free to choose
our own values, which have no justification beyond the fact that we have cho-
sen them. But second-​wave existentialists remained confident that there was
someone, an agent, who could be the locus of the choice we each confront.
Contemporary cognitive science shakes our faith even in the existence of this
agent. Instead, it provides evidence that seems to indicate that there is no
one to choose values; rather, each of us is a motley of different mechanisms
and processes, each of which lack the intelligence to confront big existential
questions and each pulling in a different direction. According to Levy, while
there are grounds for thinking that the picture is in some ways bleaker than
the existentialists suggested, he argues that it is not hopeless. The unified self
that serves as the ultimate source of value in an otherwise meaningless uni-
verse may not exist, but we can each impose a degree of unity on ourselves.
The existentialists were sociologically naïve in supposing a degree of distinc-
tion between agents and their cultural milieu that was never realistic. Agents
are enculturated, and a realistic existentialist will recognize that. But they will
also recognize that we are embodied and embedded agents: a biologically real-
istic picture will understand us as agents always already in process of unifi-
cation but never achieving it, and always already in negotiation with values
rather than choosing them. We are thrown beings: thrown into history, into
culture, and into a biological and evolutionary history which we never fully
understand and which we can do no more than inflect, all without founda-
tions and lacking even the security of knowing the extent to which we choose
or even what we choose. Existentialism must face up to an insecurity that is
ontological and epistemological as much as it is axiological.
In Chapter 8, Shaun Gallagher, Ben Morgan, and Naomi Rokotnitz explore
the notion of relational authenticity. They argue that to understand existential
authenticity it will not do to return to the individuality celebrated by classical
existentialism. Nor is it right to look for a reductionist explanation in terms of
neuronal patterns or mental representations that would simply opt for a more
severe methodological individualism and a conception of authenticity confined
to proper brain processes. Rather, they propose, we should look for a fuller
picture of authenticity in what they call the “4Es”—​the embodied, embedded,
enactive, and extended conception of mind. They argue that one requires the

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [ 15 ]
16

4Es to maintain the 4Ms—​mind, meaning, morals, and modality—​in the face
of reductionistic tendencies in neurophilosophy. The 4E approach, they con-
tend, gives due consideration to the importance of the brain taken as part of
the brain-​body-​environment system. It incorporates neuroscience in its expla-
nations, but it also integrates important phenomenological-​ existentialist
conceptions that emphasize embodiment (especially following the work of
Merleau-​Ponty) and the social environment. More specifically, they argue that
phenomenological conceptions of intersubjectivity, or, in existentialist terms,
being-​with (Mitsein) and being-​for-​others, should play significant roles in our
rethinking of authenticity.
In Chapter 9, Walter Glannon writes: “The existential angst of neurosci-
ence is not the result of having to choose in the absence of religious or cul-
tural models. Rather, the angst results from the idea that the subjectivity
and conscious choice that presumably define us as persons can be completely
explained—​if not explained away—​by neural and psychological factors to
which we have no access.” Neuroscience challenges our beliefs about agency
and autonomy because it seems to imply that as conscious beings we have
no control of our behavior. Most brain processes, for instance, are not trans-
parent to us. We also have no direct access to the efferent system and only
experience the sensorimotor consequences of our unconscious motor plans.
Nevertheless, Glannon argues that the fact that unconscious processes drive
many of our actions does not imply that conscious mental states have no
causal role in our behavior and that we have no control over it. He argues
that some degree of unconscious neural constraint on our conscious men-
tal states is necessary to modulate thought and action and promote flexible
behavior and adaptability to the demands of the environment. He maintains
that a nonreductive materialist account of the mind–​brain relation makes
it plausible to claim that mental states can cause changes in physical states
of the brain. He examines some psychiatric and neurological disorders and
attempts to shows how the conscious mind can have a causal role in the eti-
ology of these disorders as well as in therapies to control them and behavior
more generally. He argues that lower level unconscious neural functions and
higher level conscious mental functions complement each other in a constant
process of bottom-​up and top-​down circular causal feedback that enables
interaction between the organism and the external world. He concludes that
the motivational states behind our actions and the meaning we attribute to
them cannot be explained entirely by appeal to neural mechanisms. Although
the brain generates and sustains our mental states, he argues that it does not
determine them and leaves enough room for individuals to “will themselves
to be” through their choices and actions.
In Chapter 10, Peter U. Tse describes various developments in neuroscience
that reveal how volitional mental events can be causal within a physicalist
paradigm and argues that two types of libertarian free will are realized in the

[ 16 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

human brain. He begins by attacking the logic of Jaegwon Kim’s exclusion
argument, which he specifies as maintaining that mental information can-
not be causal and must be epiphenomenal because particle-​level physical-​on-​
physical causation is sufficient to account for apparent causation at all higher
levels. Tse maintains that the exclusion argument falls apart if indetermin-
ism is the case. He then proceeds to build an account of how mental events
are causal in the brain. He takes as his foundation a new understanding of
the neural code that emphasizes rapid synaptic resetting over the traditional
emphasis on neural spiking. Such a neural code is an instance of “criterial cau-
sation,” which requires modifying standard interventionist conceptions of
causation. Tse argue that a synaptic reweighting neural code provides a phys-
ical mechanism that accomplishes downward information causation, a middle
path between determinism and randomness, and a way for mind/​brain events
to turn out otherwise. This new view of the neural code, Tse argues, also pro-
vides a way out of self-​causation arguments against the possibility of mental
causation. Finally, Tse maintains that it is not enough to simply have “first-​
order free will.” That is, only if present choices can ultimately lead to a chooser
becoming a new kind of chooser—​that is, only if there is a second-​order free
will or meta-​free will—​do brains have the capacity to both have chosen other-
wise and to have meta-​chosen otherwise. Tse concludes by discussing how the
brain can choose to become a new kind of brain in the future, with new choices
open to it than are open to it now.
Part III begins with Derk Pereboom and Gregg D. Caruso’s chapter on hard-​
incompatibilist existentialism. In it, they explore the practical and existen-
tial implications of free will skepticism, focusing primarily on punishment,
morality, and meaning in life. They begin by considering two different routes
to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of will-
ing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneer-
ing work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-​Dylan
Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature,
does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that, whether
this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the
level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate.
They argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route, the
second route to free will skepticism remains intact. They then go on to argue
that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality and, rather than neg-
atively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well
improve our well-​being and our relationships to others since it would tend
to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. They conclude by
arguing that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to
criminal behavior—​in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alterna-
tion of relevant social conditions—​and that these methods are both morally
justified and sufficient for good social policy. They present and defend their

