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

by Joshua D. Greene

The full-blown collectivism of the Southern herders is dead, and the question today is not whether to endorse free-market capitalism, but whether and to what extent it should be moderated by collectivist institutions such as assistance for the poor, free public education, national health insurance, and progressive taxation. For some libertarians, their politics is a matter of fundamental rights: It’s simply wrong, they say, to take one person’s hard-earned money and give it to someone else. The government has no right to tell people what they can or can’t do. And so on. I reject this view, for reasons already given: We have no non-question-begging way of knowing who has which rights. With respect to economic matters, this view also presupposes that the world is fair: If government interference in the marketplace is unfair, it must be because the marketplace is itself fair, with winners who deserve all of their winnings and losers who deserve all of their losings. I don’t believe that the world is fair. Many people, myself included, begin life with enormous advantages over others. Some people succeed despite great disadvantages, but this doesn’t mean that disadvantages don’t matter. Ron Paul says that the government shouldn’t take care of a man too foolish to buy health insurance. But what about that man’s child? Or the child whose family is too poor to afford health insurance? Should the government let those children die? These are familiar liberal points, and I won’t bela...

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