Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics

This monograph presents a systematic defense of substance dualism as essential for maintaining coherent ethical frameworks in contemporary philosophy. Moreland argues that the prevailing naturalistic conception of human beings as purely physical entities undermines the metaphysical foundations necessary for objective morality, human dignity, and personal responsibility.

The work develops its argument across three main trajectories. First, Moreland examines the philosophical inadequacies of physicalist accounts of human nature, demonstrating how reductive materialism fails to accommodate crucial features of human experience including consciousness, intentionality, and personal identity through time. He contends that attempts to explain these phenomena through purely neurobiological processes inevitably eliminate rather than explain the very qualities that ground ethical discourse.

Second, the author traces the historical development of dualist thought from Plato through Descartes to contemporary formulations, while addressing standard objections concerning mind-body interaction and causal closure. Moreland advances a sophisticated version of emergent dualism that acknowledges neurobiological dependence while maintaining the irreducibility of mental properties. This position allows him to preserve human agency and moral responsibility without denying scientific insights about brain-body correlations.

Third, and most significantly, Moreland demonstrates how various ethical crises in bioethics, personal identity, and human rights stem directly from abandoning dualist anthropology. He examines specific cases involving beginning and end-of-life issues, arguing that without a substantial soul, there exists no principled basis for distinguishing humans from other biological organisms or for grounding inherent human dignity. The work engages critically with prominent physicalists including Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, and Paul Churchland, showing how their eliminative materialism leads to moral nihilism.

The monograph's contribution to the God debate emerges through its argument that theism provides the most coherent metaphysical framework for substance dualism. Moreland contends that naturalistic evolution cannot explain the emergence of immaterial souls, while theistic creation offers a natural explanation for why humans possess both physical and spiritual dimensions. He develops this connection by examining how major ethical theories implicitly rely on dualist assumptions that only make sense within a theistic worldview.

The work represents a significant contribution to contemporary debates about human nature, ethics, and religious belief, demonstrating how questions about the soul remain philosophically relevant and practically consequential for moral theory and applied ethics.