Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

by Joshua D. Greene

tribalism, the (often unapologetic) favoring of in-group members over out-group members.

As Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Natures, human violence has declined dramatically over recent millennia, centuries, and decades—a trend Pinker attributes to profound, culturally driven changes in how we think, feel, and organize our societies. These changes include shifts toward democratic governance, states with legal monopolies on the use of force, entertainment that fosters empathy, legal rights for the vulnerable, science as a source of verifiable knowledge, and mutually advantageous commerce.

people living in more market-integrated societies, rather than being hopelessly greedy, tend to be more altruistic toward strangers and more adept at cooperating with them.

we in the United States have ongoing debates over taxes, healthcare, immigration, affirmative action, abortion, end-of-life issues, stem cell research, capital punishment, gay rights, the teaching of evolution in public schools, gun control, animal rights, environmental regulation, and the regulation of the financial industry.

Racism? Feminism?

suppose that a utilitarian doctor can save them by kidnapping one person, anesthetizing him, removing his various organs, and distributing them to the other five people. That would seem to produce the greatest good. Do you think that would be right?

The decisive test.

Don’t use people. It’s hard to think of a more dramatic example of using someone than using someone as a human trolley-stopper.

Distinguished by the Doctrine of Double Effect?

ventral (lower) portions of the medial prefrontal cortex (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or VMPFC).

Emotional loci

neural circuits in the dorsal lateral (dorsolateral) prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC.

Rational loci

Figure 4.4. A 3-D brain image highlighting three of the brain regions implicated in moral judgment.

Nice illustration!

A short-term effect of citalopram is the enhancement of emotional reactivity in the amygdala and the VMPFC, among other regions.

Emotions, as automatic processes, are devices for achieving behavioral efficiency.

reason cannot produce good decisions without some kind of emotional input, however indirect.

we’re going to have to find our own, unnatural solution: what I’ve called a metamorality, a higher-level moral system that adjudicates among competing tribal moralities,

From a utilitarian perspective, it’s not that happiness beats out the other values on the list. Happiness, properly understood, encompasses the other values. Happiness is the ur-value, the Higgs boson of normativity, the value that gives other values their value.

Does this imply that sentience sans emotions is paradoxical?

If happiness is the one and only ultimate value, then how can values ever conflict?)

More important, our moral alarm systems see no difference between self-serving murder and saving a million lives at the cost of one. It’s a mistake to grant these gizmos veto power in our search for a universal moral philosophy.

Our System One (automatic) is an evolutionary kludge, but that doesn't mean the similar conclusion reached by our System Two (manual) must be discarded.

because merely doubling the cost of helping doesn’t fundamentally change the math.

Doubling, maybe not. But at some level of corruption, isn't it possible that we're subsidizing an increase in misery?

How much sacrifice should you make? Again, there’s no magic formula, and it all depends on your personal circumstances and limitations.

Isn't this awfully subjective?

Isn’t there something wrong with utilitarianism if it says that we ought, ideally, to care more about unfortunate strangers than anything else?

Are you reducing Utilitarianism to a complex rationale to "do the right thing"?

To make things more concrete, let’s imagine a representative slave society in which half of the people are slave owners and half are slaves.

Simplistic view of a slave-owning society.

Thus, we may conclude, conservatively, that owning a slave would give you a substantial boost in wealth and a modest gain in happiness.

So the financial benefit is the only one?

This experiment shows that people have a very hard time thinking clearly about utility.

Utilitarianism doesn’t ask us to be morally perfect. It asks us to face up to our moral limitations and do as much as we humanly can to overcome them.

I don't see how this question isnt bgged.

but in the real world, with human nature as it is, oppression does not make the world a happier place.

This requires us to abjure System 1, but provides no *test* for System 2. Instead, we have fuzzy boundaries, appealing to our intuitions about what is outrageous and what is sensible.

