The Ethical Primate - Humans, Freedom and Morality (Hardcover)

The author argues that the unrealistic isolation of mind from body in reductive scientific ideologies still causes painful confusion. Such ideologies present crude pictures which are not good science, since they ignore the manifest importance of the higher human faculties. Nor is there room for any realistic notion of the self. Why should these theories insist on only one kind of answer? There are as many explanations as there are viewpoints from which questions arise - subjective as well as objective, practical as well as theoretical. Human morality necessarily arises from human freedom: we are uniquely free beings in that we are aware of our conflicts of motive, but those conflicts, and our ability to resolve them, are part of our natural inheritance. Though we are in many ways divided, we share the difficult project of wholeness with other organisms. What matters for our freedom is the recognition of our genuine agency, our slight but real power to grasp and arbitrate our inner conflicts.