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

by Joshua D. Greene

I refer to contemporary liberals as “more Southerly” rather than “Southern.” Contemporary U.S. conservatives, in contrast, resemble more closely their fictional Northern counterparts.)

Ya dejo ver el color del autor

comforts. Contrary to popular lamentation, humans are getting better and better at getting along. Violence has declined over the course of human history, including recent history, and participation in modern market economies, far from turning us into selfish bean counters, has expanded the scope of human kindness. Nevertheless, we’ve plenty of room for improvement. The twentieth century was the most peaceful on record (controlling for population growth), yet its wars and assorted political conflicts killed approximately 230 million people, laying down enough human bodies to circle the globe seven times. In this new century, the death toll continues to climb, albeit at a reduced rate. For example, the ongoing conflict in Darfur has killed, through violence or increased disease, about 300,000 people.

Not according to others

The idea of a universal moral philosophy is not new. It’s been a dream of moral thinkers since the Enlightenment.

philosophy known (rather unfortunately) as utilitarianism. We’ll see how utilitarianism is built out of values and reasoning processes that are universally accessible and, thus, how it gives us the common currency that we need.

Stand

More generally, it’s rare to find a cooperative enterprise in which individuals have no opportunity to favor themselves at the expense of the group. In other words, nearly all cooperative enterprises involve at least some tension between self-interest and collective interest, between Me and Us.

General public benefit from entrepreneurs and innovators, and they don't mind. MaxU premise

Had Art and Bud both cared a bit more about the well-being of strangers, they’d have both survived.

Hypothesis Without foundation, check Adam Smith

Of course, in our society we have laws and police officers to ensure that people hold up their end of a bargain.

Yes, there is evil but not generalise

We now have an answer. Morality evolved as a solution to the problem of cooperation,

Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.

The essence of morality is altruism, unselfishness, a willingness to pay a personal cost to benefit others.

disgusting..... Morality can't be alturism. Morality is a win/win fomula, not a loose/win, nor win/loose

Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only with some people. Our moral brains evolved for cooperation within groups, and perhaps only within the context of personal relationships. Our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).

Evolution is an inherently competitive process:

No competition, no evolution by natural selection.

Nature is scarse by definition. Thus competition is a primary response, thinking that abundance eliminates the need to compete is naive at best.

Imagine, for example, two groups of herders,

Why herders? Humans were hunter gatherers before having cattle and agricultural revolution. If we want to understand the nature of morality we should think about hunters.

competition is essential for the evolution of cooperation.

or the other way around. Cooperation is essential for competition.

nature never “intended.”

What we really want to know, of course, is why we fight.

of course

Thus, familial love is more than just a warm and fuzzy thing. It’s a strategic biological device, a piece of moral machinery that enables genetically related individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.

Evidence ?

This suggests that our capacity for forgiveness, which tempers our negative reactive emotions, has deep biological origins, following the logic of reciprocity in an uncertain world.

the birth of modern military training.

Soldiers are trained to think about their mates and not the enemy. It's Either us or them.

But, as aggressive as we are, our aggression is nothing compared with what it could be. Under ordinary circumstances, we shudder at the thought of behaving violently toward innocent people, even total strangers, and this is most likely a crucial feature of our moral brains. (Try to imagine our world without it.)

1. Mob rules 2. Extinct

decency extends beyond nonaggression to positive acts of kindness. Sadly, we are not anywhere near as kind as we could be,

There must be a reason. Evil is real and ought to serve a purpose or at least did.

Watching another person experience pain, for example, engages the same emotion-related neural circuits that are engaged when one experiences pain oneself, and the brains of people who report having high levels of empathy toward others exhibit this effect more strongly.

the emotions that fuel vengeful behaviors are, or can be, a kind of rational irrationality.

??? Oxymoron

Only love provides the kind of loyalty you need in order to take the parenting plunge. Thus, love appears to be more than just an intense form of caring. It’s a highly specialized piece of psychological machinery, an emotional straitjacket that enables cooperative parenting by assuring our parenting partners that they won’t be abandoned.

