Body & Soul: Human Nature & the Crisis in Ethics

by J.P. Moreland, Scott B. Rae

While most people throughout history have believed that we are both physical and spiritual beings, the rise of science has called into question the existence of the soul. Many now argue that neurophysiology demonstrates the radical dependence, indeed, identity, between mind and brain. Advances in genetics and in mapping human DNA, some say, show there is no need for the hypothesis of body-soul dualism. Even many Christian intellectuals have come to view the soul as a false Greek concept that is outdated and unbiblical. Concurrent with the demise of dualism has been the rise of advanced medical technologies that have brought to the fore difficult issues at both edges of life. Central to questions about abortion, fetal research, reproductive techologies, cloning and euthanasia is our understanding of the nature of human personhood, the reality of life after death and the value of ethical or religious knowledge as compared to scientific knowledge. In this careful treatment, J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae argue that the rise of these problems alongside the demise of Christian dualism is no coincidence. They therefore employ a theological realism to meet these pressing issues, and to present a reasonable and biblical depiction of human nature as it impinges upon critical ethical concerns. This vigorous philosophical and ethical defense of human nature as body and soul, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees, will be for all a touchstone for debate and discussion for years to come.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Anthropology, Christian, Nonfiction, Christianity

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2000

About the author

J.P. Moreland is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University in La Mirada, California. He has four earned degrees: a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Missouri, a Th.M. in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, an M. A. in philosophy from the University of California-Riverside, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California.

He has co-planted three churches, spoken and debated on over 175 college campuses around the country, and served with Campus Crusade for Christ for 10 years. For eight years, he served as a bioethicist for PersonaCare Nursing Homes, Inc. headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland.

His ideas have been covered by both popular religious and non-religious outlets, including the New Scientist and PBS’s “Closer to Truth,” Christianity Today and WORLD magazine. He has authored or co-authored 30 books, and published over 70 articles in journals, which include Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, American Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Philosophia Christi, and Faith and Philosophy.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae offer a very thorough book defending a Thomistic version of substance dualism (part I) and then applying that version to contemporary ethical issues (part II). Not only will the reader obtain valuable information specifically dealing with substance dualism, but Moreland also provides the reader with a valuable introduction to many metaphysical (and epistemological, to a lesser extent) terms and subtleties required to engage or enter into the issues surrounding anthropological dualism.

The above covers the first part of this book. Part II builds on part I, taking what was (attempted to be) proven and thus applies that view of human persons to contemporary ethical issues of our day, viz., abortion, reproductive technologies, cloning, and euthanasia (the so-called "good" death. The real euthanistic death is the one that has "fought the good fight of faith," but I digress). Without repeating myself, I reviewed Dr. Rae's book on ethics here

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to put the book’s importance into words, which makes writing this review rather difficult. One has to start somewhere, I suppose. Moreland and Rae (hereafter MR) argue for a form of Thomistic substance dualism in their doctrine of human nature. Accordingly, the soul is an individuated essence that makes the body a human body (MR 202).

States and faculties of the soul: The soul has capacities. Capacities come in hierarchies. 1st order hierarchy: a capacity that is realized. 2nd order: capability faculty: a faculty is a compartment of the soul that contains a natural family of related capacities (204). The key word here is “capacities.” Fetuses and those on life-support have the latent capacity for the later functions of personhood. What all this means is, contra to any form of naturalism, the soul is an essence that survives change. It cannot be reduced to a form of different functions.
Such an entity has the ability to make rational choices.

Further, personhood is something that is absolute, not degreed. Here MR are following the lead of Thomas Reid and most of Christendom. commonsense view (Reid, Butler). Persons differ from physical artifacts in that they maintain absolute sameness through change. Leibniz’s law holds between all the moments a person exists except tenses. PI is unanalyzable and primitive. It cannot be broken down further.

Moreover, Leibniz’s law states (x)(y)[(x=y)--->(P)(Px<-->Py)]; For any x, and for any y, if they are identical to each other, then for any property P, P will be true of x iff P is true of y. This means, negatively, that the soul is not the same thing as the body. The person is not the same thing as the body. Positively, a person maintains identity over time, a position that scientific naturalism really can’t account for.

