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

by Joshua D. Greene

There are three major schools of thought in Western moral philosophy: utilitarianism/consequentialism (à la Bentham and Mill), deontology (à la Kant), and virtue ethics (à la Aristotle). 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. We can use manual-mode thinking to explicitly describe our automatic settings (Aristotle). We can use manual-mode thinking to justify our automatic settings (Kant). And we can use manual-mode thinking to transcend the limitations of our automatic settings (Bentham and Mill).

3 main philosophical schools of thought