Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Issue: From Knowledge to Wisdom: Science and the Good Life The moral animal: virtue, vice, and human nature Steve Paulson, 1 Heather A. Berlin, 2 Christian B. Miller, 3 and Michael Shermer 4,5 1 Wisconsin Public Radio, Madison, Wisconsin. 2 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York. 3 Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 4 Skeptic Magazine, Altadena, California. 5 Chapman University, Orange, California In Leo Tolstoy’s famous novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a rich and meaningful inner life is sacrificed in pursuit of material rewards and social status. How can we cultivate something intrinsic that transcends our worldly accomplish- ments? Assuming that a basic model or map of human nature is needed to navigate the road to the good life, what desires, tendencies, and aversions constitute our core nature? How has our evolutionary history shaped our moral impulses? Are we inherently good or fundamentally flawed? Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, moderated a discussion with philosopher Christian Miller, neuroscientist Heather Berlin, and historian of science Michael Shermer to examine our moral ecology and its influence on our underlying assumptions about human nature. Keywords: morality; virtue; character; the good life; free will; honesty; neuroscience; philosophy Steve Paulson: Do you ever get a pang of conscience after you have done something kind of crappy or have just made a cutting remark? Or maybe you look around at what’s happening in the world—you’ve seen the latest news about a recent atrocity—and you think maybe the human species is not all that it’s cracked up to be? Maybe you have the opposite reaction—you’re pleasantly startled by acts of generosity, courage, and self-sacrifice. Today we are going to take the moral temperature of our fellow human beings and of ourselves, and we’re going to talk about some old-fashioned ideas like virtue and character, and what they mean for our own lives. For centuries, philosophers and religious leaders were the go-to authorities on morality, but more recently, science has gotten into the act. There are evolutionary explanations for all kinds of moral behaviors, and there’s a whole new wing of neuroscience that looks at how particular parts of our brain seem to trigger behaviors that have a moral component—from compassion and sociability to impulsivity and violence. How much can science tell us about morality? And even if it can point to the roots of certain behaviors, does this knowledge actually make us better people? To put it another way, if we’re looking for virtue, are we better off talking to scientists or philosophers? We have both on our panel this evening, so you can be the judge. We’re going to dig into the science of morality, and also concepts like character and the good life and what they mean for our lives. We have a wonderful panel; let me introduce our speakers. Heather Berlin is a cognitive neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and MPH from Harvard University. She studies the complex interactions of the human brain and mind, with the goal of developing better treatment and prevention of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders. She’s also interested in the neuronal basis of consciousness and dynamic unconscious processes, and is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Christian Miller is professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. He holds a BA in philosophy from Princeton University and a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. His main areas of research are metaethics, moral psychology, moral character, action theory, and philosophy of religion. He is the director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com) and the author of Moral Character: An Empirical Theory, and Character and Moral Psychology, which together articulate a novel framework for thinking about character that is empirically supported by research in psychology. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13067 1 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2016) 1–18 C  2016 New York Academy of Sciences.