Applied Ethics

The second half of the book takes the Thomistic doctrine and applies it to abortion and end-of-life debates. Scott Rae is the main contributor in this section. He analyzes a number of pro-abortion arguments and notes that they all hinge on a defective view of the person. most abortion-rights advocates define personhood in terms of a set of functions or actualized capacities. The problem with this approach is that it logically justifies killing:
mentally handicapped and the newborn (it’s not clear at what age infants can meet reasoning capacities to justify their living)
Abortion-rights advocates are unable to tell at what point a developing human becomes a person.
Newborns have sentience, but so do unborn. Isn’t it somewhat arbitrary for abortion advocates to draw the line at breaching the vagina as ‘suddenly okay to live?.” [But even here, pro-abortion logic breaks down, given our President’s ghoulish endorsement of killing babies who have breached the vagina]
Functionalist definitions of personhood presuppose a property-thing ontology, rather than a substance one.
A person under general anesthesia cannot function. Does he cease to be a person? Why not? As Rae notes, “To appeal to some higher-order capacities as determinate of personhood” cannot be done without acknowledging that personhood is not dependent on lower-order capacities (Moreland and Rae 251). These higher-order capacities are latent, just as they are with the unborn.

There is a rather interesting chapter on genetic cloning. The main question is whether clones have souls. Noting the difficulty of answering this question, the authors conclude “probably.”

The book ends with a powerful chapter on end-of-life ethics.

Evaluation

Moreland in particular writes with Kingdom Power. I learned more philosophical terminology in one week studying and outlining this book than I did in the previous year. And this philosophy isn’t arcane. It literally is life-and-death. Because of this book I feel confident in giving coherent and rational responses in the abortion debate.

[Josiah Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Body and Soul", J.P. Moreland and Scott Rae present what they believe to be the philosophical and Biblical treatise on personhood and the soul. In part 1, Moreland lays the metaphysical groundwork on the issue of human personhood and what form of dualism the implications form. While part 2 lays out the ethical implications from what part 1 asserts on personhood.
In the first chapter, he established definitions of what dualism is from a naturalist and non-naturalist perspective also laying out and defining monistic views of philosophy of mind. He then finishes the chapter by analyzing what the Biblical data asserts about personhood and concludes that a Thomistic-like dualism best accounts for the data. The second chapter analyzes the distinctions of a human person as a Substance or Property. When reading this chapter, you will want to understand and master this material to have a fruitful experience with the rest of the book. Chapter 3 describes a naturalist and a Christian Complementarian perspective definitionally and sketches out the implications of said views. The most interesting implication this chapter drew, I believe, is that the complementarian view, metaphysically speaking, is virtually identical to the naturalist perspective on human persons.
Chapters 4-5 makes arguments, namely, that human persons are identical to immaterial substances such as a soul. Chapter 6 clarifies the soul's relationship to the body and vise versa. The three main considerations these chapters make are as follows: on human agency and freedom (chapter 4); the nature of what consciousness is what this says about us (chapter 5); and as stated earlier, the relationship between the soul and the body are analyzed (chapter 6).
Part 2 focusses draws on part 1 on the issue of personhood and uses it to discuss an array of complex bioethical positions as follows: abortion (chapter 7); reproductive technologies (chapter 8); human cloning (chapter 9); and, lastly, euthanasia, Physician-Assisted Suicide (or PAS), and the issue of caring for someone at the end of their life (chapter 10).

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The common belief that Darwinian evolution provides a complete materialistic explanation of human beings has led to the idea of the soul being completely dismissed in our culture. A growing number of Christian intellectuals are even joining their secular colleagues in this rejection of the soul in favor of an anthropology of monism or physicalism. Insofar as many Christians still talk of a soul, it has been stripped of almost all of its content, to consist of little more than that which goes to heaven when we die. We have lost touch with the history of thought, according to the authors, because we have turned to scientists to be the leaders in culture, when their training is far too narrow to deal with the relevant issues. It is philosophy, not science, that as a knowledge discipline is equipped to properly frame and debate the issues. In this dense philosophical work, the authors seek to reaquaint Christians with what they consider to be the most reasonable, and the at the same time the most biblical, picture of what constitutes human personhood. The picture is one of Thomistic substance dualism.



