William A. Rottschaefer

This paper continues the dialogue between my right-wing-Sellars and James O’Shea’s middle-Sellars. In it, I reply to O’Shea’s middle-Sellars critique of my right-wing-Sellarsian criticism of his recent attempt (Wilfrid Sellars: Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn) to develop an understanding of Sellars’s overall view that avoids the problems of both right and left-wing-Sellarsians. In his contribution to this issue O’Shea argues that Sellars follows a middle way between left and right-wing-Sellarsians by advocating a refined Kantian naturalist account of human knowledge. In so doing he finds my right-wing interpretation of Sellars is not true to the real Sellars. Here I show that O’Shea’s critique of my right-wing-Sellars fails and that the real Sellars is a right-wing-Sellars, a scientific naturalist.

E. O. Wilson argues that we must use scientifically based reason to solve the values dilemma created by the loss of a transcendent foundation for values. Peter Singer allows that sociobiology can help us understand the evolutionary origin of ethics, but denies the claim that sociobiology or any science can furnish us with ultimate ethical principles. We argue that Singer's critique of Wilson's attempt to bridge the gap between fact and value using empirical reason is unconvincing and that Singer's own ethical principle of disinterestedness requires major support from empirical reason and is not sustainable by pure reason alone.

In a recent paper in this journal (Rottschaefer and Martinsen 1990) we have proposed a view of Darwinian evolutionary metaethics that we believe improves upon Michael Ruse's (e.g., Ruse 1986) proposals by claiming that there are evolutionary based objective moral values and that a Darwinian naturalistic account of the moral good in terms of human fitness can be given that avoids the naturalistic fallacy in both its definitional and derivational forms while providing genuine, even if limited, justifications for substantive ethical claims. Jonathan Barrett (this issue) has objected to our proposal contending that we cannot hold for the reality of supervenient moral properties without either falling foul of the naturalistic fallacy or suffering the consequences of postulating inexplicable moral properties. In reply, we show that Barrett's explicit arguments that we commit either the definitional or derivational form of the naturalistic fallacy fail and that his naturalistic intuitions that supervenience explanations of moral properties by nonmoral properties force us into what we call the explanatory form of the naturalistic fallacy also fail. Positively, his objections help us to clarify the nature of the naturalistic fallacy within an evolutionary based naturalistic ethics and to point out the proper role of both supervenience explanations and moral explanations in such an ethics.

Michael Ruse has proposed in his recent book Taking Darwin Seriously and elsewhere a new Darwinian ethics distinct from traditional evolutionary ethics, one that avoids the latter's inadequate accounts of the nature of morality and its failed attempts to provide a naturalistic justification of morality. Ruse argues for a sociobiologically based account of moral sentiments, and an evolutionary based casual explanation of their function, rejecting the possibility of ultimate ethical justification. We find that Ruse's proposal distorts, overextends and weakens both Darwinism and naturalism. So we propose an alternative Darwinian metaethics that both remedies the problems in Ruse's proposal and shows how a Darwinian naturalistic account of the moral good in terms of human fitness avoids the naturalistic fallacy and can provide genuine, even if limited, justifications for substantive ethical claims. Thus, we propose to really take Darwin seriously.

In his recent The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics, Paul Farber has given a negative assessment of the last one hundred years of attempts in Anglo-American philosophy, beginning with Darwin, to develop an evolutionary ethics. Farber identifies some version of the naturalistic fallacy as one of the central sources for the failures of evolutionary ethics. For this reason, and others, Farber urges that though it has its attraction, evolutionary ethics is a temptation to be resisted. In this discussion I identify three major, historically relevant forms of the naturalistic fallacy, the (1) the deductive, (2) genetic, and (3) open question forms and argue that none of them pose an intrinsic problem for evolutionary ethics. I conclude that on this score at least there is no reason to resist temptation.

. Using as a model contemporary analyses of scientific cognition, Ian Harbour has claimed that religious cognition is neither immediate nor inferential but has the structure of interpreted experience. Although I contend that Barbour has failed to establish his claim, I believe his views about the similarities between scientific and religious cognition are well founded. Thus on that basis I offer an alternative proposal that theistic religious cognition is essentially inferential and that religious experience is in fact the use of inferentially acquired religious beliefs to interpret ordinary nonreligious experiences

Moral agency is a central feature of both religious and secular conceptions of human beings. In this paper I outline a scientific naturalistic model of moral agency making use of current findings and theories in sociobiology,developmental psychology, and social cognitive theory. The model provides answers to four central questions about moral agency: what it is, how it is acquired, how it is put to work, and how it is justified. I suggest that this model can provide religious and secular moral theories with a basis for a common understanding of moral agency

Examining James M. Gustafson's views on the relationships between the sciences, theology, and ethics from a scientifically based naturalistic philosophical perspective, I concur with his rejection of separatist and antagonistic interactionist positions and his adherence to a mutually supportive interactionist position with both descriptive and normative features. I next explore three aspects of this interactionism: religious empiricism, the connections between facts and values, and the centering of objective values in the divine. Here I find much accord between Gustafson's theocentrism and a scientifically based naturalistic philosophical account of the relationships between the sciences, theology, and ethics.