But when there’s controversy, when whole tribes disagree, then you know that you’re on the new pastures, dealing with Us versus Them. And that’s when it’s time to shift into manual mode. Why? Because when tribes disagree, it’s almost always because their automatic settings say different things, because their emotional moral compasses point in opposite directions. Here we can’t get by with common sense, because our common sense is not as common as we think.

But heightened emotions also means that identity is threatened, so identity-protective motivated thinking kicks in.

anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

According to the conflict-monitoring theory, the ACC detects that the brain has been firing up two incompatible behaviors and then sends a wake-up signal to the DLPFC, the seat of manual mode, which can, like a higher court, resolve the conflict.

When we think about divisive moral problems, our first instinct is to think of all the ways in which We are right and They are wrong.

Yup: i-p m t.

And recall that when we evaluate evidence, our biases creep in unconsciously.

In a brilliant set of experiments, Philip Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig Fox, and Steven Sloman

In the early 1970s, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron sent an attractive female experimenter to intercept men crossing two different bridges in a park in British Columbia.

In another classic experiment, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson asked people to choose one of several pairs of panty hose displayed in a row.

But for tribal loyalists, these pragmatic, utilitarian arguments are just window dressing.

Yes: slavery is simply *wrong*.

The rights and the duties follow the emotions.*

No: they correlate with. You've made the case that the rationalization is prompted by emotions, but dismissed the possibility that the deontological reason might be logical despite that origin.

By appealing to rights, we excuse ourselves from the hard work of providing real, non-question-begging justifications for what we want.

B.S.: by explicitly explaining "rights" (a la deontological rationales) we provide non-fuzzy explanations. Exactly backwards.

claims about what will or won’t promote the greater good, unlike claims about rights, are ultimately accountable to evidence.

That doesn't pass the sniff test: evidence is interpreted; it doesn't stand aside and above reasoning. There is no "appeal to evidence", only individual evaluation of evidence.

Who has the best quality of life following care? Which citizens are most satisfied overall with their healthcare?

Are phrases like "quality of life" and "satisfied" empirical, absent an a priori criteria?

In my estimation, the costs of talking about slavery as if it’s an open question, to be settled by the available evidence, outweigh the benefits.

How is this a useful guideline?

Few liberals would say that being a member of Homo sapiens is a necessary ingredient for having a right to life.

Perhaps I'm in the minority. Humans are the only species that have an inherent right to life. Others only have it because we grant it to them.

We understand the chemical processes that allow sperm to move:

Lol. This is a really good précis.

This, however, is just a hope, a bald assertion with no evidence behind it.

So? We make many moral (and other) judgement which aren't amenable to empirical demonstration.

From a pro-life perspective, the only questionable part of Mourdock’s position should be his willingness to allow abortion to save a mother’s life. Would it be okay to kill a three-year-old if, somehow, that were the only way to save her mother?

Poor reasoning: the life of a fetus is contingent on the life of the mother, unless the mother's"death" could still permit her body to function as a zombie incubator. The charitable understanding of Mourdock's conclusion is that when the choice is between the death of both versus the death of only the "unborn child", the latter is the correct, if tragic, choice.

are just bluffing,

I have no evidence that will prove that life is "good" — is my belief so trivially dismissible?

The only sharply discontinuous event in the whole process is fertilization.

No, the other "magical" event is birth.

What to do?

I think the Justices in Roe v. Wade did a tolerably good job at answering this.

These three schools of thought are, essentially, three different ways for a manual mode to make sense of the automatic settings with which it is housed.

Nonsense. We can think beyond the origins of the ideas. Example: when we try to write software that instantiates ethics, do the crude biological origins of those ideas matter?

transcend

Oh, that is such bs. Why do you privilege your choice with the glorious "transcend", cheater?

I think that Rawls’s central argument in A Theory of Justice, like Kant’s before him, is essentially a rationalization.***

The footnote here might be interesting for someone exploring Rawl's text. It had probably been done.

I’m a deep pragmatist first, and a liberal second.

I'm amused. This describes me, too. I don't devalue his goal so much as deny his success and his methodology.

Haidt does not accept this characterization of his view.

I need to explore this.