The soul is an immaterial substance which grounds, forms, and animates the body. But it is not identical to the body and can survive in a temporary disembodied state after the body dies. While body and soul are joined, they have an intimate, dependent relationship so that the body is the means by which the soul expresses itself. If the body is not developed adequately so that the physical capacities move to a certain level, the capabilities of the soul cannot be expressed. By way of example, you may be a great pianist, but if your piano is out of tune, you're not going to be able to play a beautiful piece. Thus the body/soul relationship is one of functional holism while the soul is in the body, but not ontological holism. You are a soul, you have a body.



The soul is what you are aware of when you introspect. It contains thousands of capacities (or powers) which are grouped together with similar capacities into faculties. The mind is a faculty or compartment of the soul that contains your capacities to think, believe, and reason. The spirit is another faculty, and it contains the soul's ability to have a relationship with God. The human soul also contains five sensory faculties. The faculty of sight is not in your eye; it is contained in your soul. Your eye doesn't see, you do. There's two reasons why you can see: you've got the right kind of soul (as opposed to an earthworm's soul) and second, your body parts work. And while you are in the body, this faculty has to use a relevant body part before it can work. Now if your soul leaves your body, as with near-death experiences, you can see without needing eyes. By the same token, your brain doesn't think, you do. God doesn't have a brain but is able to think. Your brain is causally connected to your mind while you are in the body but is not identical to it.



The problem we run into today is that people conflate correlation, causal relationship, and functional dependence with identity, and that is a fundamental error. Just because it can be shown that fire causes smoke, that in no way proves that fire is the same thing as smoke. In the same way just because a neuroscientist can cause a patient to experience a memory by doing something to his brain, that does not prove that the memory is located in his brain. There are things true of mental states that are not true of brain states, and vice versa, and this proves that they are not the same thing. Thoughts, for example, have the property of being true or false, and no brain state has this property. Brain states can be described in physical terms but thoughts cannot. One other major difference is that brain states are third-person public - a scientist may well have better knowledge of your brain than you do; mental states, however, are first-person private - only you have access to them.



Identifying mental states with brain states and thus reducing human anthropology to nothing but physical language creates all kinds of counter-intuitive problems. One is that it is difficult to explain the continuity of the self over time when every atom in the body is replaced every seven years or so. And yet we instinctively know that we are the same person we were decades ago. Moral responsibility also becomes problematic. How can you punish someone for a crime committed ten years ago when, in physicalist terms, he is not the same person as the perpetrator of the crime? Free will is another problem if we are just physical beings, because physical things are governed by physical laws and cannot actually cause anything. Yet we know intuitively that we do make choices and with these choices we could have chosen otherwise.



The authors argue that where science is competent to enter into the discussion it favors dualism. Recent evidence from embryology indicates that a DNA-first, genocentric view of the organism is having to be replaced by an organocentric view: DNA is not what directs development, but presupposes the organism as a whole and is just a tool the organism uses in development. This is consistent with dualism, which claims that the soul acts as a unified principle of life that directs the teleological development of the organism.



The second half of the book spells out the ethical implications of one's anthropology and argues that the crisis in ethics we face in areas such as abortion and euthanasia is due to our having adopted a faulty view of the human person. If humans do not have souls and are just physical bodies, then there is nothing to ground equal rights and the notion of human personhood. According to substance dualism, personhood is a non-degreed property, which something either has or doesn't have, like numbers being either odd or even. This is because personhood resides in the essence of the soul. So there is no such thing as a human non-person. But if humans are just physical things without a soul, there is nothing metaphysical to ground personhood in, and we end up establishing artificial functional criteria such as self-awareness and ability to use language. Personhood becomes, then, a degreed property, one that can be had to a greater or lesser extent. Human non-persons become a possibility and equal human rights are really impossible to maintain.



Recovery of the soul restores an anthropology that both accords with our basic intuitions that we have about ourselves, and clarifies the ethical dilemmas that have arisen from the rise of scientism.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm ambivalent about "Body & Soul."

Positives: This book is incredibly thorough in its investigation of the mind-body problem and its importance. In addition to having a keen understanding of the main voices in the field of philosophy of mind, Moreland convincingly synthesizes perspectives from a variety of related subfields (e.g. neuroscience, ethics, debates about freewill and personal identity), illustrating how our understanding of what it means to be a human person profoundly shapes a litany of beliefs, both about abstract concepts and real-world moral issues. I should also mention that even though Moreland has a clear argument to make, I'd recommend "Body & Soul" for anyone interested in the topic since Moreland does an excellent job of fairly (it seems to me) representing the views of Christian and non-Christian contemporary thinkers.