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [ 17 ]
18

nonretributive alternative—​the quarantine model, which is an incapaci-

tation account built on the right to self-​protection analogous to the justi-
fication for quarantine—​and respond to recent objections to it by Michael
Corrado, John Lemos, and Saul Smilansky.
In Chapter 12, Michael Gazzaniga tells us: “Let’s face it. We are big animals
with brains that carry out every single action automatically and outside our
ability to describe how it works. We are a soup of dispositions controlled by
genetic mechanisms, some weakly and some strongly expressed in each of us.”
Yet, he tells us there is some good news too: “We humans have something
called the interpreter, located in our left brain, that weaves a story about why
we feel and act the way we do. That becomes our narrative, and each story is
unique and full of sparkle.” He wonders, what’s wrong with being that—​just
that? After all, being self-​aware narrators is what brains do. Gazzaniga pro-
ceeds to explore the concepts of free will and moral responsibility in light of
such facts, arguing that we all remain personally responsible for our actions
because responsibility arises out of each person’s interaction with the social
layer we are embedded in. “Responsibility is not to be found in the brain,”
he concludes, rather it is “a needed consequence of more than one individual
interacting with another.”
In Chapter 13, Farah Focquaert, Andrea L. Glenn, and Adrian Raine return
to the issue of free will skepticism and criminal behavior. They ask how we
should, as a society, deal with criminal behavior in the current era of neuroex-
istentialism. They further ask if our belief in free will is essential to adequately
addressing criminal behavior or if neurocriminology could offer a new way of
addressing crime without the need to resort to backward-​looking notions of
moral responsibility and guilt. They begin by noting that the kind of free will
that could justify retributive punishment based on a criminal’s moral respon-
sibility needs to be the “ultimate” kind—​the kind which would allow an indi-
vidual to behave differently given the exact same conditions. According to free
will skepticism, however, we are not free in the sense that is required for moral
responsibility (i.e., the basic desert sense), and we therefore lack the responsi-
bility that is needed to justify any kind of punishment that draws on revenge
or desert. They proceed to argue that what does remain is “moral answer-
ability” and forward-​looking claims of responsibility that focus on the moral
betterment or moral enhancement of individuals who are prone to criminal
behavior and on the realization of reparative measures toward victims. They
go on to present a neurocriminology approach to criminal behavior and crit-
ically discuss the potential benefits and risks that may accompany such an
approach. They argue that, whereas mass incarceration, severe sanctions,
and stigmatization have resulted in more recidivism, adequate treatment
programs that focus on increasing an individual’s capacity to better control
and change his future behavior have been linked to less recidivism. Such an
approach can be placed within a broader public health perspective of human

[ 18 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

behavior and addresses both environmental and neurobiological risk factors
of criminal behavior. Within this framework, neurocriminology approaches
to criminal behavior may provide specific guidance within a broader moral
enhancement framework. Hence, rather than undermining our current crim-
inal justice practices, the free will skeptics’ approach can draw on neurocrimi-
nological findings to reduce immoral behavior.
In Chapter 14, Eddy Nahmias defends a compatibilist account of free will
and attempts to understand free will in the age of neuroscience. He begins by
considering various reactions one could have to neuronaturalism—​the thesis
that, in imagining options, evaluating them, and making a decision, “each
of those mental processes just is (or is realized in) a complex set of neural
processes which causally interact in accord with the laws of nature.” He diag-
noses the different reactions one could have to this thesis and argues that the
“natural reaction”—​one that accepts neuronaturalism in stride and without
any accompanying existential angst—​is both common and correct. Focusing
on free will, he offers reasons to think that a neuronaturalistic understanding
of human nature does not take away the ground (or grounding) that supports
most of our cherished beliefs about ourselves. While dualists and reduction-
ists tend to think neuronaturalism conflicts with people’s self-​conception,
Nahmias argues that most people are “theory-​lite” and amenable to what-
ever metaphysics makes sense of what matters to them. He argues that even
though we do not yet have a theory of how neural activity can explain our
conscious experiences, such a theory will have to make sense of how those
neural processes are crucial causes of our decisions about what to do. He con-
cludes by suggesting that interventionist theories of causation offer the best
way to see this.
In Chapter 15, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Jennifer Cole Wright investigate
the relationship between free will beliefs (or the lack thereof) and existential
anxiety. In an attempt to shed light on this relationship, they set out to test
whether trait humility can serve as a “buffer” between the two—​that is, are
people who are high in dispositional humility less likely to experience existen-
tial anxiety in the face of skepticism about free will? Given the perspectival and
attitudinal nature of humility, Nadelhoffer and Wright predict that humble
people will be less anxious in the face of stories about the purported death of
free will (or the reduction of the mind to the brain). In a series of four studies,
they tested their hypothesis using various scales (e.g., the Free Will Inventory,
the Humility Scale, the Existential Anxiety Questionnaire, the Existential
Anxiety Scale, etc.) and primes designed to manipulate belief in free will.
While they found some correlational support in Study 1 for their buffering
hypothesis, their efforts were less successful than they had hoped since they
were unable to push people’s beliefs in free will sufficiently in Studies 2–​4 to
test the hypothesis further. This failure itself is instructional, however, since
it tells us something important about the current use of primes in studies

