Human Transactions

Given the evolutionary and developmental processes that form a human being, can we plausibly believe that people can make rational and autonomous choices about their lives? How can such choices be non-arbitrary and compelling if there are no norms outside the historical process against which they can be judged? And if that historical process is simply an accidental episode in an indifferent universe, what sorts of meanings can individual lives and choices have? These are the questions that Gary H. Stahl addresses in this original and provocative work. Drawing on arguments from biology and psychology as well as from the history of philosophy, Stahl examines the naturalistic meaning that can be assigned to moral agency, choice, and responsibility, in order to assert the conjunction between ethics and metaphysics. His focus is the process within which the self and the other, defined in terms of each other, emerge within evolution and development so as to generate an irreducible level of meaning. Author note: Gary H. Stahl is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In memoriam: 'A full life is constituted by the history of its relations to others, and a full death must include these. We are dealing here with solidarity and unique relations among people, not with death that enforces a solitude apart from them' - Gary H. Stahl (1932-1998).