Negatives: Even after reading 350+ pages of philosophical and ethical arguments, I still can't fully understand Thomistic substance dualism. This becomes most apparent when I find myself trying to summarize what I'm reading for friends. I find myself saying something like, "Moreland argues that the human person is a 'substance' rather than a 'property-thing,'" and then I blank out. I'm cautious, however, to place the blame on Moreland for my lack of understanding. Looking back, I probably should have started with his "Soul" book instead. It also doesn't help that I don't have a good grasp of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Oh well.

Final note: Even though Part 2 (the "ethical issues" part of the book) is well-written, it's obviously Rae's contribution rather than Moreland's. As a result, it seems to lack the thorough scholarship that is so distinctive about Part 1. But on the plus side, it's much easier to read.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A carefully reasoned book about a very important subject. This book addresses the important theological and philosophical issues of what it means to be a human being before it addresses the ethical issues presented by modern medical science. So its ethical arguments are founded on carefully articulated theological and philosophical premises. I fear many people simply approach the medical ethics addressed merely on pragmatic or emotional grounds, without thinking about the profound philosophical and theological implications of their positions. I would recommend this book for any person in a position of spiritual leadership or influence in the decisions which ordinary people face when confronted by the medical and personal issues related to medicine and life, from conception to death. This is not an easy read. It takes some determined reading unless one is perhaps already familiar with the philosophical, theological, and medical issues addressed. But it is well worth the effort.

[Conner Hinton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is tough sledding. The first half of the book is a philosophical defense of substance dualism against naturalistic physicalism and of Thomistic dualism against Cartesian dualism. Many logic formulas and thought experiments in this section. The second half of the book focuses on ethical implications for this discussion. The last few chapters provide the concrete reason for why we should care about the more abstract philosophizing.

[Caleb Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best book available on the topic of mind/body dualism, though it is not for the faint of heart. The combination of J.P. Moreland’s metaphysics, and the philosophy of ethics provided by Scott B. Rae, results in a tour de force. The sections concerning bioethics, and the implications of the soul were particularly helpful. Highly recommend.

[Jessica Diasodse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book made me change my mind about how to think about the soul. I came in hoping philosophy would help me sort through my thoughts and intuition about dualism, but the more I read the more detached things felt. There were some interesting thoughts to consider, but I'm not sure this is the true battleground for this discussion.

[John Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finishing a 380 page book feels like quite an accomplishment, especially when it is philosophical and difficult reading. Evidently Moreland was not writing this for regular folks like me, but yeah, I tried and i think I have walk away with something.
The book is primarily a philosophical defense of Thomistic Substance Dualism (Not to be confused with Cartesian Dualism) which is the idea that humans have a soul and that is what makes them persons, they are not only their brain and body (property-thing). The soul is not separate from the body but united and dependent upon the body for expression. The soul is the unifier of all brain activity, the director and the driver of the DNA and it is why we have personal identity through change (For example roughly every 7 years, every atom in a human body is replaced, so if we are nothing more than a property thing, then technically we are no longer the same person). The soul is the only way to reasonable argue for libertarian freewill and thus moral responsibility for our actions. The book argues that the bible clearly teaches that man has a soul (the argument was very convincing to me) and thus it disagrees with the many Christian intellectuals who are now agreeing with academic orthodoxy (the belief we don't have a soul) and so think the naturalist explanation of man is right; that when we die we cease to exist, and if we say "Well, what about heaven and all?" they would point to the resurrection, but the bible does not seem to jive with this view. Much of the book is spent on the problems within the Naturalist view of humans and tries to argue a Thomistic Dualism perspective makes more sense.

