Abstract

This is a good time for determinists. One hundred and fifty years of Darwinian thought have undermined belief in the exceptional status of human beings. Biological reductionism is in the ascendant. One of its most recent manifestations—evolutionary psychology, which has been widely influential both within and beyond academe—argues that individual behaviour and even social institutions are expressions of genes, the vast majority of which are common to humans and the higher primates. The implicit, largely unconscious, principles that inform gene-determined human behaviour are rooted in their survival value; and the entity whose survival is served is not the conscious organism but the genome itself. Since the actual reasons for our actions are beyond our ken, they are not truly voluntary. Yet more radical attacks on the notion of human freedom have come from neuroscience: ever more sophisticated and seemingly complete accounts of the human mind in terms of the functioning of our brains, appear to embed even higher level awareness in the material world.