Beyond Good and Evil in the 21st Century: A Roundtable on Neuroscience, Morality, and the 'Cure' for Evil
Overview of the Foundational Paper
At the heart of our most pressing social and personal questions lies a fundamental debate about human nature: are we beings who freely choose our actions, or are we complex biological machines whose behavior is determined by the firing of neurons and the expression of genes? This question, once the domain of philosophers, has gained urgent, practical significance with the rapid advance of neuroscience. Every day, we encounter claims that link aggression to specific brain regions, addiction to neurotransmitter imbalances, and even empathy to particular genetic markers. This shift impacts how we think about everything from criminal justice—should a murderer with a brain tumor be punished or treated?—to our own moral failings. Is 'evil' a choice for which we are responsible, or is it a treatable pathology, a 'circuit disorder in the brain'?
The paper "Are We 'Beyond Good and Evil'? Radical Psychological Materialism and the 'Cure' for Evil" by Charles Webel and Tony Stigliano serves as a critical examination of this modern dilemma. The authors confront what they term "radical psychological materialism," the increasingly prevalent view that all mental phenomena, including our moral lives, can be fully reduced to and explained by brain processes. This "eliminative materialism" suggests that our traditional language of intention, belief, desire, good, and evil is a form of 'folk psychology' that will eventually be replaced by a more precise, scientific vocabulary of neurobiology.
Webel and Stigliano argue forcefully against this position. Drawing on thinkers like Wittgenstein and Chomsky, they posit a significant "explanatory gap" between our understanding of the brain's physical mechanics and our grasp of meaningful human action. They contend that while brains and genes are necessary for us to act, they are not sufficient to explain our actions. To understand moral deliberation and choice, one must also account for a person's embodiment, their language community, and their cultural environment—what the authors call the Umwelt. Consequently, they conclude that good and evil are not properties of the brain but are social constructions. As long as human societies exist, these moral categories will persist, and the dream of a purely scientific 'cure' for evil remains a philosophical and practical impossibility. The contention around these concepts exists because the stakes are incredibly high: at issue is the very foundation of responsibility, justice, and what it means to be human.
The Panelists
To discuss the far-reaching implications of this paper, we assembled a diverse panel of experts, each bringing a unique disciplinary lens to the debate:
- Dr. Iris K. Mercado: A neurophilosopher and leading proponent of eliminative materialism, she argues that moral concepts are pre-scientific placeholders that should be replaced by neurofunctional descriptions.
- Prof. Leda Steinbruck: A philosopher of language from the Wittgensteinian tradition, she critiques materialism as a category mistake, asserting that the meaning of moral terms is found in public practices, not private brain states.
- Dr. Samuel N. Rahman: A cognitive scientist specializing in linguistics and moral grammar, he argues for a persistent "explanatory gap" between neural implementation and computational-level explanations of moral reasoning.
- Prof. Mira Valente: A scholar of Continental philosophy, she uses a Nietzschean framework to critique the politics of pathologizing behavior and questions the very idea of a value-neutral definition of a "healthy" brain.
- Dr. Helena J. Cho: A practicing psychiatrist and clinical researcher, she represents a moderate materialist position, viewing the brain as a necessary but not sufficient condition for agency and advocating for a pragmatic, pluralistic approach to treatment.
- Prof. Arturo Jiménez: A sociologist and anthropologist, he argues that large-scale harm ('evil') is an emergent property of social systems and institutions, not reducible to the biology of individuals.
- Hon. Naomi Okafor, JD, DPhil: A judge and professor of law and philosophy, she focuses on how neuroscience challenges and informs legal concepts of responsibility, culpability, and punishment.
- Dr. Sylvie Marchand: A clinical psychologist and phenomenological researcher, she emphasizes the lived, embodied, and intersubjective nature of moral experience, arguing that reducing the mind to the brain is a clinical and human loss.
Summary of the Discussion
The roundtable discussion, moderated around the core theses of Webel and Stigliano's paper, revealed a deep and complex set of disagreements about the relationship between the brain, the mind, and morality. The conversation organized itself around several key themes: the philosophical viability of materialism, the practical limits of neuroscience in clinical and legal settings, and the broader social and political dimensions of defining 'evil' as a disease.
The Central Debate: Reductionism vs. The Primacy of the Social World
The discussion began with a direct confrontation between the two most philosophically opposed positions. Dr. Iris Mercado opened by articulating the strong eliminative materialist view critiqued in the paper. She argued that terms like 'good' and 'evil' are analogous to 'phlogiston' or 'ether'—explanatory fictions from a pre-scientific era. From her perspective, what we call 'evil' is a class of maladaptive behaviors arising from identifiable circuit dysregulations. The scientific and ethical imperative, she claimed, is to map these neural dynamics and develop targeted interventions, such as deep-brain stimulation or personalized pharmacology, to minimize harm. For Dr. Mercado, clinging to folk-psychological terms like 'responsibility' in the face of this potential is an obstacle to progress.
Prof. Leda Steinbruck offered a direct rebuttal, characterizing Dr. Mercado's position as a fundamental "category mistake." Drawing on Wittgenstein, she argued that even a perfect correlation between a brain state and an action does not mean the brain state is the action or its moral quality. The criteria for applying a term like 'evil' are not found on an fMRI scan; they are public, rooted in social rules, context, and shared "forms of life." To say "Jones's C-fibers are firing" is simply not a replacement for "Jones is in pain," because the latter statement does its work within a web of social practices involving empathy, care, and communication that the former does not. Similarly, identifying a brain lesion in a killer does not, by itself, answer the question of whether the act was evil, justified, or tragic.
