Lynn Underwood

Art, science, and personal experiences all help us better understand who we are and how we can flourish

Category: ethics

My work in ethics has been informed by my work on the nature of the human person, epistemology and measurement, disability, and compassionate love.

I was one of the first to teach a course in Neuroethics to undergraduates. This field requires attention both to major philosophical and theological questions as well as to the technical findings of neuroscience.

  • Wu Wei and Grace 

               I have been revisiting a tattered book of mine, The Way of Chuang Tzu by the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton (first edition, New Directions, 1965), with excerpts and poems of Chuang Tzu, a chief spokesperson for Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu, written in the fourth and third centuries BCE. I made this drawing of one of the poems, The Fighting Cock. There are also many other good poems in the book. Alongside re-reading this book I have been listening to podcasts on Chinese philosophy, which place Taoism in the context of philosophers reacting to Confucianism’s very strict rules in an orderly societal context. One episode of a History of Philosophy podcast compares Confucian notions of virtue to Aristotle and more recent exponents of “virtue ethics” from Aquinas to the present day. Virtue ethics tends to emphasize developing character rather than only relying on rules as we make ethical decisions, even though the rules can be helpful too.

                The Taoism of Chuang Tzu emphasizes wu wei, or a kind of action in inaction. Taoism and many of the poems from the book, sees wu wei as nested in the context of strict societal and personal constraints in that time. As I read the poems and Merton’s introduction to The Way of Chuang Tzu book, I see similarities to a notion of grace, flowing rather than ego-centric pushing, and it seems to harmonize well with other readings I am doing during this time of Lent in the Christian calendar.

                A friend of mine once told me “Don’t push the river.” I find myself trying too hard sometimes. Reading these poems is helpful to me as I think of how to do things like moving my current book project out into the world, and trying to help others daily. The poem of the fighting cock also opens me up to how to I might react to the inevitable arguments and animosity from others in my own life. Can these be of any use to you in your daily life?

  • one eye or two eyes?

    A children’s book that I found in the UK before my children were born, was ‘The Boy with Two Eyes.’ It was part of a series of books from UNICEF on the rights of children, now out of print. It describes a planet far away where all the people had only one eye. With that one eye they could see in the dark, see far, far away, and see through walls. One day a strange child was born. He had two eyes. He lacked the eye skills that the one-eyed had, and his parents took him to many doctors, and he was given special help in school.  Eventually he and his parents found that he had a special quality. He could see colors, while everyone else in the world saw only blacks, whites and greys. 

    The book was designed to illustrate the 5th right of children: “Handicapped children shall have special attention and care.” But beyond that, it highlights how those handicapped in one area, not quite fitting into our society, can often have qualities that others do not have. The limitations in one area can even enhance other capacities.  When I criticize myself for things I lack maybe I can remember that I may have other qualities that shine, and even those areas of weakness can help me to fully inhabit who I am. I lack 3-D vision because my eyes don’t work together, but it gives me a different way of doing art that seems to be good.  How about you? Or those around you? Are there things about you that seem like awful limitations that stretch you in other ways? We are not defined by our limitations. And some of them can actually be good.

  • We are not machines and AI is not human

    A chapter in a book I am working on explores how we are not machines, yet can be duped into thinking that we are. It is part of a book that centers on how a person can flourish in difficult circumstances. As I was writing it, the Generative AI, Chat GPT, and computer future fears surfaced in the media, and we have been alerted to an acceleration of human-seeming abilities of technology. I found myself concerned with issues that are arising now, rather than long term fears, and wrote a paper for the US Office of Science and Technology Policy with recommendations for action. There are many people who can speak to so many issues raised by AI, but I thought there were some things that were being left out of discussions, and my scholarship in human relationships might be helpful in making recommendations for action and making a case for those.

    We need to protect real human-to-human relationships and strengthen our relationships with one another in the wider social world. What can we do to help us see ourselves as we are, not as machines, and help us to relate realistically to human-seeming Generative AI objects with various levels of verbal, visual, auditory, and tactile characteristics? How do we encourage people to see the value of human-to-human interactions, of giving and receiving compassionate love, and accepting others and ourselves, flawed yet of value at a fundamental level? It is in our relationships with one another, embodied and truthful, that we express ourselves in a way that leads to fullness of life for ourselves and the people we encounter in our day to day lives. We need to put guardrails in place to help us to affirm these important characteristics of our lives in the midst of the increasing proliferation of human-seeming machines and technology.