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [ 19 ]
20

designed to manipulate people’s belief in free will (usually to measure their

pro-​or antisocial effects). In this respect, they write, “our work should serve
as a cautionary tale for philosophers, psychologists, and pundits who want
to discuss the potential ramifications of the supposed death of free will. For
while it is certainly possible for people to change their minds about free will,
it is not clear that researchers have figured out effective, reliable, and stable
methods for bringing these epistemic changes about (even temporarily).”
Physicist Sean M. Carroll closes out Part III with his chapter on purpose,
freedom, and the laws of nature. He notes that the popular image of existen-
tialism is associated with “philosophers sitting in cafes, smoking cigarettes and
drinking apricot cocktails” and that this is at odds with the popular image of
scientists decked out in lab coats. Despite these stereotypes, Carroll maintains
that there is an undeniable connection between existentialism and science.
This is perhaps easy to see with biology and neuroscience, but the connection
goes beyond this. Carroll maintains that “An honest grappling with the ques-
tions of purpose and freedom in the universe must also involve ideas from
physics and cosmology.” He goes on to argue that if we want to create purpose
and meaning at the scale of individual human lives, it behooves us to under-
stand the nature of the larger universe of which we are a part. After discussing
what modern physics can tell us about determinism, quantum mechanics, the
arrow of time, and emergence, Carroll concludes by exploring the existential
implications of these insights for freedom and meaning.
Part IV begins with Valerie Hardcastle’s chapter on the neuroscience of
criminality and our sense of justice. Taking the US courts as her stalking
horse, Hardcastle analyzes appellate cases from the past five years in which
a brain scan was cited as a consideration in the decision. After describing the
methodology of her study, she presents the results of her analysis, focusing on
how a defendant’s race might be correlated with whether a defendant is able
to get a brain scan, whether the scan is admitted into evidence, how the scan
is used in the trial, and whether the scan changes the outcome of the hear-
ing. Although she cautions against drawing any definitive conclusions until
more studies are conducted, she identifies a trend indicating that brain scans
of African-​American defendants were less likely to be mitigating when used as
evidence in court. She suggests one possible explanation for this that draws on
Mark Alicke’s culpable control model of blame (Alicke 2000, 2008) and recent
work on implicit bias. She then provides a comparative analysis of the cases in
which imaging data were successful in altering the sentence of defendants and
those in which the data were unsuccessful. She concludes by pointing to larger
trends in our criminal justice system indicative of more profound changes in
how we as a society understand what counts as a just punishment.
The collection concludes in Chapter 18 with Stephen J. Morse arguing that
neuroscience, for all its astonishing recent discoveries, raises no new chal-
lenges for the existence, source, and content of meaning, morals, and purpose

[ 20 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

in human life, nor for the robust conceptions of agency and autonomy that
underpin law and responsibility. According to Morse, proponents of using the
new neuroscience to revolutionize the law and legal system, especially crimi-
nal law, make two arguments. The first appeals to determinism and the specter
of the person as simply a “victim of neuronal circumstances” (VNC) or “just a
pack of neurons” (PON)—​included here are those who argue that determin-
ism and/​or VNC/​PON are inconsistent with responsibility. The second are
those who defend “hard incompatibilism” (HI) (e.g., Pereboom and Caruso,
in Chapter 11). Morse begins by reviewing the law’s psychology, concept of
personhood, and criteria for criminal responsibility. He then argues that nei-
ther determinism nor VNC/​PON are new to neuroscience and that neither, at
present, justifies revolutionary abandonment of moral and legal concepts and
practices that have been evolving for centuries in both common law and civil
law countries. He then turns to HI and argues that, although the metaphysi-
cal premises for responsibility or jettisoning it cannot be decisively resolved,
the real issue should be the type of world we want to live in. He concludes
by examining Pereboom and Caruso’s quarantine proposal (Chapter 11) and
argues that the hard incompatibilist vision is not normatively desirable, even
it if is somehow achievable.

REFERENCES

Alicke, M. D. 2000. Culpable control and the psychology of blame. Psychological Bulletin
126: 556–​574.
Alicke, M. D. 2008. Blaming badly. Journal of Cognition and Culture 8: 179–​186.
Bloom, P. 2004. Descartes’ baby. New York: Basic Books.
Camus, A. 1942/​1989. The stranger. Tr. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage.
Camus, A. 1942/​1991. The myth of Sisyphus. Tr. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage.
Chalmers, D. 1996. The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Chisholm, R. 2002. Human freedom and the self. In R. Kane (Ed.), Free will, pp. 47–​57.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Clark, T. 2013. Experience and autonomy: Why consciousness does and doesn’t mat-
ter. In G. D. Caruso (Ed.), Exploring the illusion of free will and moral responsibility,
pp. 239–​254. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
de Beauvoir, S. 1949/​1989. The second sex. Tr. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books.
Dennett, D. C. 1995. Darwin’s dangerous idea: Evolution and meaning in life.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Descartes, R. 1649/​1968. Passions of the soul. In E. Haldane and G. Ross (Eds.), The
philosophical works of Descartes. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doris, J., and S. Stich. 2006. Moral psychology: Empirical approaches. Stanford ency-
clopedia of philosophy. Accessed online: https://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​
moral-​psych-​emp/​
Dostoevsky, F. 1866/​2001. Crime and punishment. Tr. Constance Garnett. New York:
Dover.

