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

by Joshua D. Greene

Simply forcing people to justify their opinions with explicit reasons does very little to make people more reasonable, and may even do the opposite. But forcing people to confront their ignorance of essential facts does make people more moderate.

Ask: that is interesting. So how does it work? (not why you do or don't support it)

Rationalization is the great enemy of moral progress, and thus of deep pragmatism.* If moral tribes fight because their members have different gut feelings, then we’ll get nowhere by using our manual modes to rationalize our feelings. We need to shift into manual mode, but we need to use our manual modes wisely. We’ve seen some of this already (explaining how in addition to why), but we can do more. We can learn to recognize rationalization, and we can establish ground rules that make it harder to fool ourselves—and each other.

One can say that national health insurance will improve/destroy American healthcare, but if one is going to say this, and say it with confidence, one had better have some evidence. First, one had better understand how national health insurance is actually supposed to work (see above). Then, as a seeker of evidence, one must understand how different healthcare systems work and how different systems have fared in various states and nations: Who lives longest? Who has the best quality of life following care? Which citizens are most satisfied overall with their healthcare? These are, of course, just the sorts of questions that policy wonks try to answer, and not just about healthcare but about all significant social issues: When nations abolish the death penalty, do murder rates go up? Do nations that redistribute wealth more widely encourage laziness? Are the citizens of such nations less happy overall? Figuring out what makes societies happier is challenging and prone to bias. But in the end, with ten steps forward and nine steps back, such questions can be answered with evidence.

For people of means, making abortion illegal would simply make obtaining an abortion more expensive and inconvenient. Less fortunate women would turn to a domestic market that caters to the desperate for an illegal abortion. I’ll not recount here the horrors of illegal abortion. From a utilitarian perspective, causing people to seek alternative routes to abortion leaves them with options that range from bad to horrible.

Forcing women into unwanted pregnancies is horrible. Pregnancy is an enormous emotional strain under the best of conditions, and women carrying unwanted fetuses may, consciously or unconsciously, take less good care of them. Carrying a fetus/baby to term not only is a great emotional strain, but can severely disrupt one’s life. In sum, forcing women to have babies against their will is very, very bad.

On the one hand, outlawing abortion would pull an important safety net out from under millions of people, cause some wealthy people to seek abortions at great expense, and cause some desperate women and girls to seek horribly dangerous illegal abortions. Outlawing abortion would also disrupt many people’s life plans, causing them to have children when they are not yet ready to have children, or not interested in having children at all. These are very, very high costs. On the other hand, outlawing abortion would grant life to many people who would otherwise not get to exist. And, depending on the availability of good adoptive homes, among other things, their existence would likely be good.

For better or worse, we can’t take the pro-lifer’s life-saving utilitarian argument seriously. But the pro-choicer’s utilitarian arguments are not too good. They’re just plain good. Disrupting people’s sex lives, disrupting people’s life plans, and forcing people to seek international or illegal abortions are all very bad things that would make many people’s lives much worse, and in some cases much shorter. And that’s why, in the end, I believe that deep pragmatists should be pro-choice. I make no appeal to “rights,” just to a realistic consideration of the consequences.

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

As an ethicist, Aristotle is essentially a tribal philosopher. Read Aristotle and you will learn what it means to be a wise and temperate ancient Macedonian-Athenian aristocratic man. And you will also learn things about how to be a better human, because some lessons for ancient Macedonian-Athenian aristocratic men apply more widely. But Aristotle will not help you figure out whether abortion is wrong, whether you should give more of your money to distant strangers, or whether developed nations should have single-payer healthcare systems.

Kant’s problem is not so much with his ambition but with his unwillingness to admit failure. Mathematicians have successfully resolved countless mathematical controversies with proofs, but not one moral controversy has ever been resolved with a proof from first principles. Kant wants so badly to prove that his moral opinions are correct that he’s blind to the flaws in his arguments. In other words, Kant crosses the line from reasoning to rationalization, and that’s why Nietzsche is chuckling.

But while we’re waiting for Godot, I recommend a more pragmatic approach: We should simply try to make the world as happy as possible. This philosophy doesn’t give us everything we want, but for now, it’s the best that modern herders can do.

I’m a liberal because I believe that, in the real world, my tribe’s policies tend to make the world happier. But I’m not a liberal to my core. I’m a deep pragmatist first, and a liberal second. With the right kind of evidence, you could talk me out of my liberalism.

So far the conservatives just have not been able to have enough evidence

Morality is a suite of psychological capacities designed by biological and cultural evolution to promote cooperation.

Main definition of morality

WEIRD* (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)

..the people on whom most psychology research has been done

For the most part, American social conservatives belong to a specific tribe—a European American, white, Christian tribe that remains lamentably tribal. This tribe dismisses the knowledge gained from science when it conflicts with tribal teachings. Moreover, this tribe regards its own members as the “real” Americans (implicitly, if not explicitly) and regards residents who challenge their tribal beliefs as foreign invaders. According to Haidt, American social conservatives place greater value on respect for authority, and that’s true in a sense. Social conservatives feel less comfortable slapping their fathers, even as a joke, and so on. But social conservatives do not respect authority in a general way. Rather, they have great respect for the authorities recognized by their tribe (from the Christian God to various religious and political leaders to parents). American social conservatives are not especially respectful of Barack Hussein Obama, whose status as a native-born American, and thus a legitimate president, they have persistently challenged. Such conspiracy theories ought to be relegated to the right-wing fringe, but according to a 2011 CBS/New York Times poll, 45 percent of Republicans believe that President Obama has lied about his origins. Likewise, Republicans, as compared with Democrats and independents, have little respect for the authority of the United Nations, and a majority of Republicans say that a Muslim American with a position of authority in the U.S. g...