In Augustinian fashion, James B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright develop a neurotheology that finds evolutionarily based correlations between the functions of the human mind‐brain and the roles God plays in human life. I argue that their assumptions of anthropomorphism, that the human mind‐brain must conceptualize its environment in human terms, and realism, that anthropomorphism is correct, are evolutionarily unlikely. I conclude that the image of God (imago dei) the authors find reflected in the human mind‐brain appears to derive from their Christian religious commitments rather than from evolutionary theory.

B.F. Skinner allures us with the possibilities of turning the stones of materialistic rewards into the bread of human values. He tempts us by assuring success in achieving our goals through behavioral science, if only we give up our autonomy. He offers the power of complete control over our behaviors, on condition that we relinquish responsibility for our lives to a technological elite. Is B. F. Skinner a flesh‐and‐blood Grand Inquisitor? This essay tries to persuade the reader that Skinner's offers are worth considering.

An important question for a naturalized philosophical psychology is what constitutes moral agency (MA). The two prominent scientific theories to which such a philosophical approach might appeal, those of cognitive developmental theory (CDT) and social learning theory (SLT), currently face an investigative dilemma: The better theories of the acquisition of beliefs and the performance of action based on them, the SLTs, seem to be irrelevant to the phenomenon of MA and the theories that seem to be relevant, the CDTs, are unsatisfactory in their accounts of acquisition and action. In this paper I take up the cause of SLT accounts of MA. Critics of SLT accounts of MA can be interpreted as arguing that they are irrelevant to MA because they lack one or more of five functional criteria that require MA to be integral morally motivated cognitive agency. I argue that SLT accounts of MA, and specifically Bandura's social cognitive theory, (SCT), when applied to issues of MA, meet these criteria. Assuming the merits of SLT explanations of both the acquisition of beliefs and the performance of actions based on them, I conclude that SLTs generally, and specifically Bandura's SCT, are promising candidates for explaining MA. If so, they merit the attention of naturalistic philosophical psychologists.

Kenneth Schaffner has argued that evolutionary theory, strictly understood, cannot support the functional ascriptions used in adaptational functional explanations. Although the causal ascription clause in these ascriptions is supported, the goal-ascription clause cannot be, since it imports anthropocentric features deriving from a vulgar understanding of evolutionary theory. I argue that an etiological interpretation of selectional explanations sanctions both the causal and goal-ascription clauses of functional ascriptions and provides a way to understand teleological explanation within evolutionary biology

This paper sketches an alternative answer to James Jones's recent attempt to explore the implications of cognitive social learning theories of personality for issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and religious studies. Since the 1960s, two cognitive revolutions have taken place in scientific psychology: the first made cognition central to theories of perception, memory, problem solving, and so on; the second made cognition central to theories of learning and behavior, among others. Cognitive social learning theories find their place in the latter revolution. Because of an ongoing naturalistic revolution in philosophy, these cognitive revolutions in psychology are having a profound effect on both descriptive and normative issues in epistemology and philosophy of science. From the naturalistic perspective, philosophy cannot adequately pursue its goals without the contributions of the empirical sciences, including psychology. The author concludes that the cognitive revolutions in psychology and the naturalistic revolution in philosophy have similar descriptive and normative import for the study of religion.

Arguably, one of the most exciting recent advances in moral philosophy is the ongoing scientific naturalization of normative ethics and metaethics, in particular moral psychology. A relatively neglected area in these improvements that is centrally important for developing a scientifically based naturalistic metaethics concerns the nature and acquisition of successful moral agency. In this paper I lay out two examples of how empirically based findings help us to understand and explain some cases of successful moral agency. These are research in moral internalization and aggression management. Using these examples, I sketch some lessons for investigating successful moral learning and moral action. My proposal reflects a common theme in scientifically based philosophy generally: the shift from the armchair methods of analyzing concepts and finding a priori foundations, the enterprise of first philosophy, to an effort to study the phenomena themselves, using empirical findings and theories to answer philosophical questions about these phenomena, an endeavor recently characterized as second philosophy

Sellars’ verbal behaviorism demands that linguistic episodes be conceptual in an underivative sense and his theoretical mentalism that thoughts as postulated theoretical entities be modelled on linguistic behaviors. Marras has contended that Sellars’ own methodology requires that semantic categories be theoretical. Thus linguistic behaviors can be conceptual in only a derivative sense. Further he claims that overt linguistic behaviors cannot serve as a model for all thought because thought is primarily symbolic. I support verbal behaviorism by showing that semantic categories are in the first instance teleological explanatory categories and consequently can be observational. And I show how theoretical mentalism can be maintained even though thought is primarily symbolic

Is metaphysics possible? If so, what would it be like? And what would make it possible? David Harbert offers a positive answer to the first question and an existential phenomenological characterization of metaphysics as a reply to the second. What makes such a metaphysics possible are, according to Harbert, the personal, interpersonal, and person-related structures of being which reveal themselves in the peak moments of ordinary experience and in similar moments of aesthetic and religious experience.