[David Palmer]

Call for Papers
Panel Topic: Evolution, Ethics, and Tragedy

Conference:
Why the Humanities: Answers from Cognitive and Neuroscience
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio
July 9-12, 2015
http://www.kent.edu/cas/why-humanities

Contact Person for this Panel:
David Palmer
Humanities Department
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
dpalmer@maritime.edu

I am organizing a proposal for a panel at this humanities conference on the evolutionary foundations of our moral attitudes and the ways in which these help us to understand depictions of tragedy. Please email me proposals of no more than 300 words for papers that can be presented in no more than 15 minutes on the following general topic. I plan to have three papers in this one-hour panel, and limiting individual papers to 15 minutes in length will allow for 15 minutes of discussion at the end of the session. Proposals for individual papers for this panel will be accepted until March 15. I will submit the proposal for this panel to the conference organizers by its due date of April 1.

General Topic for the Panel: Like all human organs, the brain evolved to be adaptive to the particular demands of the environment. Part of this adaptive biological evolutionary development of the brain gave humans two distinctive mental capacities. First, the ability to experience a self – in particular a narrative, autobiographical self – and the ability to use that self to organize our experience of the world. Secondly, an innate set of moral propensities that enables humans to cooperate and live effectively in groups but also to have nearly automatic hostile attitudes to outsiders. These two elements – the self and moral instinct – interact with each other: our sense of self contains moralized ideals. When those ideals are achieved, the person experiences what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia: a sense of happiness, personal flourishing, or self-respect. However, when those ideals cannot be achieved, the self goes into crisis, and the person experiences shame. Modern tragedies often depict the collapse of the self into this state of shame. Thus, the evolutionary foundations that underlie many of our ethical systems, in particular the ancient Greek approach of virtue ethics, also underlie our understanding and experience of tragedy. This panel invites papers on the how the evolution of the brain led humans to a particular type of self and basic moral attitudes, how cultural values interact with evolutionary propensities to develop localized sets of ideals, and how these moralized ideals are involved in the human experience of shame and tragedy. The purpose of this panel is to explore the evolutionary foundations of ethics and how these foundations are depicted in tragedy in ways that help us to understand how people experience their lives and explain their interactions with others.

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