T h i r d - Wav e E x i s t e n t i a l i s m [ 21 ]
22

Dostoevsky, F. 1880/​1976. The brothers Karamazov: The Constance Garnett translation

revised by Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: Norton.
Flanagan, O. 1991. Varieties of moral personality: Ethics and psychological realism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Flanagan, O. 2002. The problem of the soul: Two visions of the mind and how to reconcile
them. New York: Basic Books.
Flanagan, O. 2007. The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Flanagan, O. 2009. One enchanted being: Neuro-​ existentialism and meaning.
Zygon: Journal of Science and Religion 44(1): 41–​49.
Flanagan, O. 2017. The geography of morals: Varieties of moral possibility. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Flanagan, O., and D. Barack. 2010. Neuroexistentialism. EurAmerica 40(3): 573–​590.
Harman, G. 2009. 1st Shearman lecture: Naturalism in moral philosophy. Delivered at
Princeton University on May 19, 2009. Accessed online: https://​www.princeton.
edu/​~harman/​Papers/​Naturalism.pdf
Kierkegaard, S. 1843/​1983. Fear and trembling. Tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. 1843/​1992. Either/​or. Tr. Alastair Hannay. New York: Liveright.
Kierkegaard, S. 1844/​2014. The concept of anxiety: A simple psychologically oriented
deliberation in view of the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin. Tr. Alastair Hannay.
New York: Liveright.
Kierkegaard, S. 1846/​1971. Concluding unscientific postscript. Tr. David F. Swenson and
Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. 1849/​ 1998. The sickness unto death. Tr. Alastair Hannay.
New York: Liveright.
Morriston, W. 1977. Freedom, determinism, and chance in the early philosophy of
Sartre. The Personalist 58: 236–​248.
Nadelhoffer, T. 2014. Dualism, libertarianism, and scientific skepticism about free
will. In W. Sinnott-​Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: Neuroscience, free will, and
responsibility, vol. 4, pp. 209–​216. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nietzsche, F. 1882/​1974. The gay science. Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. 1883/​1975. Thus spoke Zarathustra. In The portable Nietzsche. Tr. Walter
Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press.
Nietzsche, F. 1886/​ 1989. Beyond good and evil. Tr. Walter Kaufman.
New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. 1887/​ 1969. On the genealogy of morals. Tr. Walter Kaufmann.
New York: Vintage Books.
Ryle, G. 1949/​2001. The concept of mind (with introduction by Daniel C. Dennett).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sartre, J.-​P. 1943/​1992. Being and nothingness. Tr. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington
Square Press.
Sartre, J.-​P. 1946/​2007. Existentialism is a humanism. Tr. Carol Macomber. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Sellars, W. 1963. Science, perception, and reality. London: Humanities Press.
Taylor, C. 1989. Source of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.

[ 22 ] Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso

PART I

Morality, Love, and Emotion

24
CHAPTER 2

The Impact of Social Neuroscience

on Moral Philosophy
PATRICIA SMI TH CHURCHL AND

A n abiding puzzle is where moral motivation comes from.1 Philosophers

have long wanted to understand why we are not overwhelmingly and
always completely selfish. You see me stumble on the staircase coming up
from the subway. You, and strangers nearby, will probably be highly motivated
to help. Why do you care about my plight? Why do we donate blood? It is nei-
ther fun nor lucrative. Why do we care about the fate of elephants?
Moral behavior comes in all sizes—​from minor—​for example, helping a
short person put his luggage in an overhead bin—​to momentous and far-​
reaching, such as traveling to Africa to treat patients infected with Ebola
virus. This action is momentous because you, too, could catch the disease and
die. Some doctors did, and some died.
In this context, by “moral motivation” I shall mean the willingness to incur
a cost to oneself in order to benefit another. Imperfect though it is, that pro-
visional characterization will suffice for the main points I wish to make here.
Sometimes the costs incurred will be in terms of resources such as money or
food, or time and energy, but they can also include opportunities foregone
and reputational costs. Edward Snowden, who did what he did out of moral
conviction, will likely never be allowed to return home and is despised by
many Americans. The fact is, moral values and moral motivation loom large in
human decision-​making and behavior. The question is this: “Why?”

1. The central points in this chapter are drawn from my book, Braintrust ( Churchland
2011). See also my paper, “The Neurobiological Platform for Moral Values” (2014).
26

1. VALUES IN THE NEURONAL CIRCUITRY

It is well understood that self-​oriented values are built into the very structure
of every nervous system. All animals, from worms to whales, are wired to be
motivated to care for their own survival and well-​being. If an animal were to
lack self-​regarding circuitry, it would not last long—​it would become someone
else’s dinner. So, thanks to biological evolution, self-​care is a basic value built
right into the very structure of the brain. The prominent aspects of this cir-
cuitry in the brainstem of mammals are quite well understood, though many
details are not yet nailed down. But caring for others? Sacrificing one’s own
interests for that of others? Where can that come from if biological evolution
is driven by “me” and “my genes?”
Evolutionary biologists have tended to frame this question in terms of
genes for altruism. The setting goes like this: if “altruism” genes happened
to appear in some animals, they would not spread throughout the popula-
tion. That is because the other selfish animals in the neighborhood would take
advantage and out-​compete the altruistic animals. They would not survive
long enough to reproduce and spread their altruistic genes. One hypothesis,
therefore, is that altruism probably is not a product of evolution; morality
must be taught (Dawkins 1976).
Two major problems thwart this hypothesis. First, studies of preverbal
infants as young as 3–​6 months of age indicate that, by and large, the sub-
jects are well able to distinguish between nice and nasty puppets and to rec-
ognize the difference between helpful puppets and obstructing puppets. They
tend to prefer the helpful ones (Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007). There is no
evidence that these infants have been grilled on the desirability of kindness
over unkindness or, even if they had, that they would have understood. Much
remains to be done to assess the significance of these studies, but, for present
purposes, they do at the very least suggest that it might be useful to consider
what infants early in their development have by way of moral sense.
The second problem concerns nonhuman mammals and birds. Some mam-
mals, such as marmoset monkeys, are intensely social, the males taking
a major role in the caring for the offspring and even alloparenting orphan
infants. This has also been reported in five cases involving orphan chimpan-
zees adopted by males who are not their biological fathers.
Frans deWaal and colleagues have documented consolation behavior
in chimpanzees, where one animal may console by touching and grooming
another who has been defeated in a squabble, for example (deWaal 1989;
DeWaal and van Roosmalen 1979). DeWaal has also documented prosocial
choice in monkeys (deWaal, Leimgruber, and Greenberg 2008). In this experi-
ment, one monkey is given two food items, and he can share one with a friend
or keep them both. Prosocial choice is regularly, though not always, seen.
These behaviors may not be as dramatic as joining Doctors Without Borders,

