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Heidi Ravven . The Self beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will . New York : The New Press , 2013. 528 pp.
Book Reviews: Contemporary Jewish Culture and Thought
Heidi Ravven's new book is, as its title indicates, an ambitious critique of our conventional account of morality in general and the idea of free will in particular. It is also a comprehensive, thoroughly interdisciplinary account of the true sources of our moral lives, and how we can most enrich them. Ravven's argument boils down to this: that we simply don't act for the reasons we think we do, and that any truly ethical action lies in being cognizant of the psychological and sociological sources of our ethical (and unethical) motivations. In this respect, Ravven deeply challenges what usually passes for ethics and suggests a new conception, one that will no doubt prompt many to question whether it is an account of ethics at all.
In both her critique of the idea of free will and her own ethical theory the sheer range of literature that Ravven employs to ground her argument is impressive. Ravven's book analyzes the Stanford Prison Experiments, Descartes, the educational policies of William Bennett, and contemporary theories of neuroplasticity and systems theory, to give just a few examples. There have been few books in recent years that engage as many disciplines as Ravven's and that are as adept at bringing these various disciplines together. Ravven begins her book with a discussion of the ways in which Americans try to teach their children to be moral and then goes on to analyze the failure of these moral theories to account for the existence of widespread social evil, specifically the Holocaust. The message throughout these first sections of the book is the same: we are not able to appreciate the inadequacies of our moral theories because they are framed as problems of free...