Thus, reputation can enhance cooperation in two ways: by giving people incentives to demonstrate their cooperativeness and by giving people incentives to demonstrate their intolerance of noncooperativeness.

Reputation is an effect not a cause

“honor box” for buying drinks, a picture of eyes made people pay more than twice as much for their milk.

Dios te ve

What’s surprising here is that an irrelevant low-level cue, a picture of eyes, can put people on their best behavior.

The power of metaphors

Research shows that people like transgressors better if, after committing a transgression, the transgressor appears to be embarrassed.

Lady who left kids in the car

Cooperation is why we’re here, and yet, at the same time, maintaining cooperation is our greatest challenge. Morality is the human brain’s answer to this challenge. (For

Built into our moral brains are automated psychological programs that enable and facilitate cooperation.

but he wants to make a rational altruistic system!!

From these studies, you might conclude that intuition is the source of all things good and that careful reasoning is the enemy of morality. This would be a mistake. Indeed, it’s the mistake that this book was written to correct.

so far he is leaned towards this “error”

How do these prohibitions help people cooperate?

check the origin of the mandate (10 commandments)

Out of evolutionary dirt grows the flower of human goodness.

Why do our moral brains, which are so good at averting the Tragedy of the Commons, so often fail to avert the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality?

groups can have selfish reasons for favoring some moral values over others, a phenomenon I call biased fairness.

Insofar as there is a debate about our tribalistic tendencies, it’s not about whether we have them, but about why.

As usual, all of this is done anonymously.

More recently, in 2012, a YouTube video portraying Muhammad in a highly unflattering manner sparked protests around the world, many of which turned violent.

In 2013 Charlie Hebdo in France

The aggrieved Muslims were deeply opposed to the cartoons, but the Danish journalists had no problem with them at all.

How does this explain the violence of BLM - Antifa? The Cancel Culture

religion can be a source of both moral division and moral unity.

We genuinely want to be fair, but in most disputes there is a range of options that might be seen as fair, and we tend to favor the ones that suit us best.

A poor definition is not an excuse

Ironically, our tendency toward biased fairness is sufficiently strong that, in some situations, we may be better off if everyone thinks selfishly rather than morally.

Opposites ?

The surprising answer is that the selfish careerists did better. Bear in mind that the selfish careerists did not succeed by trampling over the seekers of justice. The selfish careerists were negotiating with each other.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Kahan’s theory predicts that people who are more scientifically literate, rather than gravitating toward the truth, will simply be more adept at defending their tribe’s position, whatever it happens to be.

The other way around Chose your tribe based on believes

While there is widespread disagreement about climate change among nonexperts, there is, once again, overwhelming consensus among experts that climate change is real and that the risks are serious.

Not so fast

the two parties diverged on climate change because this issue got politicized, forcing some people to choose between being informed by experts and being good members of their tribe.

six psychological tendencies that exacerbate intertribal conflict. First, human tribes are tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Second, tribes have genuine disagreements about how societies should be organized, emphasizing, to different extents, the rights of individuals versus the greater good of the group. Tribal values also differ along other dimensions, such as the role of honor in prescribing responses to threats. Third, tribes have distinctive moral commitments, typically religious ones, whereby moral authority is vested in local individuals, texts, traditions, and deities that other groups don’t recognize as authoritative. Fourth, tribes, like the individuals within them, are prone to biased fairness, allowing group-level self-interest to distort their sense of justice. Fifth, tribal beliefs are easily biased. Biased beliefs arise from simple self-interest, but also from more complex social dynamics. Once a belief becomes a cultural identity badge, it can perpetuate itself, even as it undermines the tribe’s interests. Finally, the way we process information about social events can cause us to underestimate the harm we cause others, leading to the escalation of conflict.

At the start of the debate, each debater presents a “value premise,” the value that one regards as preeminent.

Next you’d argue for the preeminence of your value premise.