Neurobiology and the Free Will: Implications for Catholic Theological Ethics This dissertation addresses the notion of free will in Catholic theological ethics and puts it in the context of current knowledge about human neurobiology. While the notion remains central to Christian ethics – supporting personal responsibility and accountability – it is presently being challenged by contemporary cognitive neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology, and becomes largely reappropriated by philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Assessing the most burning points of these critiques, the present work is a comparative study of the philosophical/theological positions and the rapidly evolving scientific paradigms that surround voluntary moral agency, critically bringing them into conversation with theological ethics. The goal is to develop a balanced understanding of natural human freedom in the context of moral agency and moral responsibility. We strive after the notion of free will that on one hand can be supported by natural sciences, and on the other hand remains rooted in Catholic moral tradition and is reconcilable with Christian personalist anthropology. One point of departure for these considerations is the widely cited experiment by Benjamin Libet (1983), who used EEG recordings to measure the timing of the conscious intention to act and its preceding brain potentials. The neuroscientific and philosophical interpretations of this study provoked an increased interest in free will during the past few decades, as the results suggest that our brains make decisions unconsciously, before we become aware of it. This has led thinkers such as Daniel Wegner or Derk Pereboom to conclude that free will is an illusion, and supported determinist and even fatalist views of the human person. While scepticism towards free will is as old as human reflection, it is now based not only on philosophical speculations, but on concrete empirical results. This work moves beyond the Libet-style argumentation by consulting new paradigms in cognitive neuroscience of volition, neurophilosophy and philosophy of science, and by including results from the rapidly developing fields of evolutionary and systems biology. The aspects of moral agency covered in that way include: long-term and indirect freedom of action, context-sensitive and distributed understanding of volitional control, as well as the moral importance of unconscious and non-rational layers of acting which are a direct continuation of our evolutionary past. The results point to virtue theory and Christian virtue ethics as the most suitable framework for accommodating the emerging notion of free will in fundamental moral theology. Even if a person’s actions now are largely pre-determined, one not only retains some indirect control at the moment of choice, but can effectively exercise long-term free will by developing moral dispositions of character. Such freedom is supported by natural autonomy of living organisms, and can be related to Aristotelian, Thomistic and Confucian virtue theories, in which long-term influence over one’s character remains central. Based on this, one can argue for a distributed, yet in fact broader and ethically real notion of moral responsibility, pointing to multiple causes of human moral acts, among which personal voluntary agency is to be carefully situated.

In the first part of the paper, I present the summary of Davies’ chapter pointing to the notions I find particularly important. In the second part, I apply Davies’ integrative paradigm to the on-going refugee crisis in Europe while discerning practical implications of integrative paradigm in theological anthropology. In the third part, I pose the question of Christian identity in classical Aquinas manner, linking it back to the recent refugee crisis.

The ecological crisis almost forces different disciplines to search together for a better world.We all share one earth: the closer we reach a certain point, the closer we also come together. This places the paper amid the so-called science and religion dialogue in which theology increasingly takes cognisance of empirical research and scientific data. On the other hand, sciences are becoming increasingly aware of the need to transcend their evidential limitations to find a comprehensive paradigm.This paper will apply an exemplary methodology by selecting the eco-theology of Jürgen Moltmann as a theologian who takes relevant results of scientific ecological research seriously. The Club of Rome, on the other hand, is an example of social (and natural) sciences urging to find a new inclusive paradigm for a world in peril.The juxtaposition of theology and science provides the need for a new value system emerging in social sciences. Randers makes clear that the culture of consumerism had ...

This paper engages with one debate in the emerging field of neuroethics. It is sometimes claimed on the strength of neuroscientific research that our actions are causally determined and therefore not truly free, or more modestly that brain structures or processes constrain some choices and actions, raising questions about our moral responsibility for them. I argue that a Reformed account of providence, sin and grace offers an account of causation able to resist hard determinism, reframes concepts of freedom and responsibility, and provides a theological perspective for evaluating medical interventions in brain activity. Thus the paper not only contributes to a neuroethical debate, but also illustrates the capacity of Reformed ethics to respond creatively to novel problems.