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

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Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world’s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground.

A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (“portrait,” “landscape”) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions—efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain’s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight—sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words—often with life-and-death stakes.

An award-winning teacher and scientist, Greene directs Harvard University’s Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive techniques to understand how people really make moral decisions. Combining insights from the lab with lessons from decades of social science and centuries of philosophy, the great question of Moral Tribes is this: How can we get along with Them when what they want feels so wrong to Us?

Ultimately, Greene offers a set of maxims for navigating the modern moral terrain, a practical road map for solving problems and living better lives. Moral Tribes shows us when to trust our instincts, when to reason, and how the right kind of reasoning can move us forward. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2013

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About the author

Joshua D. Greene

5 books134 followers
Joshua D. Greene is an American experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher. He is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the director of Harvard's Moral Cognition Lab. The majority of his research and writing has been concerned with moral judgment and decision-making. His most recent research focuses on fundamental issues in cognitive science.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 383 reviews
Profile Image for Infinite Jen.
89 reviews577 followers
September 25, 2023
Comrades, after having discovered the presence of radically lengthened telomeres in laboratory mice the other night, (for those of you not among the cognoscenti of biology, the length of telomeres (repetitive (TTAGGG) DNA–protein complexes at the ends of chromosomes) in a cell, to oversimplify, govern the number of cell divisions possible, short telomere’s = few, long = lots. Telomeres (and telomerase), as you might be able to surmise, play a crucial role in the formation of tumors and when/if they undergo instability and attain replicative immortality), I ravaged my body with ethanol-induced oxidative stress, called up a friend and, without preamble, began the following rant: “The whole damn thing is shot through with corporate malfeasance! The breeding protocols for these mice have biased drug tests to overrepresent occurrences of cancer and dramatically underrepresent potential toxicity!” To which she sleepily asked: “Jen, have you been drinking again?” Causing me to hatefully swipe the end call button and yearn for the day when it was possible to slam the phone into the receiver like Mjölnir into the chest of a Jotun. Growling: “From his shoulders he lifted the kettle down; Miöllnir hurled forth towards the savage crew, and slew all the mountain-giants, who with Hýimir had him pursued!” Then opened a window and fucked the night.

Anyhoo, that is to say, I’m under the weather and so, of necessity, must avoid, at all costs, padding this review with otiose displays of verbiation and digressity, and, as you can see from my introduction, I am deadly serious about this. As serious as I am about senescence and antagonistic pleiotropy.

First, let me start by saying; this book provides an extremely thorough examination of the Trolley Problem, for those who don’t know what that is, the perennial ethical kerfuffle goes as follows:

Imagine there is a nondescript family in the path of a MK Ultra Experimented Kodiak Bear whose chronic caloric deficit has, through complex biochemical pathways mediated by ghrelin, activated agouti-related peptide (AgRP)-expression neurons in the hypothalamus region of its brain, which has told the giant, psychologically unstable bear that it is ravenously hungry and must - bear - down upon the family with all possible savagery in order to placate this imperative. Suppose furthermore, as you watched this unfold from a safe, elevated location, you saw that there was a Smucker’s delivery man in a tree stand, with several cases of delicious jams, high fructose syrups, and calorically dense peanut butter, desperately seeking to occlude his phenomenological existence from the ten foot tall, mescaline addled, killing machine. Improbably enough, right next to you is a switch, which, when flipped, will cause the man to tumble from his tree stand, shattering several containers of jelly (thus releasing their aromatic compounds for the bear’s sensitive perusal) followed by sonorous clinking which, coincidentally was used to prime the bear for enhanced focus in Project Artichoke, causing the animal to make a beeline for the professional jelliest, and leave the nondescript family with ample time to escape to their vehicle. Most people, when asked if they would flip this switch, say yes.

However, if people are presented with the same scenario, but instead of flipping an adjacent switch and consigning the skulking condiment purveyor to a PB&J Manwich, are told they’re armed with a harpoon gun and must lance the Smuck’s willy bits, and then reel the poor bastard off the pedestal thrashing and screaming his throat raw, they will decline.

If you’re asking where the Trolley is... well, that’s a problem.