So yeah, that was the first part of the book, the second section was how all of this is relevant in ethics. Some of which was really interesting to me. Philosophers who are scientific naturalist (which is most of them i fear) claim one can be a human, and yet not a person, person-hood is to have consciousness, to be able to desire and communicate, etc... If one does not possess these, they are not a person and don't have rights. Therefore, pre-born babies are not persons and abortion is justified because they don't yet have these high-capabilities, the same argument goes for Euthanasia and the destruction of the embryo in embryonic research. So it is interesting that the main argument is that they are not persons. But the problem is that infants therefore are not persons either, neither are those who are put under by anesthesia, nor those in a coma and those in a deep sleep. Now the other view, held by pro-choice activist Naomi Wolf, is the pre-born are indeed human persons and yet it is still morally justifiable to kill in certain context, such as the fetus will cause financial strain, physical pain or mental discomfort to the mother, but the problem is infants may cause all of these to the mother after birth, and the infant is still just as dependent upon the mother as it was when it was in her womb, it does not seem to be grounds for killing. So its a problematic view. The whole argument that its the woman's body and she has a right over her body is from the assumption that the pre-born are not persons. That this belief is extremely problematic and inconsistent is argued extremely well by the authors.

I wish the book commented on capital punishment and killing in war and wrote about the killing of animals (which they claim has a soul as well). Many liberals think. It did spend lots of time on end of life care and is against physician assisted suicide, but since the feeding tubs and ventilators are medical treatments, the patient should be able to reject such treatments and its morally permissible for relative decision maker to request that the life support is stopped.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What is needed is a Christian natural philosophy of living things, especially of human persons, that provides two things--a central role for philosophy and theology in contributing to the ontology of human persons and a proper ordering of science relative to philosophy and theology in the ontological task."

One of the things that makes "Body and Soul" interesting is that it brings two areas of philosophy (philosophy of mind and ethics) together in a single volume. The subtitle is important here, for this is really a book about a particular view of human nature.

Also noteworthy is that while Moreland and Rae are explicit and unashamed about their Christianity, the book does an excellent job of presenting a holistic view, integrating philosophy, theology, and science in a way that respects each. Christianity is definitely a driving force, but just as surely it is not the only driving force.

In Part I, the authors explain their version of Thomistic substance dualism and compare it with both functionalism and Cartesian dualism. This provides a detailed but reasonably accessible introduction to some of the major issues in phil-mind. In Part II, they apply their model (as well as the others) to some of the leading bioethical issues of the day, including abortion, euthanasia, and cloning.

For my part, I find the arguments for Thomism fairly compelling. But even if it doesn't convince you, "Body and Soul" is worth a look as an example of the unity of philosophical disciplines: metaphysics and epistemology support one another and mutually inform our ethical thinking. What's more, the book demonstrates the importance of the philosophy of mind for modern life, provides a model for Christians who want to think carefully and systematically about how their faith applies to the modern world, and shows that substance dualism might not be as dead as it has been thought to be.

[Ben Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unless metaphysics is your thing, talk of mind-body problems and souls can be a little obscure. Scott Rea and J.P Moreland do the reader the favor of answering the question: so what? Our authors argue that one's view of the human being--ensouled body, animal, machine et al--makes a big difference in bioethics. They show the implications of one's view on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and reproductive technologies. It is also refreshing to hear what many think--that the human without a soul is a vastly overrated idea. Their view, for the interested metaphysician, is a Thomistic one in contrast to a Cartesian view. Some of the book is a technical defense of the view. However, one can tell that the authors have gone to great lengths to make it as easy on the non-philosopher as possible.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! A perfect wedding of theoretical and practical philosophy. Part one is a rigorous argument for and defense of Thomistic Substance Dualism. Part two builds upon part one and argues for the various implications found in the arena of bioethics (abortion, stem stells, cloning, IVF, euthanasia, etc.). The chapter on the unborn and abortion is excellent in that the authors cogently demonstrate that advocates of abortion constantly set forth question-begging arguments that assume the fetus is not a person from the get-go.

Reading this book is a reminder of two things: (1) Why the philosophy of mind is worth the time and mental effort of study and (2) Why naturalism/scientism is so utterly morally repulsive and bankrupt and should be resisted at all costs.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read most of the bioethics portion of this book (main author of this section is Rea), but am now going back to re-read JP Moreland's portion which discusses dualism.

I actually skipped some of the technical philosophy. Mainly because I am on a deadline...but I would like to go back and look at it again.

[Joe Kearns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, academic and philosophical. Not an easy read, but most works that consider such deep subjects honestly are not.

[Jonathan]

None