Author: Huenemann

This Atlantic article is lengthy, but very much worth reading. The author tells some amazing criminal stories along the lines of “my brain made me do it,” and recommends we stop thinking in terms of retribution and think solely along lines of rehabilitation and deterrence. The upshot:

The crux of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology, and to what extent was it him?,” because we now understand that there is no meaningful distinction between a person’s biology and his decision-making. They are inseparable.

While our current style of punishment rests on a bedrock of personal volition and blame, our modern understanding of the brain suggests a different approach. Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot. It is a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.

Instead of debating culpability, we should focus on what to do, moving forward, with an accused lawbreaker. I suggest that the legal system has to become forward-looking, primarily because it can no longer hope to do otherwise. As science complicates the question of culpability, our legal and social policy will need to shift toward a different set of questions: How is a person likely to behave in the future? Are criminal actions likely to be repeated? Can this person be helped toward pro-social behavior? How can incentives be realistically structured to deter crime?

Hah! Here’s the proper comic antidote to my schoolmarmish posting about electronic distractions:

Young is a philosopher currently at Wake Forest, who recently wrote a great biography of Nietzsche. Here is a thoughtful interview with him on university life, philosophy in general, and differences between analytic and continental philosophy. An excerpt:

Heidegger observed that in the age of electronic media the principle existential issue is ‘homelessness’, lack of ‘dwelling’. One dwells when there are things that are ‘near’ to one. But if some things are ‘near’ others have to be ‘far’. In electronic modernity, however, the ‘near’-‘far’ distinction is disappearing, things are assuming a ‘uniform distancelessness’. So the idea of a dwelling place is under threat. But there is more to dwelling than the idea of a special geographical region. Dwelling also depends on what Heidegger variously calls ‘the holy’ and ‘the poetic’. If you possess a dwelling place then it has, for you, a dimension that does not show up in a photograph – unless you are a very great photographer. One of the things Heidegger tries to do in his own writing is to convey the sense of this hidden, poetic, dimension. At the end of perhaps the greatest of his later works, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, he writes that ‘as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer’. This is my experience of reading and thinking with Heidegger, which is why I return to him again and again. It is, I guess, a kind of spiritual therapy.

“The results suggest that traditional lecture-style teaching in U.S. middle schools is less of a problem than is often believed.” There is an article here reporting a pretty narrow study which suggests this, but the commentary after the article is interesting. The upshot of the discussion, in my view, is that with some lecturers on some kinds of topics you can learn a whole lot; but some things you can’t learn by lecture, and some people really shouldn’t be lecturing at all. Ah, the fruits of social science.

Yes, I’m the most reductionistic philosopher on campus, but even my eyebrows went up when I read this article about the moral significance of oxytocin:

“It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles,” [philosopher Patricia Churchland] says — surely not a phrase John Rawls ever uttered.

She told the story at the natural-history museum, in late March. Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar “that naifs like me can’t tell them apart,” she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum’s usual patrons—the word “neuroscience” these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren’t their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)

“As a philosopher, I was stunned,” Churchland said, archly. “I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way.”

Well, at least in the case of voles, let us admit. Should we then infer that all that moral reasoning we go through is really just the sloshing of oxytocin? That’s quite a jump.