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

Neuroscieintist/philosopher Joshua Greene has a big thesis in this book that requires some quite involved steps. His concern is to argue for a "metamorality" of the kind that should help groups with differing moralities resolve differences. Greene starts out envisioning two prototypical "tribes. One has a morality of self-reliance and "just desserts," where people are responsible for their lot in life and get rewarded in proportion to their efforts. The other has a more altruistic view of the world, where things are shared and shared alike, and everyone feels responsibility for everyone. The question: how do we decide which of these groups - or more likely, which elements of each group's worldview - should win the day in cases of moral conflict? (More specifically: when we face moral dilemmas where we could respond via self-interest and "just desserts" or with altruism and egalitarian "desserts", how should we determine which to go with?)Greene's answer is basically a form of utilitarianism that he calls "deep pragmatism." And to see why requires some explanation, which could be really dull but isn't, owing to Greene's gifts as a good and clear writer. He argues that humans have what is called a "dual process morality" that is divided between intuitive gut instincts (dominated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and a more calculating thought process (owing more to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). When it comes to questions of "me versus us," the intuition side of things is pretty reliable, making us feel guilty for taking more than "our fair share," breaking rules that we expect everyone else to follow, etc. Understandable, because our intuitions of empathy and the like almost certainly evolved to stimulate cooperation within groups among otherwise selfish individuals (which confers an overall survival advantage).But our instincts also don't do very well with "we versus them" problems, because the same mechanisms that evolved to stimulate cooperation evolved to do so only WITHIN GROUPS (not between them). So, instincts often make us feel guilty at not helping others who are close to us, but the guilt lessens the farther removed the others-in-need are from us. Here, though, the thinking part of our brains can step in, and the thinking part of our brains (Greene's and others' research suggests) tend to be "utilitarian" - preferring whatever option leads to the greatest overall happiness less discriminately.The most interesting (and original) parts of this book are those where Greene reviews his own and others' research on "the trolley problem" - a problem philosophers have concocted to illustrate the dilemma between the sanctity of individual rights and the imperative of maximizing overall happiness. The trolley problem - and there are many variations of it - is of a train going down a track where five people are trapped. One can avert the trolley from killing the five only if one pushes a particular person onto the track (fortunately, you are standing at an area of the track where any obstruction to the trolley will avert it to a side-track, and pushing the man in front of the track will create such an obstruction.)Yes, it is highly contrived, but philosophers have argued for many years over the 'correct' answer to the problem: is it better to maximize happiness by saving five even if it means you have to intentionally sacrifice one, or is it better to let the five die if it means not intentionally killing one innocent person? Greene's study has led him to see the "dual process theory" of morality at work here. Those who have damage to the "instinctual" part of the brain unhesitatingly kill the one to save the five, and those with damage to the "calculating" part of the brain do the opposite. The rest of us struggle because the two parts of our brain are telling us different things.But, far from saying that there is no good answer, Greene suggests that in the trolley case, the best answer is the utilitarian one, because he suspects that our compunctions about intentionally killing to save five lives is a relic of the intuitional module of our brain (as evidenced partly by the fact that those who choose to let the five die can''t generally give any good explanation for why, save that it feels wrong). And Greene also suggests that while intuitional thinking doe serve us well at times - in "me versus us" questions - it is often ill-equipped to deal with "us versus them" problems (problems the world is facing more and more of).This is where I start to find Greene unconvincing. Without getting into too much detail, Greene strikes me as a utilitarian only to the degree that it gets him to the answers he wants to get... and there is a lot of inconsistent reasoning Greene gives about why utilitarianism is the best actual theory, rather than the one that gets him the answers he likes best. Mostly, this comes from a mixture of explaining both how utilitarianism doesn't conflict with some of our most deeply held intuitions (disrespect for individual rights when they conflict with the greatest good, etc), AND explaining that when it does, it is because in those cases, our intuitions are wrong. In other words, when utilitarianism validates our intuitions, that shows how good utilitarianism is, but when it conflicts with our intuitions, that shows that our intuitions - not utilitarianism - is flawed. Something seems very post hoc and inconsistent about this.To be sure, I don't have a much better answer. I think that, in the end, Greene's work actually REDUCES our confidence that there are best and worst answers to moral questions, but that is because unlike Greene, I see no reason to think we can resolve the "dual process" competing answers by somehow stepping above our human moral thinking and saying that there is an objective criteria that can determine which "process" is the right one and which, the wrong one. Might it just be that our impulses toward intuition and calculation conflict and that is that? Yes, Greene (and many of us) do think that it is quite important to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but if our instincts about what is morally right can be flawed in some cases, why can't our feeling that the greatest good is important be flawed too (and even though we reason to it, the value we put on the greatest good is still an instinct)? Not that Greene is wrong to put value on it, but I came away thinking that he wanted it both ways: intuitions can be trusted when they validate our calculations, but they're probably wrong when they don't.Anyway, aside from my general misgivings about Greene's conclusion (or at least his defense of it), I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Greene's research on the neural basis of moral thinking is intriguing, original, and does a service to moral philosophy. And here, he writes a clear and well-written explanation of those and a larger moral case he draws from it. Those who are interested in this book should also read  Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality , and  The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage) . The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