Long but good explanation how conservatives are very tribal

In sum, American social conservatives are not best described as people who place special value on authority, sanctity, and loyalty, but rather as tribal loyalists—loyal to their own authorities, their own religion, and themselves. This doesn’t make them evil, but it does make them parochial, tribal. In this they’re akin to the world’s other socially conservative tribes, from the Taliban in Afghanistan to European nationalists. According to Haidt, liberals should be more open to compromise with social conservatives. I disagree. In the short term, compromise may be necessary, but in the long term, our strategy should not be to compromise with tribal moralists, but rather to persuade them to be less tribalistic.

#koigieesti

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...

Tanelile

Some people earn three million dollars in a year. More typical American workers have an annual income of thirty thousand dollars. Such is the way of the free market. I’m prepared to believe that, on average, people who earn millions work harder than typical workers and deserve to be rewarded. But I don’t believe that they work one hundred times harder. I don’t believe that the super-rich do more hard work in one week than typical workers do all year. Rich people may deserve to be rich, but they are also beneficiaries of good fortune. I see no reason why the world’s luckiest people should keep all of that good fortune for themselves, especially when public schools can’t afford to pay teachers competitive professional salaries and billions of children worldwide are born into poverty through no fault of their own. Taking a bit of money from the haves hurts them very little, whereas providing resources and opportunities to the have-nots, when done wisely, goes a long way. That’s not socialism. That’s deep pragmatism.

Tanelile

Today we, some of us, defend the rights of gays and women with great conviction. But before we could do it with feeling, before our feelings felt like “rights,” someone had to do it with thinking. I’m a deep pragmatist, and a liberal, because I believe in this kind of progress and that our work is not yet done.

First, there must be arguments, then later it can just start to "feel" right

Thanks to our big brains, we’ve defeated most of our natural enemies. We can make as much food as we need and build shelters to protect ourselves from the elements. We’ve outsmarted most of our predators, from lions to bacteria. Today our most formidable natural enemy is ourselves. Nearly all of our biggest problems are caused by, or at least preventable by, human choice.

Once again, we face two fundamentally different kinds of moral problems: Me versus Us (Tragedy of the Commons) and Us versus Them (Tragedy of Commonsense Morality). We also have two fundamentally different kinds of moral thinking: fast (using emotional automatic settings) and slow (using manual-mode reasoning). And, once again, the key is to match the right kind of thinking to the right kind of problem: When it’s Me versus Us, think fast. When it’s Us versus Them, think slow.

Basically this sums the whole book up

Thus stated, the solution to our problem seems obvious: We should put our divisive tribal feelings aside and do whatever produces the best overall results. But what is “best”? Nearly everything that we value is valuable because of its impact on our experience. Thus, we might say that what’s best is what makes our experience as good as possible, giving equal weight to each person’s quality of life. Bentham and Mill turned this splendid idea into a systematic philosophy, and gave it an awful name.

Utilitarianism

SIX RULES FOR MODERN HERDERS Rule No. 1. In the face of moral controversy, consult, but do not trust, your moral instincts

In your personal life, you should trust your moral instincts and be wary of your manual mode, which is all too adept at figuring out how to put Me ahead of Us. But in the face of moral controversy, when it’s Us versus Them, it’s time to shift into manual mode.

In personal moral decisions, listen to what you feel as being right or wrong

Rule No. 2. Rights are not for making arguments; they’re for ending arguments

We have no non-question-begging way of figuring out who has which rights and which rights outweigh others.

Rule No. 3. Focus on the facts, and make others do the same

We should provide—and demand—evidence about what works and what doesn’t. And when we don’t know how things work, in theory or in practice, we should emulate the wisdom of Socrates and acknowledge our ignorance.

Rule No. 4. Beware of biased fairness

Rule No. 5. Use common currency

We can argue about rights and justice forever, but we are bound together by two more basic things. First, we are bound together by the ups and downs of the human experience. We all want to be happy. None of us wants to suffer. Second, we all understand the Golden Rule and the ideal of impartiality behind it. Put these two ideas together and we have a common currency, a system for making principled compromises. We can agree, over the objections of our tribal instincts, to do whatever works best, whatever makes us happiest overall.

There are many sources of knowledge, but the most widely trusted, by far, is science, and for good reason.

In our tribal quarters, and in our hearts, we may believe whatever we like. But on the new pastures, truth should be determined using the common currency of observable evidence.

Rule No. 6. Give

Volunteer ;)

But the honest response, the enlightened response, is to acknowledge the harsh reality of our habits and do our best to change them, knowing that a partially successful honest effort is better than a fully successful denial.

The natural world is full of cooperation, from tiny cells to packs of wolves. But all of this teamwork, however impressive, evolved for the amoral purpose of successful competition. And yet somehow we, with our overgrown primate brains, can grasp the abstract principles behind nature’s machines and make them our own. On these pastures, something new is growing under the sun: a global tribe that looks out for its members, not to gain advantage over others, but simply because it’s good.

GiveWell recommends charities based on their track records, cost-effectiveness, and need for additional funds. For the latest information visit: www.givewell.org. Oxfam International works to create long-term solutions to poverty and injustice. To find your nearest Oxfam affiliate visit: www.oxfam.org.

In sum, bias in cross-cultural social scientific research is a legitimate concern, but the solution is not to dismiss all such research as biased political posturing. This is no better than blindly believing that everything well-credentialed scientists have ever said is true.

Same about Psychology research - yes, some studies have been flawed and some results biased or not valid, but this does not mean all Psychology research is bullshit