[ 26 ] Patricia Smith Churchland

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Nor will it less delight the attentive sage,
To observe that instinct, which, unerring, guides
The brutal race, which mimicks reason’s lore,
And oft transcends. Heaven-taught, the roebuck swift
Loiters at ease before the driving pack,
And mocks their vain pursuit; nor far he flies,
But checks his ardour, till the steaming scent,
That freshens on the blade, provokes their rage.
Urged to their speed, his weak deluded foes,
Soon flag fatigued; strain’d to excess each nerve,
Each slacken’d sinew fails; they pant, they foam:
Then o’er the lawn he bounds, o’er the high hills
Stretches secure, and leaves the scatter’d crowd,
To puzzle in the distant vale below.

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 15-38.

 ’Tis instinct that directs the jealous hare
To choose her soft abode: with step reversed,
She forms the doubling maze; then, ere the morn
Peeps through the clouds, leaps to her close recess.
As wandering shepherds, on the Arabian plains,
No settled residence observe, but shift
Their moving camp; now, on some cooler hill,
With cedars crown’d, court the refreshing breeze;
And then, below, where trickling streams distil
From some penurious source, their thirst allay,
And feed their fainting flocks. So the wise hares
Oft quit their seats, lest some more curious eye
Should mark their haunts, and by dark treacherous wiles
Plot their destruction; or, perchance, in hopes
Of plenteous forage, near the ranker mead,
Or matted blade, wary and close they sit.
When spring shines forth, season of love and joy,
In the moist marsh, ’mong beds of rushes hid,
They cool their boiling blood: when summer suns
Bake the cleft earth, to thick wide-waving fields
Of corn full grown, they lead their helpless young:
But when autumnal torrents, and fierce rains
Deluge the vale, in the dry crumbling bank
Their forms they delve, and cautiously avoid

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 39-63.

The dripping covert; yet when winter’s cold
Their limbs benumbs, thither, with speed return’d,
In the long grass they skulk, or, shrinking, creep
Among the wither’d leaves: thus changing still,
As fancy prompts them, or as food invites.
But every season carefully observed,
The inconstant winds, the fickle element,
The wise experienced huntsman soon may find
His subtle, various game; nor waste in vain
His tedious hours, till his impatient hounds,
With disappointment vex’d, each springing lark
Babbling pursue, far scatter’d o’er the fields.
Now golden autumn from her open lap
Her fragrant bounties showers; the fields are shorn;
Inwardly smiling, the proud farmer views
The rising pyramids that grace his yard,
And counts his large increase; his barns are stored,
And groaning staddles bend beneath their load.
All now is free as air, and the gay pack
In the rough bristly stubbles range, unblamed;
No widow’s tears o’erflow, no secret curse
Swells in the farmer’s breast, which his pale lips
Trembling conceal, by his fierce landlord awed:
But courteous now, he levels every fence,
Joins in the common cry, and halloos loud,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 64-88.

Charm’d with the rattling thunder of the field.
Oh bear me, some kind power invisible,
To that extended lawn, where the gay court
View the swift racers, stretching to the goal!
Games more renown’d, and a far nobler train,
Than proud Elean fields could boast of old.
Oh! were a Theban lyre not wanting here,
And Pindar’s voice, to do their merit right!
Or to those spacious plains, where the strain’d eye,
In the wide prospect lost, beholds at last
Sarum’s proud spire, that o’er the hills ascends,
And pierces through the clouds. Or to thy downs,
Fair Cotswold, where the well-breathed beagle climbs,
With matchless speed, thy green aspiring brow,
And leaves the lagging multitude behind.
Hail, gentle dawn! mild blushing goddess, hail!
Rejoiced, I see thy purple mantle spread
O’er half the skies, gems pave thy radiant way,
And orient pearls from every shrub depend.
Farewell, Cleora; here deep sunk in down,
Slumber secure, with happy dreams amused,
Till grateful steams shall tempt thee to receive
Thy early meal, or thy officious maids,
The toilet placed, shall urge thee to perform
The important work. Me other joys invite,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 89-113.

The horn sonorous calls, the pack awaked,
Their matins chant, nor brook my long delay.
My courser hears their voice; see there, with ears
And tail erect, neighing, he paws the ground;
Fierce rapture kindles in his reddening eyes,
And boils in every vein. As captive boys,
Cow’d by the ruling rod, and haughty frowns
Of pedagogues severe, from their hard tasks
If once dismiss’d, no limits can contain
The tumult raised within their little breasts,
But give a loose to all their frolick play:
So from their kennel rush the joyous pack;
A thousand wanton gaieties express
Their inward ecstasy, their pleasing sport
Once more indulged, and liberty restored.
The rising sun, that o’er the horizon peeps,
As many colours from their glossy skins
Beaming reflects, as paint the various bow,
When April showers descend. Delightful scene!
Where all around is gay, men, horses, dogs;
And in each smiling countenance appears
Fresh blooming health, and universal joy.
Huntsman, lead on! Behind, the clustering pack
Submiss attend, hear with respect thy whip
Loud-clanging, and thy harsher voice obey:

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 114-138.

