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

by Joshua D. Greene

The founding utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were not just armchair philosophers. They were daring social reformers, intensely engaged with the social and political issues of their day. Indeed, many familiar social issues became social issues because Bentham and Mill made them so. Their views were considered radical at the time, but today we take for granted most of the social reforms for which they fought. They were among the earliest opponents of slavery and advocates of free speech, free markets, widely available education, environmental protection, prison reform, women’s rights, animal rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, the right to divorce, and the separation of church and state. Bentham and Mill were unwilling to accept moral business as usual. They refused to accept practices and policies as right simply because of tradition, or because they seemed intuitively right to most people, or because it was “the natural order of things.” Nor did the founding utilitarians appeal to God to justify their moral ideas. Instead, they asked the kinds of questions that we asked above: What really matters, and why? By what standard can we evaluate our actions and policies, without begging the questions we’re trying to answer? On what grounds, for example, can one say that slavery is wrong? Bentham and Mill couldn’t appeal to God because their proslavery opponents thought they had God on their side. Even if the founding utilitarians had wanted to appeal to God, how could they show ...