Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Churchland | 123
are to survive. (In passing, lest we confuse causes with reasons, we
should note that this is less an account of the origins of morality than
an explanation of its point.) And surely this is part of the point of
morality. Yet, one of the oldest puzzles about morality is that what
my group needs to survive and flourish may be my own willingness
to suffer or die. “Men need virtues as bees need stings,” Peter Geach
once wrote. “An individual bee may perish by stinging, all the same
bees need stings: an individual man may perish by being brave or
just, all the same men need courage and justice.” 1 The best Churchland
can do to make place for this truth is to note that altruistic
behavior in the past might (via a complicated scenario that is purely
speculative) have spread throughout the population.
However we account for such sacrificial behavior, Churchland’s
depiction of a neurobiological foundation for morality cannot explain
our experience of intentional action. A person is not simply
a place where certain psychological states occur. A person is present
in his actions without disappearing entirely into them—present in
but also distanced from them. Activities of the brain do surely provide,
as Churchland puts it, “a biological substratum” for the mind’s
thoughts and intentions, but those mental activities in turn interact
with and shape the brain. Our thoughts are both located in the brain
and distanced from it—which is why we are capable of what Thomas
Nagel has called “the view from nowhere.”
If we think of morality in Churchland’s way, moral education—
“stories about the glory of courage and the humiliation of cowardice…;
songs about kindness rewarded and sharing blessed”—is not
initiating the young into a set of obligations that unfold the meaning
of human flourishing. It is, instead, simply training them in behaviors
that “solidify social values.” There is all the difference in the
world between indoctrinating the young in a set of norms we find
useful and initiating the young into a set of norms that bind us also,
even when we wish they did not. “We castrate and bid the geldings
be fruitful,” was C. S. Lewis’s description of what moral education
becomes on a view such as she espouses. 2
Churchland’s discussion of embryonic stem cell research is so
lacking in nuance as to be embarrassing. She takes the distinction
between therapeutic and reproductive embryo research to be obvious
and in no need of clarification or argument. She evidently thinks