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

by Joshua D. Greene

Then, with your value premise in place, you would argue that your side best serves the preeminent value.

Then I discovered utilitarianism, the philosophy pioneered by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, British philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.* Utilitarianism is a great idea with an awful name. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy.

The more flexibly we behave, the more our environments change; and the more our environments change, the more opportunities we have to succeed by behaving flexibly. Thus, we reign as the earth’s undisputed champions of flexible behavior.

Enlightenment

Reasoning, as applied to decision making, involves the conscious application of decision rules.

Notice, by the way, that choosing a larger delayed reward is, in certain respects, like choosing to push the person into the path of the trolley. In both cases, one uses one’s DLPFC to opt for the “greater good,”

Stretching The argument

we see dual-process brain design not just in moral judgment but in the choices we make about food, money, and the attitudes we’d like to change. For most of the things that we do, our brains have automatic settings that tell us how to proceed. But we can also use our manual mode to override those automatic settings, provided that we are aware of the opportunity to do so and motivated to take it.

experience comes in three forms, based on three different kinds of trial and error. First, our automatic settings may be shaped by our genes.

Second, our automatic settings may be shaped by cultural learning, through the trials and errors of people whose ideas have influenced us.

Finally, there’s good old personal experience,

getting smart requires three things. First, it requires the acquisition of adaptive instincts—from

Second, getting smart requires a facility with manual mode,

Third, it requires a kind of metacog...

How can we avert the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality?

Morality is nature’s solution to the Tragedy of the Commons, enabling us to put Us ahead of Me.

Wrong premise.

If we are to avert the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality, we’re going to have to find our own, unnatural solution: what I’ve called a metamorality,

one philosophical and one psychological. What’s more, these two solutions turn out to be the same solution, a remarkable convergence.

Utilitarianism is a splendid idea, and it is, I believe, the metamorality that we modern herders so desperately need.

I don’t think that happiness is the one true value. Instead, what makes happiness special—and this is Bentham and Mill’s real insight, in my opinion—is that happiness is the common currency of human values.

It seems that Mill’s “higher pleasures” are pleasures derived from activities that build durable and shareable resources. This opens up a more principled utilitarian argument in favor of Mill’s “higher pleasures.”

In defending the noble life, Mill appealed to immediate self-interest (“Really, it’s a much better high!”), when he should have instead appealed to the greater good: The higher pleasures are higher because of their characteristic long-term consequences, not because of how they feel.

N ope

This is mostly a verbal problem. We can say that happiness is different things for different people, but that’s needlessly confusing. It’s clearer to say that happiness is the same thing for everyone, and that different people are made happy and unhappy by different things. Two kinds of ice cream does it for me, but not for you, and so on.

Criminal Minds

We’ve asked Ricardo and Beatriz about how they are feeling right now, but we could also ask them about how their lives are going overall. Here the measurement problems are even worse.

Difference Bentham & Mill; edo vs Aristotle

it’s not necessary to measure the happiness of any given individual with great accuracy. Instead we need to understand general patterns: What kinds of policies tend to increase happiness? What kinds of policies tend to decrease happiness?

Dangerous criteria. How trends w/o bias? Who measures ?

our moral instincts reliably guide us toward the greater good, then why bother with moral philosophy, utilitarian or otherwise? Here it’s important not to confuse our two tragedies. Once again, our moral instincts do well with the Tragedy of the Commons (Me vs. Us), but not so well with the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality (Us vs. Them). The utilitarian thing to do, then, is to let our instincts carry us past the moral temptations of everyday life (Me vs. Us) but to engage in explicit utilitarian thinking when we’re figuring out how to live on the new pastures (Us vs. Them).

Without a common currency there can be no metamorality, no system for making compromises, trade-offs. Finding a common currency is challenging. Some say impossible.

I do

they must make their moral cases in secular terms.