Spare not the straggling cur, that wildly roves,
But let thy brisk assistant, on his back,
Imprint thy just resentments; let each lash
Bite to the quick, till, howling, he return,
And, whining, creep amid the trembling crowd.
Here, on this verdant spot, where nature kind,
With double blessings crowns the farmer’s hopes;
Where flowers autumnal spring, and the rank mead
Affords the wandering hares a rich repast,
Throw off thy ready pack. See, where they spread
And range around, and dash the glittering dew.
If some stanch hound, with his authentick voice,
Avow the recent trail, the justling tribe
Attend his call; then with one mutual cry
The welcome news confirm, and echoing hills
Repeat the pleasing tale. See, how they thread
The brakes, and up yon furrow drive along:
But quick they back recoil, and wisely check
Their eager haste; then, o’er the fallow’d ground
How leisurely they work, and many a pause
The harmonious concert breaks; till more assured,
With joys redoubled the low vallies ring.
What artful labyrinths perplex their way!
Ah, there she lies! how close! she pants, she doubts
If now she lives; she trembles as she sits,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 139-163.

With horror seized! The wither’d grass, that clings
Around her head, of the same russet hue,
Almost deceived my sight, had not her eyes,
With life full beaming, her vain wiles betray’d.
At distance draw thy pack, let all be hush’d,
No clamour loud, no frantick joy be heard,
Lest the wild hound run gadding o’er the plain,
Untractable, nor hear thy chiding voice.
Now gently put her off; see how direct
To her known meuse she flies! Here, huntsman, bring,
But without hurry, all thy jolly hounds,
And calmly lay them in. How low they stoop,
And seem to plough the ground! then, all at once,
With greedy nostrils, snuff the fuming steam,
That glads their fluttering hearts. As winds, let loose
From the dark caverns of the blustering god,
They burst away, and sweep the dewy lawn.
Hope gives them wings, while she’s spurr’d on by fear.
The welkin rings; men, dogs, hills, rocks, and woods,
In the full concert join. Now, my brave youths,
Stripp’d for the chase, give all your souls to joy!
See how their coursers, than the mountain roe
More fleet, the verdant carpet skim; thick clouds
Snorting they breathe, their shining hoofs scarce print
The grass unbruised; with emulation fired,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 164-188.

They strain to lead the field, top the barr’d gate,
O’er the deep ditch exulting bound, and brush
The thorny-twining hedge: the riders bend
O’er their arch’d necks; with steady hands, by turns
Indulge their speed, or moderate their rage.
Where are their sorrows, disappointments, wrongs,
Vexations, sickness, cares? All, all are gone,
And with the panting winds lag far behind.
Huntsman! her gait observe; if in wide rings
She wheel her mazy way, in the same round
Persisting still, she’ll foil the beaten track.
But, if she fly, and with the favouring wind
Urge her bold course, less intricate thy task;
Push on thy pack. Like some poor exiled wretch,
The frighted chase leaves her late dear abodes,
O’er plains remote she stretches far away,
Ah, never to return! for greedy death
Hovering exults, secure to seize his prey.
Hark! from yon covert, where those towering oaks
Above the humble copse aspiring rise,
What glorious triumphs burst, in every gale,
Upon our ravish’d ears! the hunters shout,
The clanging horns swell their sweet-winding notes;
The pack, wide-opening, load the trembling air
With various melody; from tree to tree

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 189-213.

The propagated cry redoubling bounds,
And winged zephyrs waft the floating joy
Through all the regions near. Afflictive birch
No more the schoolboy dreads, his prison broke,
Scampering he flies, nor heeds his master’s call;
The weary traveller forgets his road,
And climbs the adjacent hill; the ploughman leaves
The unfinish’d furrow; nor his bleating flocks
Are now the shepherd’s joy; men, boys, and girls,
Desert the unpeopled village; and wild crowds
Spread o’er the plain, by the sweet frenzy seized.
Look, how she pants! and o’er yon opening glade
Slips, glancing, by; while, at the further end,
The puzzling pack unravel wile by wile,
Maze within maze. The covert’s utmost bound
Slily she skirts; behind them, cautious, creeps,
And, in that very track, so lately stain’d
By all the steaming crowd, seems to pursue
The foe she flies. Let cavillers deny
That brutes have reason; sure, ’tis something more,
’Tis Heaven directs, and stratagems inspires,
Beyond the short extent of human thought.
But hold—I see her from the covert break;
Sad, on yon little eminence, she sits;
Intent she listens, with one ear erect,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 214-238.

Pondering, and doubtful, what new course to take,
And how to escape the fierce blood-thirsty crew,
That still urge on, and still, in vollies loud,
Insult her woes, and mock her sore distress.
As now, in louder peals, the loaded winds
Bring on the gathering storm, her fears prevail;
And o’er the plain, and o’er the mountain’s ridge,
Away she flies; nor ships, with wind and tide,
And all their canvas wings, scud half so fast.
Once more, ye jovial train, your courage try,
And each clean courser’s speed. We scour along,
In pleasing hurry and confusion toss’d;
Oblivion to be wish’d. The patient pack
Hang on the scent, unwearied; up they climb,
And ardent we pursue; our labouring steeds
We press, we gore; till once the summit gain’d,
Painfully panting, there we breathe awhile;
Then, like a foaming torrent, pouring down
Precipitant, we smoke along the vale.
Happy the man, who, with unrivall’d speed,
Can pass his fellows, and with pleasure view
The struggling pack; how, in the rapid course,
Alternate they preside, and, justling, push
To guide the dubious scent; how giddy youth
Oft, babbling, errs, by wiser age reproved;

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 239-262.

