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

by Joshua D. Greene

if we acknowledge that our tribal feelings can’t all be right, and yet aspire to resolve our differences in a principled way,

Our = tribe

The key to using our moral brains wisely is to match the right kind of thinking with the right kind of problem.

If choice, volition thus manual (until habit, then automatic)

Botvinick and Cohen argue that the brain solves this problem using a conflict monitor,

Knowing all this, you might think that evidence-based, manual-mode morality is hopeless, that thinking hard about divisive problems can only make things worse. Perhaps. Alternatively, manual-mode thinking may bring us together, provided that we use our manual modes in the right way.

Recent experience, BLM, proves wrong

Nevertheless, people without expertise on these topics have strong opinions about them. In an ideal world, we’d all transform ourselves into experts and make judgments based on extensive knowledge.

People are harmless, politicians not.

The moral equivalent of confabulation is rationalization. The confabulator perceives himself doing something and makes up a rational-sounding story about what he’s doing and why.

“Rights” are nothing short of brilliant. They allow us to rationalize our gut feelings without doing any additional work.

Rights and their mirror images, duties, are the perfect rhetorical weapons for modern moral debate.

rights and duties are the modern moralist’s weapons of choice, allowing us to present our feelings as nonnegotiable facts. By appealing to rights, we excuse ourselves from the hard work of providing real, non-question-begging justifications for what we want.

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.

Circumstantial

If, someday, philosophers produce a theory of rights that is demonstrably true, then everything I’m saying here will go out the window. But for now, at least, arguing about rights is a dead end. When you appeal to rights, you’re not helping to resolve the issue. Instead you’re pretending that the issue has already been resolved in some abstract realm to which you and your tribespeople have special access.

What endows us with rights is not our being human, per se, but rather our having features that members of others species could, or do, have.

Whatever it is that makes people worthy of moral consideration, these things don’t all appear in one magic moment. Without a magic moment to believe in, pro-choicers simply have to draw the line somewhere, while acknowledging that the line they’ve drawn is somewhat arbitrary. There may be no better place to draw the abortion line than where we currently draw it. But if there are good arguments, based on common currency, for drawing the line elsewhere, then deep pragmatists should listen.

pragmatism is totally arbitrary

utilitarianism makes a whole lot of sense—not just to me and you, but to every nonpsychopath with a manual mode.

I'm a psychopath

I’ve tried to provide a framework for thinking about our biggest moral problems.

According to whom ? He should have said "what I consider ..."