The Self Beyond Itself: Further Reflection on Spinoza’s Systems Theory of Ethics

I offer here a new theory of moral agency –why people are ethical, why they are not, and how to get them to be more ethical. I look broadly at evidence from the new brain sciences, systems theory, and Spinoza’s philosophy to address the question. Spinoza’s vision of the infinitely expansive boundaries of the self as we progressively take in and embrace the world, and also extrude ourselves into the universe, forms the basis for rethinking moral agency and moral psychology. His vision opens up a broader swathe of the evidence coming out of both the theory of complex adaptive systems and also out of the new brain sciences than is usually thought of as relevant to exploring and understanding what makes us moral beings. It points us toward the pertinence of understanding moral agency in terms of nested complex adaptive systems.