Now if we adopt a consequentialist view of morality, what differs between these two scenarios? By pushing our ethical intuitions around with various permutations of this problem, we reveal interesting ways in which our morality is not grounded purely in processing the logical outcomes of events.

The broad message of this book is that, (if you accept naturalistic explanations for the emergence of morality, and if you don’t, maybe this book will persuade you that there are evolved characteristics of our morality, and the ways in which we reliably fail in our ethical treatment of others elucidate how certain biological realities constrained the development of these impulses.), morality evolved to facilitate cooperation between members of the same tribe, but, and this is important, NOT cooperation between tribes. Joshua Greene, drawing upon decades of his work in neuroscience, (with ballasts of evolutionary biology and game theory) provides a very accessible account (i.e. piss out my ass! this is incredibly well written!) of his theories on moral cognition and what implications we should draw if we are to upgrade our moral reasoning. It reminded me a lot of how thinking was dichotomized in Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Similarly, moral cognition, as put forward by Greene, has a fast system which relies upon the deep circuitry of our ancestral nucleotides to make quick assessments, with neuronal homunculi disseminating insidious Russell conjugations to emotionally flavor our value judgements. And then we have a slow, deliberative system in which we can bring to bare our frontal OS in order to override archaic beliefs and maintain more enlightened dispositions.

The practical advice put forward to ameliorate the strife produced by tribal conflict, which show no signs of abating, was perhaps the weakest section for me, but it’s truly difficult for me to conceive of the problem being tractable at all. So I leave it to better (and more optimistic) minds than my own to attempt to make progress here. It seems to me that, in an age where your political affiliation can reliably predict your thoughts on topics as disparate as climate change, abortion, gun control and universal healthcare, we are in dire need of better correctives for our sectarian tendencies. Let us hope that our moral software continues to improve, however incrementally, so we can expand our parochial concerns beyond their ancient boundaries.
Profile Image for Joshua Stein.
213 reviews152 followers
June 5, 2014
There's a lot to be said about Moral Tribes but I will divide the comment roughly into two parts: (1) the smart commentary on moral psychology and (2) the weak commentary on ethics. It is worth noting that the strong points and weak points should be unsurprising given Greene's background; he's a renown neuroscientist. It seems to make sense that his recapitulation of his groundbreaking work would be terrific and engaging, and that the book would weaken in discussions of other domains.

The opening chapters of the book, though, are even stronger than I anticipated. Greene talks elegantly through the game theory, evolutionary biology, and eventually neuroscience that underlie his theory of cognition. It is an absolute master class in science writing for a mainstream audience. For the first few chapters alone I recommend reading the book, if for no other reason than to glean the smart interdisciplinary methodologies of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.

Greene's theory of moral cognition is compelling, but he also doesn't skimp on engaging with his competitors. His discussion of John Mikhail is the best I've read (I'll be reading Mikhail's major book next) and he has me convinced that the folks in this domain are really all having good, productive discussion, which isn't always the default in academia. I suspect that Greene's theory is incomplete, but I'm sure he'd be able to engage well with my technical concerns. (Several of them have already been engaged in his exchanges with some philosophers.)

The book goes off the rails in the philosophical discussion of the last 100 or so pages. My concerns are numerous, the first is that he is strikingly dismissive of rights based theories (pp. 305) without actually referring to any of the literature on said theories and then immediately turning around and suggesting that in some cases it's ok to used rights based theories to protect beliefs against the utilitarian arguments he advocates (pp. 308). It's not really a well developed step-change, and he stumbles over it in his attempt to illustrate the abortion issue, where he mangles together ethical and public policy considerations.

The book should be taken seriously for what it does well, offer a tremendous contribution to the blossoming field of moral psychology. It demonstrates the significant role neuroscience and psychology have to play in understanding social relations and, for that, we ought to be attentive. But it would be nice if the philosophical discussions were a bit more rigorous. I suspect there's a lot more to come from Greene, though, and that it will get more philosophically sophisticated in the future, as his work does include a lot of serious engagement with philosophers.
Profile Image for David Rubenstein.
820 reviews2,653 followers
May 27, 2014
Humans have evolved the ability to be cooperative, in order to help our own survival in difficult times. This ability usually prevents us from being completely selfish. We cooperate with other members of our group, our "tribe", and solves the dilemma between "Me" and "Us". The problem is, that this same mechanism generates a different dilemma, a competition between "Us" and "Them". We find that we generally have the same moral outlook as others in our "tribe", and we do not even consider the moral outlook of outsiders.

