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

by Joshua D. Greene

the victim is killed as a means to save the others.

mean, victim (side-effect) or tool. It is too much consideration for a fast decision. For the mind it is a person vs five.

This tells us that intuitive judgments come first, and that the doctrine is just an (imperfect) organizing summary of those intuitive judgments.

our brains have a cognitive subsystem, a “module,” that monitors our behavioral plans and sounds an emotional alarm bell when we contemplate harming other people.** Second, this alarm system is “myopic,” because it is blind to harmful side effects.

this general ability to dream up ways of achieving distant goals came with a terrible cost. It opened the door to premeditated violence.

To keep one’s violent behavior in check, it would help to have some kind of internal monitor, an alarm system that says “Don’t do that!” when one is contemplating an act of violence.

impartial spectator. Conciencia

this system should respond most strongly to simulating violent actions oneself, as opposed to watching others simulate violence or simulating physically similar, but nonviolent, actions oneself.

what determines whether this alarm system sounds the alarm? We know that our judgments are, at least sometimes, sensitive to the means/side-effect distinction. And yet, our judgments are not always sensitive to the means/side-effect distinction,

The missing ingredient is personal force.

the system that sounds the emotional alarm is supposed to be a relatively simple system,

this action-plan inspector is a relatively simple, “single-channel” system that doesn’t keep track of multiple causal chains.

These two systems interact as follows. When the emotional alarm is silent, the manual mode gets its way (rows 1 and 2). But when the emotional alarm goes off, the manual mode’s reasoning tends to lose (rows 3 and 4).

representing a specific goal-directed action, such as choosing a blue mug, is a fairly basic cognitive ability, an ability that six-month-old infants have. But representing an omission, a failure to do some specific thing, is, for humans, a less basic and more sophisticated ability.

If there are only two possibilities—choosing A and not choosing A—then representing what is not done is not much harder than representing what is done.

nice application to the non-contradictory principle

it appears that humans find it much easier to represent what one does rather than what one doesn’t do. And that makes sense, given that in real life, it’s more important to keep track of the relatively few things that people do, compared with the millions of things that people could do but don’t.

reminds me buying engament ring. Knew what she didn't like was tough

The hypothesis, then, is that harmful omissions don’t push our emotional moral buttons in the same way that harmful actions do. We represent actions in a basic motor and sensory way, but omissions are represented more abstractly.

this difference in how we represent actions and omissions has nothing to do with morality; it has to do simply with the more general cognitive constraints placed on our brains—brains

“Pushing the guy off the footbridge is murder.

Law should be moral, thus the moral problem is more general than the legal one.

To say that this automatic alarm system responds to violence probably gets things backward. Rather, I suspect that our conception of violence is defined by this automatic alarm system.

“Careful! You’re playing with fire!” That’s a good voice to have in one’s head. (Lenin, Trotsky, Mao . . . take note.)

Boling frogs. Easy to point at Lenin, Mao, etc. but not so easy to Roosevelt, LBJ, Biden, Sanders, Clinton....

to harms caused using personal force not because personal force matters per se, but because the most basic nasty things that humans can do to one another (hitting, pushing, etc.) involve the direct application of personal force.

someone who is willing to cause harm through personal force shows especially strong signs of having a defective antiviolence alarm system: If this person had a normal moral sense, he wouldn’t do that. And

Moral as a negative trait, do no harm. Instead of do good.

But it’s certainly important to distinguish harms that are specifically intended from harms that are unforeseen side effects—that is, accidents. Someone who harms people by accident may be dangerous, but someone who specifically intends to harm people as a means to his ends is really dangerous. Such people may or may not be more dangerous than people who knowingly cause harm as collateral damage.

Law makes the distinction between voluntary and involuntary. Also judge events's evidence not personality. X did not X is.

truly wrong to maximize happiness?

or do no harm?

It’s a mistake to grant these gizmos veto power in our search for a universal moral philosophy.

Sorry, but you’re on the hook.

The author invented the hook and put a blame. Compassion is not obligation

International aid organizations are more effective and more accountable than ever

Check "Poverty Inc."

being a perfect utilitarian requires forsaking almost everything you want out of life and turning yourself into a happiness pump.

Kant

But as a real person with limited time, money, and willpower, trying to maintain a physiologically optimal diet is not, in fact, optimal. Instead, the optimal strategy is to eat as well as you can, given your real-world constraints, including your own psychological limitations and including limitations imposed on you as a social being. This is challenging because there’s no magic formula, no bright line between the extremes of perfectionism and unbridled gluttony.

Slippery slope

The ideal utilitarian “moral diet” is simply incompatible with the life for which our brains were designed. Our brains were not designed to care deeply about the happiness of strangers.

Fatal flaw of the model

Thus, in the real world, utilitarianism is demanding, but not overly demanding. It can accommodate our basic human needs and motivations, but it nonetheless calls for substantial reform of our selfish habits.

jajajaja

It’s surprisingly hard to justify treating the nearby drowning child and the faraway starving child differently.

Helping the nearby creates community; next time could be my child.

moral monster.

morally abnormal,

Here, too, utilitarianism can do plenty of accommodating.

Weak theory

At some point, spending money on your own child instead of children who badly need food and medicine may indeed be a moral mistake.

Force moral limits

there’s no formula for drawing the line between reasonable and indulgent uses of our resources.

Fuzzy morality!!! Little Help

Perhaps if we step back far enough from our human values we can see that they are not ideal, even as we continue to embrace them.

Ouch

the ideal utilitarian punishment system is one in which punishments are convincingly faked rather than actually delivered. In an ideal utilitarian world, convicts would be sent to a happy place where they can’t bother anyone, while the rest us believe that they’re suffering, the better to keep us on our best behavior.

it would likely look different from our current criminal justice system, which is highly retributive.

Define Justice. Society is not the victim

Suppose that punishing an innocent person really would promote the greater good.

What else is the trolley ?

Utilitarianism is a very egalitarian philosophy, asking the haves to do a lot for the have-nots.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Karl Marx

Imagine a society in which the majority enslaves a minority. If the majority is happy with this arrangement—happy enough to offset the unhappiness of those enslaved—does that make it right?

It's called democracy

I am not claiming that utilitarianism is the absolute moral truth. Instead I’m claiming that it’s a good metamorality, a good standard for resolving moral disagreements in the real world. As long as utilitarianism doesn’t endorse things like slavery in the real world, that’s good enough.

Strawman fallacy

could ever lead to anything like slavery.

But it did

Having a free market leads to economic inequality, raising the question of how much, if at all, we ought to redistribute wealth. In a regime of maximal redistribution (communism), the inequality is eliminated, along with any economic incentive to be productive.

Total ignorance of the market process

Such laws restrict the freedom of people who are HIV-positive,

Positive freedom, instead of negative

This pattern of evaluation is internally inconsistent, but it’s exactly what Baron and I predicted people would do, based on reading Rawls.* This experiment shows that people have a very hard time thinking clearly about utility.

Isn't the whole point that we have evolutionary biases?

They confuse utilitarianism with wealthitarianism. Thus, countless philosophers have convicted poor, innocent utilitarianism of crimes against humanity.

Where did the empiricism ended?

based on experience.

without becoming relativism!!??

A pragmatist needs an explicit and coherent moral philosophy, a second moral compass* that provides direction when gut feelings can’t be trusted.