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 will, and thus we ignore the truly psychological and sociological foundations of the only real agency available to us.

Ravven then turns to intellectual history, locating the idea of free will in the work of Augustine (along with his followers Descartes and Kant) and opposing their theories of free will to the more rationalist moral theories of Maimonides and Spinoza. It is in these chapters that The Self beyond Itself is on the shakiest ground. Free will is certainly a central idea within Augustine's ethical thought, but for Augustine what makes an action ethical is not that it is freely chosen—and certainly not that it is freely chosen independently. While Augustine's theories of will and grace are notoriously complex, the relationship between these ideas needs a good bit more exegesis than we find here if we are going to lay the error of free will at Augustine's door.

Ravven's account of Spinoza is similarly incomplete. While it is no doubt true that Spinoza challenged Descartes's dualism of mind and body, and perhaps even paved the way for more scientific conceptions of embodied thinking in the process (as Ravven argues), he also insisted that “intellect” and “extension” were separate attributes, not just conceptually but causally as well. Subsequently, while it is true that a mode of thought always thinks some specific mode of extension, it must also be said that thought is not capable of producing a bodily effect—and vice versa. This relationship between the attributes of intellect and extension (termed Spinoza's “parallelism” by modern scholars) goes largely unexplored in Ravven's book.

The reason for these omissions is that Ravven is less interested in fleshing out the details in Augustine and Spinoza than putting what she takes to be their more important points into conversation with contemporary empirical studies of the brain and its social environment. It is this latter third of the book that really shines. Ravven moves deftly through complicated literature about the brain and is able to illuminate the ethical ramifications of these approaches. Ravven's rationalist, neuro-scientific approach to ethics moves us away from traditional ethical mainstays such as virtue or duty and towards a conception of ethics that is centered on self-understanding. Ironically this concern for self-understanding is a movement away from the self, at least as it has been traditionally understood. In The Self beyond Itself we see the how we are simultaneously embodied and embedded, fashioned continually by the vicissitudes of physical and social influences. As we come to understand our selves as inherently “porous selves” we can appreciate our dependence on others and we can figure out how to best respond to our given situations. In some cases this might lead us to appreciate and love those around us, in others it might lead to us to oppose them and pursue our own liberation from them. Ravven does not supply us with any easy rules or criteria by which we might know the differences between these situations—she only insists that these are ethical questions that must be considered scientifically, rather than obscured by sentiment or ideology.

Given the breadth of Ravven's research here it is easy to look past her omission of some of the more complicated aspects of Augustine and Spinoza. However it seems to me that a more interesting problem arises when we consider her conclusion in relation to her treatment of Maimonides. In Ravven's reading, Maimonides sounds a lot like Farabi—he sees the Torah as a form of legislation, written by human beings and dressed up in theological garb, possessing just enough clues for the occasional philosopher to be able to discern this otherwise obscured secret. This is not an uncommon reading of Maimonides and I do not wish to try to challenge it here, only to note that in Ravven's reading Maimonides's esotericism as a tactic goes unexamined. This omission is rather strange given Ravven's use of scholars like Shlomo Pines and Warren Zev Harvey, who have placed the esoteric complexities of Maimonides's work at the center of his thought.

I mention this only because Ravven's own ethical theory is thoroughly, self-consciously, exoteric. While some scholars such as Daniel Dennett have argued that we would seem to be better off keeping the idea of free will around as a valuable culturally produced tool (despite the fact that scientifically it is a clear fabrication), this is clearly not Ravven's position. For Ravven free will is the philosophical analogue to Pluto—we may feel that it is “really something” but once we get close enough we can see that it doesn't exist. Given this discovery it is now time to order new maps of our moral galaxy and teach them in the schools. This again is a task at which Ravven succeeds quite well—she writes clearly and builds an impressive argument from wide array of sources. But the use of Maimonides and perhaps even Spinoza as the intellectual forerunners of a real, scientifically viable system of social ethics seems quite strange in this regard. Didn't Maimonides at least have real hesitations about organizing life around truths (such as our lack of free will) so foreign to human experience? How would the lives of the “many” really fare if they were asked to reconcile themselves (ourselves?) to these objective truths? Nowhere in her book does Ravven really address these inter-related questions head on. Instead she seems to imply on a few occasions that ethics might be something of a higher calling. As she notes at the end of her book, Ravven writes that her theory of “an expansive self-coherence … is a lofty ideal for the individual and a noble and difficult path … It is a rare one, as Spinoza pointed out” (408). This may be the simple, if sad, conclusion that follows from the reality of our moral natures, and again Ravven paints a persuasive picture of this reality. Whether or not this is a truly Maimonidean approach to ethics is a different story.