There are two traditions in moral thinking: metaphysical and empirical. The first has built imposing philosophical skyscrapers, like Kant's categorical imperative and Rawls' principles, but has done so over very shaky foundations; for instance, Kant's claim that the purpose of reason, which is needed to bind people to moral codes, is “to produce a will which is good, not as a means to some further end, but in itself" - a claim that, even today, remains completely unjustified. The second tradition, headed by the likes of Hume's passions and Smith's benevolence, has emphasized the limits of reason and the will, the predominance of emotions in moral behavior, and the role of everyday conventions in shaping what we think is fair or right, anticipating by a couple of centuries what we now call heuristics, biases in cognition, parochial altruism, etc.Greene has one foot in each tradition, hopping conveniently between them as he makes the case that utilitarianism is the best solution to the Us vs Them problem: when ethical norms that evolved independently meet, conflict often ensues and there is no clear way of resolving the disagreements that follow. To justify his proposal, he shows why certain types of moral judgement are ill-suited for addressing modern problems, and re-frames the standard critiques of utilitarianism in order to give it the scope, he thinks, the theory deserves: a moral system to solve problems between, not within, other moral systems. A meta-morality, one that Greene calls "deep-pragmatism".Pioneering experimental philosophy in the early 2000s, Greene mashed Judith Thomson's extensions of the famous trolley problem with brain imaging in order to figure out why people give contradictory responses to varying scenarios presented in this moral dilemma. Using the newly minted "trolleyology", he identified the emotional channels of moral action, such that "people say no to pushing the man off the footbridge […] because of emotional responses enabled by the VMPFC and the amygdala." (p. 126), and that you can manipulate responses to the dilemma with ad hoc cognitive loads, showing that "utilitarian judgments depend […] on cognitive control." (p. 127). Even though these experiments are limited, as all experiments are, they've bridged the intuitions of Hume with Kahneman's dual-process theory: the moral mind is also a fast-acting and slowly-deliberative machine, aptly described by Greene as a camera with automatic and manual modes. Because of this, both modes have different scopes of specialization, which leads to each having consistent limitations; for example, our automatic moral setting is sensitive to "means/side-effect distinction" (p. 220), readily avoiding direct harm but an incompetent judge when indirect, causally-complex actions, lead to harm. Our automatic moral system therefore "responds negatively to prototypically violent acts, independent of whatever benefits those acts may produce" (p. 248), which is great for most everyday circumstances (not acting on ire towards an offender, or refraining from stealing from a neighbor), but limited when addressing modern ethical dilemmas (famines on the other side of the world, mortality from car crashes, migration, climate change, etc.) This section alone justifies picking up a copy of the well-written Moral Tribes.As Thomas Nagel's review and many others have remarked, Greene doesn't succeed in reframing utilitarianism from a philosophical perspective, or in deriving moral guidelines from trolleyology. However, if you value the empirical tradition at least as much as prescriptive idealization, this shouldn't be a problem; the fact that Greene doesn't succeed in his ambitious philosophical enterprise subtracts nothing from his experimental explorations, or his poignant critiques of theological and deontological thinking that are well worth revisiting.My two favorite parts of the book were are a 5-page essay on rights, near the end, and the discussion on the morality of abortion that follows. On the first one, have you ever wondered why discussions on rights are seldom fruitful, often descending into nonconstructive tirades? Greene has an answer that I think is spot on: rights are the ultimate rationalization of moral emotions, as "appeals to “rights” function as an intellectual free pass, a trump card that renders evidence irrelevant" (p. 302). Rights are nonnegotiable distributional claims, and when they are not used to defend what has already been established, they are little else than rhetorical weapons: "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 tribes-people have special access."(p. 305). No wonder why many important discussions have fallen prey to this rights trap - making progress impossible by forcing a trade-off of incommensurable values. I find Greene's moral prescription that "Rights are not for making arguments; they’re for ending arguments" (p. 350) practical, not because rights are not important, but because prematurely deploying them often stalls moral progress.Trolleyology is a big step forward in the empirical tradition of morality that Hume championed. If you want a book that promises an answer to the question "how should we act morally", Moral Tribes is not it. That is why it's so good, and why its pragmatic approach is worth paying attention to:"Morality is not a set of freestanding abstract truths that we can somehow access with our limited human minds. Moral psychology is not something that occasionally intrudes into the abstract realm of moral philosophy. Moral philosophy is a manifestation of moral psychology. Moral philosophies are, once again, just the intellectual tips of much bigger and deeper psychological and biological icebergs. Once you’ve understood this, your whole view of morality changes. Figure and ground reverse, and you see competing moral philosophies not just as points in an abstract philosophical space but as the predictable products of our dual-process brains." (p. 329)