How, niggard of his strength, the wise old hound
Hangs in the rear, till some important point
Rouse all his diligence, or till the chase
Sinking he finds; then to the head he springs,
With thirst of glory fired, and wins the prize.
Huntsman, take heed; they stop in full career:
Yon crowding flocks, that at a distance gaze,
Have haply foil’d the turf. See! that old hound,
How busily he works, but dares not trust
His doubtful sense; draw yet a wider ring.
Hark! now again the chorus fills: as bells
Sallied awhile, at once their peal renew,
And high in air the tuneful thunder rolls.
See, how they toss, with animated rage,
Recovering all they lost!—-- That eager haste
Some doubling wile foreshows.—Ah, yet once more
They’re check’d!—hold back with speed—on either hand
They flourish round—— even yet persist—’tis right:
Away they spring; the rustling stubbles bend
Beneath the driving storm. Now the poor chase
Begins to flag, to her last shifts reduced:
From brake to brake she flies, and visits all
Her well-known haunts, where once she ranged secure,
With love and plenty bless’d. See! there she goes;

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 263-287.

She reels along, and, by her gait, betrays
Her inward weakness. See, how black she looks!
The sweat, that clogs the obstructed pores, scarce leaves
A languid scent. And now, in open view,
See, see! she flies; each eager hound exerts
His utmost speed, and stretches every nerve.
How quick she turns, their gaping jaws eludes,
And yet a moment lives; till round enclosed
By all the greedy pack, with infant screams
She yields her breath, and there reluctant dies!
So, when the furious Bacchanals assail’d
Threïcian Orpheus, poor ill-fated bard!
Loud was the cry; hills, woods, and Hebrus’ banks,
Return’d their clamorous rage: distress’d he flies,
Shifting from place to place, but flies in vain;
For eager they pursue, till panting, faint,
By noisy multitudes o’erpower’d, he sinks,
To the relentless crowd a bleeding prey.
The huntsman now, a deep incision made,
Shakes out, with hands impure, and dashes down,
Her reeking entrails, and yet quivering heart.
These claim the pack; the bloody perquisite
For all their toils. Stretch’d on the ground she lies,
A mangled corse; in her dim glaring eyes
Cold death exults, and stiffens every limb.

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 288-312.

Awed, by the threatening whip, the furious hounds
Around her bay; or, at their master’s foot,
Each happy favourite courts his kind applause,
With humble adulation cowering low.
All now is joy. With cheeks full-blown they wind
Her solemn dirge, while the loud-opening pack
The concert swell, and hills and dales return
The sadly-pleasing sounds. Thus the poor hare,
A puny, dastard animal! but versed
In subtle wiles, diverts the youthful train.
But if thy proud aspiring soul disdains
So mean a prey, delighted with the pomp,
Magnificence, and grandeur of the chase,
Hear what the Muse from faithful records sings.
Why, on the banks of Jumnah, Indian stream,
Line within line, rise the pavilions proud,
Their silken streamers waving in the wind?
Why neighs the warrior horse? from tent to tent,
Why press in crowds the buzzing multitude?
Why shines the polish’d helm, and pointed lance,
This way and that, far-beaming o’er the plain?
Nor Visapour, nor Golconda rebel;
Nor the great Sophy, with his numerous host,
Lays waste the provinces; nor glory fires
To rob and to destroy, beneath the name

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 313-337.

And specious guise of war. A nobler cause
Calls Aurengzebe to arms. No cities sacked,
No mothers tears, no helpless orphans cries,
No violated leagues, with sharp remorse,
Shall sting the conscious victor: but mankind
Shall hail him good and just: for ’tis on beasts
He draws his vengeful sword; on beasts of prey,
Full fed with human gore. See, see, he comes!
Imperial Delhi, opening wide her gates,
Pours out her thronging legions, bright in arms,
And all the pomp of war. Before them sound
Clarions and trumpets, breathing martial airs,
And bold defiance. High, upon his throne,
Borne on the back of his proud elephant,
Sits the great chief of Timur’s glorious race:
Sublime he sits, amid the radiant blaze
Of gems and gold. Omrahs about him crowd,
And rein the Arabian steed, and watch his nod:
And potent Rajahs, who themselves preside
O’er realms of wide extent; but here, submiss,
Their homage pay; alternate kings and slaves.
Next these, with prying eunuchs girt around,
The fair sultanas of his court; a troop
Of chosen beauties, but, with care, conceal’d
From each intrusive eye; one look is death.

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 338-362.

Ah! cruel Eastern law! had kings a power
But equal to their wild tyrannick will,
To rob us of the sun’s all-cheering ray,
Were less severe. The vulgar close the march,
Slaves and artificers; and Delhi mourns
Her empty and depopulated streets.
Now, at the camp arrived, with stern review,
Through groves of spears, from file to file, he darts
His sharp experienced eye; their order marks,
Each in his station rang’d, exact and firm,
Till in the boundless line his sight is lost.
Not greater multitudes in arms appear’d,
On these extended plains, when Ammon’s son
With mighty Porus in dread battle join’d,
The vassal world the prize. Nor was that host
More numerous of old, which the great king
Pour’d out on Greece, from all the unpeopled East;
That bridged the Hellespont from shore to shore,
And drank the rivers dry. Mean while, in troops,
The busy hunter-train mark out the ground,
A wide circumference; full many a league
In compass round; woods, rivers, hills, and plains,
Large provinces; enough to gratify
Ambition’s highest aim, could reason bound
Man’s erring will. Now sit, in close divan,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 363-387.