    Email me at lynn@lynnunderwood.com if you want the whole paper on AI and relationships that I submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy .

  • fun and philosophy

    ‘The History of Philosophy without any Gaps.” is a podcast I have listened to for years and love. I have learned so much.  Many of the episodes, on topics of particular interest to me, I listen to 2 or 3 times. If I find this fun, what does this say about me? The presenter, Peter Adamson, has a sense of humor, and is open-minded, and has such a knowledge base, and provides a depth of content that he expresses so well.  I listen on iTunes, but here is a link to his website: https://historyofphilosophy.net/ If you want to get a taste of it, look under ‘themes’ and find something of interest.  I couldn’t resist drawing the host.

  • parting the curtain

    My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.

    -Eudora Welty, author

  • how to fight

    If you feel like fighting fire with fire, remember real firefighters use water.watercompressedlynnunderwood

  • to live is to change

    I like stability, and I often stick with something too long because I don’t want to wimp out. This quote from John Henry Newman is good for me to hear. He changed from one church to another, and also knew that all religious institutions need to change to be alive. Change is an important part of being alive. The world is not static, and we cannot be either. It may be uncomfortable to change, but if we do not remain open to change, we are just not going to be able to engage fully in this wild world.

    drawing by lynn quote by newman
    drawing by lynn quote by newman

  • too many

    art by lynn
    art by lynn

    “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times.” – Thomas Merton

  • delusion of total self-sufficiency

    drawing by lynn
    drawing by lynn

    It is delusional to think that we are fully self-sufficient. Last Saturday I led an all-day retreat on “Flourishing in Difficult Circumstances.” One thing we  talked about was how the sense of total self-sufficiency is a delusion, one that is prevalent in our western culture. One of my Power Point slides was this drawing I did long ago….I found it folded up in my files, and I recently hung it up in my study. Of course the importance of personal responsibility cannot be undervalued, but difficult circumstances can vividly remind us of how we all do need help.

  • “philosophy talks” interview

    I discussed  “Unconditional Love,” on “Philosophy Talks” Radio Program, Stanford University, December 9, 2012. Available as a podcast on itunes or at http://philosophytalk.org/

  • metaphor and the self

    Metaphor and the Self: A Role for the Arts in Understanding Suffering and Treating the Person in Distress, Lynn Underwood, International Neuroethics Conference, Brain Matters 3: Values at the Crossroads of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychology, October 24-25, 2012

    Abstract:

    Research shows that the metaphors we use affect our behaviors and attitudes in significant ways. (Holding a cup of hot coffee rather than a cold drink can cause us to have a more friendly attitude towards those we meet; Boroditsky’s work showing how reading about a description of crime as a virus rather than a beast can influence our decisions on the best ways to control the same criminal behaviors.) These effects usually happen implicitly – we are not aware of them. The machine metaphor recurs in our descriptions of the brain and the overall functioning of the body and has become an automatic default. It can be useful in simplifying complex systems, and medical training encourages this. Even efforts to promote humanism in medicine slide in this direction, as communication, empathy and ethical decisions are formulated in mechanistic terms.

    This kind of thinking can get in the way when we treat conditions for which no “physical” cause can be found. Self-reports made by the person and their experiences of suffering are essential to the identification of the roots of the problems and opportunities for treatment. However if one buys into the machine metaphor too much, the experience of the person is given less weight in the overall assessment, while objective features such as brain scans, blood chemistry and physiologically evident symptoms are given the final say. Measurements based solely on a machine model lead to interventions that presuppose a kind of person that is incongruous with the way we live our lives, and what is most important to us.

    Visual art, film and literature can give insight into the nature of the human person that offers alternative metaphors for the human person, and opens opportunities for creative approaches to treatment and evaluation of outcomes. This presentation would elaborate on those, and give specific examples of how they can help yield more effective treatments and decisionmaking.

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