I thought I was quite widely read around the subjects of history, psychology, politics and philosophy - but Greene's book was a revelation, tying all these fields together to explain one of the major problems of our age - why there is so much unnecessary violence and conflict in our world. His initial parable of 4 herder tribes outlines the essential elements of common political systems, without inviting one to take up pre-determined sides, as real-life examples would. His account of how the human brain has evolved over millennia to deal with the moral problem of Me v Us, selfishness versus collectivity, explains an enormous amount - including why the separate dilemma of Us v Them is a different issue. The section on "trolleyology" - a series of subtly different moral dilemmas - might appear at first to be so hypothetical and unreal as to be the idle fantasies of academics living in ivory towers; but they are well worth persisting with, as they illuminate the subtle ways in which our moral decisions are taken more on emotional than rational grounds. I enjoyed his passionate defence of Utilitarianism as a solution. Utilitarianism tends to come in for a lot of criticism these days, and it is good to hear a thorough set of arguments in its favour - but it whetted my appetite to hear a separate debate between Greene and opponents of Utilitarianism. I very seldom re-read books or recommend them to friends, but this book cast so much useful light on understanding conflicts within society, that I shall certainly re-read it carefully, and have recommended it to friends already. This book serves as a more useful adjunct than Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" to understanding contemporary cross-cultural morality (although both are good).

This book makes a good case for using a nuanced version of utilitarianism as a guiding principle for public discussion of policy that could be considered to have a "moral" dimension. He makes the very frequent error, which goes right back to Plato, of assuming that once you have sorted out the public realm you can then dictate that morality to the individual. In a cold, uncaring, impersonal universe this is, of course, completely untrue and personal conduct can only be guided by what satisfies the individual, and what they can get away with without bringing down the wrath of society upon their heads. His worked example (using the American controversy over abortion law) of how an "objective approach" can be applied is an inadvertent demonstration of how difficult this is. Without necessarily disagreeing with the outcome it is rather remarkable that it is perfectly in line with his self-defined membership of the "liberal" tribe.

I bought this book as it was in a one day Kindle sale and I am very glad I did. The title is pretty clear in spelling out what the book is about. The basic thesis of the book is that if we all followed pure evolutionary behaviour we would die out, so mankind has evolved ways of establishing how to define right and wrong and to resolve disagreements, thereby enabling us to cooperate together. Dr Greene points out two problems with this. The first is that (similar to the kinds of thinking explained by Daniel Hahnemann and others), some of this is creates a kind of moral autopilot where our instinctive wiring can lead us to intuitive but faulty decisions. Secondly, Greene argues that while the systems we have evolved are better for resolving disagreement within the tribes we are born into, they are less useful for resolving disagreements with a tribe who have completely different moral bases for their code of living. So for example a group who cite the Bible as their authority for judging right and wrong will struggle to reach agreement with a group who only accept the Quran as authoritative. The strength of this book in my view lies in the excellent, clear and unpatronising explanations of difficult moral issues. As a child of the UK public health service, I found the discussion of the so called "Obamacare" issue very interesting, and could almost even understand how a US conservative could believe that it was morally acceptable to leave people to their own devices (but only almost!). Prof Greene is to be applauded for his clarity. My disappointment? I read it on Kindle and was surprised that when at about 55% complete I discovered I had actually reached the end, and that the rest was footnotes and references. More seriously, I felt that the book had laid out the problem masterfully, but only offered some sketchy outline approaches to inter tribe solutions. Nonetheless a great read, and I'd love to read an expanded edition with more discussion of possible solutions.

This is an interesting book for the most part which examines moral philosophy and makes a strong case that utilitarianism, or deep pragmatism as the author calls is the most appropriate way to being about progress through a meta morality. The analysis of various social science and behavioural experiments can be a little tedious at times - although to be fair the author does suggest that the reader skip sections if already convinced. Perhaps not as compelling reading as Haidt's Righteous Mind, which the author refers to quite frequently in this book, and not as thought provoking as Thinking Fast and Slow, but if you enjoyed either of those books you will probably enjoy this too

If you enjoy books such as Thinking Fast And Slow and The Righteous Mind you should definitely read Moral Tribes. Its author, Joshua Green, is a moral psychologist who directs the Harvard University Moral Cognition Lab. The book covers a lot of recent research into how we make 'moral' decisions, but its main focus is on how to resolve inter tribal disputes where each tribe has different ideas about what is right, just and fair. For example disputes between a collectivist based society and one organized on neoliberal principles.Green's main point is that the (often subconscious) mechanisms that we have evolved to handle local (inter tribal) conflicts do not work at the intra tribal level, and that for these we need to adopt a cognitive based meta-morality. This he suggests should be based on utilitarianism, because maximising happiness is something that most of us can agree on as a common goal.I did not find his arguments in favour of utilitarianism totally convincing, but to be fair to Green he is aware of the criticisms that can be made of it. He puts utilitarianism forward not as the universal solution to all moral questions, but as the most pragmatic tool available for resolving conflicting between tribes as what is the most moral outcome.For another (more detailed) review I suggest that your see the one on the Amazon.com website with the title: An Interesting Work of Synthesis that Falls a Bit Short.