The mighty chiefs of this prodigious host.
He, from the throne, high-eminent presides;
Gives out his mandates proud, laws of the chase,
From ancient records drawn. With reverence low,
And prostrate at his feet, the chiefs receive
His irreversible decrees, from which
To vary, is to die. Then, his brave bands
Each to his station leads, encamping round,
Till the wide circle is completely form’d.
Where decent order reigns: what these command,
Those execute with speed, and punctual care,
In all the strictest discipline of war;
As if some watchful foe, with bold insult,
Hung lowering o’er the camp. The high resolve,
That flies on wings, through all the encircling line,
Each motion steers, and animates the whole.
So, by the sun’s attractive power controll’d,
The planets in their spheres roll round his orb;
On all he shines, and rules the great machine.
Ere yet the morn dispels the fleeting mists,
The signal given, by the loud trumpet’s voice,
Now high in air the imperial standard waves,
Emblazon’d rich with gold, and glittering gems;
And, like a sheet of fire, through the dun gloom
Streaming meteorous. The soldiers’ shouts,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 388-412.

And all the brazen instruments of war,
With mutual clamour, and united din,
Fill the large concave: while, from camp to camp,
They catch the varied sounds, floating in air.
Round all the wide circumference, tigers fell
Shrink at the noise; deep in his gloomy den,
The lion starts, and morsels, yet unchew’d,
Drop from his trembling jaws. Now, all at once,
Onward they march, embattled, to the sound
Of martial harmony; fifes, cornets, drums,
That rouse the sleepy soul to arms, and bold
Heroick deeds. In parties, here and there
Detach’d, o’er hill and dale, the hunters range,
Inquisitive; strong dogs, that match in fight
The boldest brute, around their masters wait,
A faithful guard. No haunt unsearch’d, they drive
From every covert, and from every den,
The lurking savages. Incessant shouts
Re-echo through the woods, and kindling fires
Gleam from the mountain tops; the forest seems
One mingling blaze: like flocks of sheep, they fly
Before the flaming brand: fierce lions, pards,
Boars, tigers, bears, and wolves; a dreadful crew
Of grim blood-thirsty foes! growling along,
They stalk, indignant; but fierce vengeance still

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 413-437.

Hangs pealing on their rear, and pointed spears
Present immediate death. Soon as the night,
Wrapp’d in her sable veil, forbids the chase,
They pitch their tents, in even ranks, around
The circling camp: the guards are placed; and fires,
At proper distances ascending, rise,
And paint the horizon with their ruddy light.
So, round some island’s shore of large extent,
Amid the gloomy horrors of the night,
The billows, breaking on the pointed rocks,
Seem all one flame, and the bright circuit wide
Appears a bulwark of surrounding fire.
What dreadful howlings, and what hideous roar,
Disturb those peaceful shades! where erst the bird,
That glads the night, had cheer’d the listening groves
With sweet complainings. Through the silent gloom
Oft they the guards assail; as oft repell’d
They fly reluctant, with hot boiling rage
Stung to the quick, and mad with wild despair.
Thus, day by day, they still the chase renew;
At night encamp; till now, in straighter bounds,
The circle lessens, and the beasts perceive
The wall that hems them in on every side.
And now their fury bursts, and knows no mean;
From man they turn, and point their ill judged rage

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 438-462.

Against their fellow brutes. With teeth and claws
The civil war begins; grappling they tear;
Lions on tigers prey, and bears on wolves:
Horrible discord! till the crowd behind
Shouting pursue, and part the bloody fray.
At once their wrath subsides; tame as the lamb,
The lion hangs his head; the furious pard,
Cow’d and subdued, flies from the face of man,
Nor bears one glance of his commanding eye:
So abject is a tyrant in distress.
At last, within the narrow plain confined,
A listed field, mark’d out for bloody deeds,
An amphitheatre, more glorious far
Than ancient Rome could boast, they crowd in heaps,
Dismay’d, and quite appall’d. In meet array,
Sheath’d in refulgent arms, a noble band
Advance; great lords of high imperial blood,
Early resolved to assert the royal race,
And prove, by glorious deeds, their valour’s growth
Mature, ere yet the callow down has spread
Its curling shade. On bold Arabian steeds,
With decent pride they sit, that fearless hear
The lion’s dreadful roar; and, down the rock,
Swift shooting, plunge; or o’er the mountain’s ridge
Stretching along, the greedy tiger leave,

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 463-487.

Panting behind. On foot their faithful slaves,
With javelins arm’d, attend; each watchful eye
Fix’d on his youthful care, for him alone
He fears; and, to redeem his life, unmoved,
Would lose his own. The mighty Aurengzebe,
From his high-elevated throne, beholds
His blooming race; revolving in his mind,
What once he was, in his gay spring of life,
When vigour strung his nerves: parental joy
Melts in his eyes, and flushes in his cheeks.
Now the loud trumpet sounds a charge: the shouts
Of eager hosts, through the circling line,
And the wild howlings of the beasts within,
Rend wide the welkin! flights of arrows, wing’d
With death, and javelins, launch’d from every arm,
Gall sore the brutal bands, with many a wound
Gored through and through. Despair at last prevails,
When fainting nature shrinks, and rouses all
Their drooping courage: swell’d with furious rage,
Their eyes dart fire; and on the youthful band
They rush implacable. They their broad shields
Quick interpose; on each devoted head
Their flaming falchions, as the bolts of Jove,
Descend unerring. Prostrate on the ground
The grinning monsters lie, and their foul gore

BOOK II THE CHASE v. 488-511.