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

by Joshua D. Greene

One can imagine a society that is highly economically productive but in which everyone is miserable. Is that a good society? If the consequences that really matter aren’t economic consequences per se, then what does really matter? We might begin by asking ourselves what we want from economic productivity. Once again, if we’re all miserable, our wealth is apparently not doing us any good. On the flip side, if we’re all happy, you might say that it doesn’t matter whether we’re rich or poor. Thus, a natural thought is that what really matters is our happiness. Not everyone agrees with this conclusion, but it is, at the very least, a reasonable place to start. If we combine the idea that happiness is what matters with the idea that we should try to maximize good consequences, we get utilitarianism.