Why religious to secular and not the other way around

This would give us a different kind of common currency: facts about which rights exist and their relative priorities and weights.

no one thinks that moral facts are mathematical facts, to be worked out through calculation; rather, the idea is that the moral facts are like mathematical facts, abstract truths that we can work out if we think sufficiently hard, objectively, and carefully.

Are bad things bad because God disapproves of them, or does God disapprove of them because they’re bad?

The fundamental problem with modeling morality on math is that, after centuries of trying, no one has found a serviceable set of moral axioms, ones that (a) are self-evidently true and (b) can be used to derive substantive moral conclusions, conclusions that settle real-world moral disagreements.*** Now, you may think it’s obvious that morality cannot be axiomatized, and that morality is therefore not like math.

Rand?

The Happiness Button. Next week, you will accidentally trip on an uneven sidewalk and break your kneecap. This will be extremely painful and will significantly reduce your happiness for several months. However, if you press this button, a little bit of magic will make you more attentive as you’re walking along, and you won’t break your kneecap. Will you push? Of course you will. This tells us something rather obvious: If all else is equal,* people prefer being more happy to being less happy. Next question.

Zen parable

Would all people do this? Unfortunately, probably not. Some people are psychopaths who care for others not

Brene Brown's harm or good intentions

If we drop the “if all else is equal” qualifier, we get utilitarianism. We get a complete moral system, a metamorality that can (given enough factual information) resolve any moral disagreement.

Utilitarianism makes sense to everybody because all humans have more or less the same manual-mode machinery. This is why utilitarianism is uniquely suited to serve as our metamorality, and why it gives us an invaluable common currency.

It is, once again, a set of neural networks, based primarily in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), that enables humans to engage in conscious and controlled reasoning and planning. It’s what enables us, unlike spiders, to solve complex, novel problems.

Are teens incapable of utilitarian morality?

As simple as a thermostat is, there are useful devices that are even simpler.

Wrong, sensors are part of the system, not the system. A thermostat is more than the probe

I think that utilitarianism is the philosophy that the human manual mode is predisposed to adopt, once it’s shopping for a moral philosophy.

It is predisposed to a moral framework, none in specific. Just one that makes sense

Thus, your general-purpose action planner is, by necessity, a very complex device that thinks not only in terms of consequences but also in terms of the trade-offs involved in choosing one action over another, based on their expected consequences, including side effects.

Therefore reductionist models are inaccurate

If there are no power asymmetries, an equal division is the only stable solution. In other words, what we would call a “fair” distribution of resources naturally emerges among people—even people who don’t care about “fairness”—when there is no power imbalance.

This is one way to get utilitarianism’s first essential ingredient, impartiality.

however imperfectly, to produce consequences that are optimal from an impartial perspective, giving equal weight to all people.

Utilitarianism can be summarized in three words: Maximize happiness impartially. The “maximize” part comes from the human manual mode, which is, by nature, a device for maximizing. This, I claim, is universal—standard issue in every healthy human brain.

Happiness—yours and that of others—might not be the only thing that you value intrinsically, as an end in itself, but it’s certainly one of the primary things that you value intrinsically. This, too, I claim, is universal,

The manual mode doesn’t come with a moral philosophy, but it can create one if it’s seeded with two universally accessible moral values: happiness and impartiality. This combination yields a complete moral system

Utilitarianism may not be the moral truth, but it is, I think, the metamorality that we’re looking for.

According to John Rawls, utilitarianism’s most influential critic,

No me defiendas compadre

For example, as I write, Oxfam America, a highly regarded international aid organization,

Uy!!!

says utilitarianism, you should spend that money helping desperately needy people rather than on luxuries for yourself.

Money used in B helps B-people, but not A-people, who are not B because they have a job. Wealth needs to be constantly created or ends.

Why would we ever want to make the world less happy than it could otherwise be?

Wrong agency. World is not happy, "good savage" doesn't exist

By accommodation, I mean showing that maximizing happiness does not, in fact, have the apparently absurd implications that it seems to have. In