Supporting this view from a phenomenological standpoint, Dr. Sylvie Marchand invoked the paper’s reference to Putnam’s "brain in a vat" argument. She contended that a brain, isolated from a body and a world, cannot have intentions, feel guilt, or make moral choices. These are capacities that arise from an embodied agent actively engaged in an intersubjective world. To reduce a person's moral struggle to a biochemical imbalance is to erase the lived experience of meaning-making that is central to both human life and effective psychotherapy.
The Explanatory Gap and Levels of Analysis
Dr. Samuel Rahman shifted the focus to the "explanatory gap" highlighted by the paper's authors. He argued that even within a scientific framework, strong reductionism is premature and likely impossible. Drawing an analogy from his own field of linguistics, he distinguished between different levels of explanation. One can describe language at the computational level (the abstract rules of grammar), the algorithmic level (the cognitive processes that implement those rules), and the implementational level (the neural hardware). Radical materialism, he suggested, mistakenly assumes that a full description of the implementational level will make the higher levels obsolete. Dr. Rahman asserted that, as Chomsky argued, the leap from the neural to the fully intentional—explaining how brain states give rise to the complex, creative, and reason-governed nature of human action—remains a profound mystery that neuroscience has not begun to solve.
The Politics of "Health": A Nietzschean Perspective
The discussion then turned to the normative implications of medicalizing morality. Prof. Mira Valente drew on the paper's engagement with Nietzsche to frame the issue politically. She warned that the project of defining 'evil' as 'pathology' is not a value-neutral scientific act but the installation of a new moral regime. The ideal of a "healthy brain," she argued, is an aesthetic and political construct disguised as a medical fact. It risks becoming a "new slave morality" where deviance, dissent, and even heroic struggle are re-branded as dysfunctions to be managed by a technocratic class. For Nietzsche, 'health' was about the will-to-power and the capacity for self-overcoming, not homeostatic stability in a neural circuit. Prof. Valente cautioned that a society that seeks to 'cure' evil through biomedical intervention may achieve a superficial peace at the cost of greatness, tragedy, and genuine freedom.
Practical Realities: The Clinic and the Courtroom
The conversation then moved from the abstract to the practical, examining how these debates play out in clinical and legal contexts. Dr. Helena Cho, speaking as a psychiatrist, offered a pragmatic middle path. She affirmed that she is a "moderate psychological materialist"—brains and genes are undeniably the necessary substrate for thought and action. Biological interventions are powerful tools for alleviating suffering and restoring a patient's capacity for agency. However, she strongly cautioned against what she called "circuit essentialism." A patient's story, their attachment history, and their social environment are co-determining factors that cannot be ignored. The goal of treatment, in her view, is not simply to modulate a circuit but to restore the person's ability to participate in the "space of reasons," making responsible choices and authoring a meaningful life.
Justice Naomi Okafor translated this complexity into the language of the law. She explained that the legal system is built not on a model of pure causality, but on a normative framework of "reasons-responsiveness." Culpability hinges on whether an agent has the general capacity to grasp and be guided by moral and legal reasons. While neuroscientific evidence can be crucial for assessing that capacity—for instance, in cases of tumors affecting impulse control—it cannot replace the normative judgment itself. Justice Okafor warned that conflating causal explanation with moral justification risks collapsing the legal concept of desert (retribution for a wrongful choice) into a purely forward-looking model of risk management. This could lead to a system where individuals are "treated" or confined based on their biological predispositions, undermining fundamental principles of due process and human dignity.
The View from Society: Evil as an Emergent Property
Finally, Prof. Arturo Jiménez broadened the frame of the discussion, critiquing what he saw as a pervasive "methodological individualism" in the debate. He argued that focusing solely on the brains of perpetrators is inadequate for understanding the most profound examples of evil, such as genocide or systemic oppression. Drawing on the paper’s reference to studies of the Holocaust, he asserted that 'evil' is often an emergent property of social systems: bureaucracies, ideologies, incentive structures, and propaganda that enable ordinary people to participate in extraordinary harm. The relevant Umwelt, he insisted, is not just a backdrop but the primary generator of such behaviors. From this sociological perspective, the idea of finding a 'cure' for genocide by treating individual brains is a dangerous oversimplification. The more effective intervention lies in redesigning institutions, promoting critical discourse, and fostering robust structures of accountability.
Conclusion
The roundtable concluded without a simple consensus, but with a shared appreciation for the profound difficulty of the questions raised by Webel and Stigliano. A clear tension remained between the materialist ambition to create a predictive science of human behavior and the humanist and social-scientific insistence on the irreducibility of meaning, context, and normative judgment.
While Dr. Mercado’s vision of a future "beyond good and evil" remains a powerful scientific goal for some, the majority of the panel echoed the paper's central thesis: that brains are necessary but not sufficient. Whether through the lens of philosophy, law, clinical practice, or sociology, the panelists consistently returned to the idea that human moral life unfolds within a shared world of language, culture, and institutions. It is this world—the Umwelt—that gives our actions meaning and within which the concepts of good and evil, for better or worse, continue to do their essential work. The discussion made clear that while neuroscience will undoubtedly reshape our understanding of human capacities, it is unlikely to eliminate the enduring task of moral and ethical deliberation.