Moral Tribes Quotes

“Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched—once they’ve become tribal badges of honor—are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In an ideal world, we’d all transform ourselves into experts and make judgments based on extensive knowledge. Given that this will never happen, our next best option is to emulate the wisdom of Socrates: We become wiser when we acknowledge our ignorance.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“After Darwin, human morality became a scientific mystery. Natural selection could explain how intelligent, upright, linguistic, not so hairy, bipedal primates could evolve, but where did our morals come from? Darwin himself was absorbed by this question. Natural selection, it was thought, promotes ruthless self-interest. Individuals who grab up all the resources and destroy the competition will survive better, reproduce more often, and thus populate the world with their ruthlessly selfish offspring. How, then, could morality evolve in a world that Tennyson famously described as “red in tooth and claw”? We now have an answer. Morality evolved as a solution to the problem of cooperation, as a way of averting the Tragedy of the Commons: Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“To borrow Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor, morality can climb the ladder of evolution and then kick it away. As”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The problem of cooperation, then, is the problem of getting collective interest to triumph over individual interest, when possible. The problem of cooperation is the central problem of social existence. Why”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves only if individuals who are prone to cooperation outcompete individuals who are not (or who are less so). Thus, if morality is a set of adaptations for cooperation, we today are moral beings only because our morally minded ancestors outcompeted their less morally minded neighbors. And thus, insofar as morality is a biological adaptation, it evolved not only as a device for putting Us ahead of Me, but as a device for putting Us ahead of Them. (And”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves only if individuals who are prone to cooperation outcompete individuals who are not (or who are less so).”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“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).”
― Joshua D. Greene , Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“scientific literacy and numeracy were not very good predictors of people’s beliefs about the risks of climate change. Instead, their beliefs were well predicted by their general cultural outlooks—by their tribal memberships (see”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In this chapter, we’ve considered 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.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them

“to cooperate with strangers, we need some means of distinguishing the strangers with whom we can cooperate from those who might exploit us. In”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Evolution is an inherently competitive process: The faster lion catches more prey than other lions, produces more offspring than other lions, and thus raises the proportion of fast lions in the next generation. This couldn’t happen if there were no competition for resources. If lion food existed in unlimited supply, the faster lions would have no advantage over the slower ones, and the next generation of lions would be, on average, no faster than the last generation. No competition, no evolution by natural selection.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Reason is the champion of the emotional underdog, enabling what Hume called “calm passions” to win out over “violent passions.” Reasoning frees us from the tyranny of our immediate impulses by allowing us to serve values that are not automatically activated by what’s in front of us. And yet, at the same time, reason cannot produce good decisions without some kind of emotional input, however indirect.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“It is plausible, if not inevitable, that we are more aware of the pain we suffer at the hands of others than of the pain that others suffer by our hands.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Morality evolved as a solution to the problem of cooperation, as a way of averting the Tragedy of the Commons: Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. How”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“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.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Why couldn’t morality have evolved to promote cooperation in a more general way? Because universal cooperation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolution by natural selection. I”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“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.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Among believers, a supernatural authority is an ideal guarantor of cooperation, because supernatural beings can be omniscient and omnipotent, guaranteeing maximal rewards for cooperativeness and maximal punishments for uncooperativeness. As David Sloan Wilson has argued, religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The idea that respect for God and being a good cooperator are related is not new, of course. Believers have long been, and continue to be, wary of people who are not “God-fearing.” From”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Chiefs and kings and emperors have used their increasingly large carrots and sticks to enforce productive cooperation (and skim the proceeds off the top). According to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, this is a good thing. He praised the king for being a peace-keeping Leviathan, the earthly god who lifts us out of our natural state, in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Leviathans”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In sum, our brains are wired for tribalism. We intuitively divide the world into Us and Them, and favor Us over Them. We begin as infants, using linguistic cues, which historically have been reliable markers of group membership. In the modern world, we discriminate based on race (among other things), but race is not a deep, innate psychological category. Rather, it’s just one among many possible markers for group membership.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz produced a U.S. map of the frequency of Google searches including the words “nigger” or “niggers.” Regions high in “nigger” searches (mostly aimed at finding racial jokes) yielded significantly fewer votes for Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election than votes for John Kerry in 2004. This racial animus appears to have given Obama’s opponent a 3 to 5 percent advantage, the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationwide, which is enough to swing most presidential elections. Given”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Thus, at the age of six months, long before they can walk or talk, human infants are making value judgments about actions and agents, reaching out to individuals who show signs of being cooperative (caring about others) and passing over individuals who do the opposite.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“We can be inspired by leaders we’ve never met and devoted to organizations with no fixed membership, such as nations, churches, corporations, and schools. Jonathan Haidt has argued that this capacity for devotion to leaders, organizations, and more abstract ideals might have evolved to facilitate cooperation in large groups, just as romantic love evolved to facilitate cooperative parenting. This capacity may depend on our ability to experience awe—to be moved by, and devoted to, things larger than ourselves and our familiar social circles. WATCHFUL”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Suppose that Art is a real hothead. If Bud rats on him, Art will be so enraged that nothing will stop him from killing Bud, even if he has to wait ten years, and even if he has to chase Bud to the ends of the earth. If Bud knows of Art’s vengeful nature, then Bud has a strong incentive not to rat on him. Thus, by being vengeful, and being known for it, Art can be his own robotic hit man, incentivizing others to cooperate with him through his high-flying, credible threats. Of course, being vengeful can be very costly. Art could lose everything if he does, in fact, devote his life to exacting vengeance on Bud. Still, if all goes well, Art will never actually need to go after Bud, because people like Bud won’t dare cross him. Thus, the emotions that fuel vengeful behaviors are, or can be, a kind of rational irrationality. They serve our interests by publicly committing us to doing things that are not in our own interest. We”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Third, it’s important to remember that a lot of cooperation doesn’t feel like “cooperation.” Friends are friends not only because of what they do together but also because of what they don’t do separately. Your friends don’t steal your stuff, make snide remarks about you, or try to bed your significant other. These everyday acts of nonaggression are inconspicuous forms of cooperation,”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Second, if the idea of friendship as a cooperation device seems strange, that may be because of the unusually good times in which we live. In the feast-and-famine world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, having friends who were willing to have you over for dinner wasn’t just a nicety but a matter of life and death. The world of our ancestors was also a lot more violent. In our world, few friends can say that they’ve saved one another’s lives, but that might not have been true in the past.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“It may seem strange to conceive of friendship as principally about cooperation rather than, say, hanging out and having fun, but appearances can be misleading. First, nature’s purposes need not be revealed in our experience. Sex, for example, is primarily about making babies, but that’s not necessarily what motivates people to do the deed. Likewise, friendship may ultimately be about things that are far from our minds when we’re being friendly. Indeed, if you’re constantly thinking about the material advantages of your friendship, that’s a sign that you’re not really a friend.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them