This, in a nutshell, is the basic dilemma in this excellent book by Joshua Greene. Greene is the director of the Moral Cognition Lab in Harvard University's Department of Psychology. He conducts psychological experiments, and uses the results to develop some fascinating theories about the problem of morality.

I was very much surprised by some experiments concerning the perceived risks of climate change. Contrary to what I expected, the degree of scientific literacy and numeracy is inversely correlated with the perception of risk due to climate change. Instead, the membership in a political "tribe" is a much better predictor of belief in the risks. While the vast majority of scientists believe in the risks, most people do not want to "consult" with the experts in this area. They prefer to "consult" with other members of their political sphere.

Much of the book is devoted to the famous moral dilemma of the "trolley-car". Suppose a trolley car is out of control. It will soon run over and kill a group of five workmen, unless something is done immediately. You have access to a track switch, that will switch the trolley onto a siding where only a single workman will be killed. The question is, would you pull the switch? Most people would pull the switch.

But now, here is the moral dilemma, for a somewhat different scenario. Suppose the same trolley is on course to kill five workmen. But you are up on a footbridge, and immediately in front of you is a man with an oversized backpack. If you were to push that man over the side of the bridge, the trolley car would be stopped, but that man would die. Again, would you push the man over? Most people would not.

So, why not? What is the moral difference between pulling the switch and pushing the man over the side? The outcomes would be the same, so why do most people make a distinction? Here, Joshua Greene analyzes this question in great detail. The simplest explanation, is that in the switch case, the death of the lone workman is an incidental side effect, while in the case of pushing the man over the side of the footbridge, that act is the means to an end. Greene takes these scenarios and presents a compelling theory, why most people have such a strong aversion to pushing the man off the footbridge.

Joshua Greene discusses a moral philosophy called utilitarianism. This philosophy advocates that people should act to maximize the collective level of happiness. There are plenty of critics of this philosophy, but Greene does a good job of addressing their criticisms.

Greene looks at the controversy surrounding abortions. He shows that the two sides in the controversy claim certain rights; pro-lifers claim the right to life, while pro-choice people claim that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her body. Greene analyzes the controversy in some detail, and concludes that both sides have excellent arguments, and that both sides are somewhat hypocritical in their not taking their "rights" arguments to their logical conclusions. In the end, Greene concludes that any argument that relies on "rights" are specious. Instead, he recommends a pragmatic approach, that requires some deep "manual" thinking.

A leit motif throughout the book is a metaphor, which likens our moral outlook to a camera with automatic and manual settings. Evolution has given us an "automatic" mode of thinking, where we generally hold the beliefs of our tribe. But, tribes often have moral beliefs that conflict with those of other tribes, and neither set of beliefs are necessarily "better". So it behooves us to switch over to "manual" mode, and use reason to think about the issues. At the end of the book, Greene offers six pragmatic "rules" to help resolve moral issues.

If you are interested in philosophy, in morality, or sociology, I highly recommend this book.
Profile Image for Mara.
404 reviews292 followers
March 6, 2015
I'm going to go ahead and assume that there are summaries out there that will tell you what this book is about, so I'm just gonna tell you why I think it was pretty great.

1. It's enormously readable - True to his affiliation as a utilitarian, Greene keeps his arguments clear and fairly concise. When he's gonna go more into depth on something that isn't crucial to understanding his overall point he tells you to go for it and skip ahead.
2. He summarizes the arguments of a lot of authors/books that I have enjoyed reading, but that might be less accessible. So, yay for TL;DR versions of a lot of Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Paul Bloom, and then the brigade of classic moral philosophers (e.g. Kant, Bentham and Mills etc.)
3. and beyond Whether or not you come out of this agreeing with Greene, you will have a much better, disambiguated sense of key concepts in moral philosophy/psychology, moral cognition and of the overall utilitarian (which he calls deep pragmatism) approach to moral philosophy.

The last time I read anything on utilitarianism I just remember walking away from it wanting to push Peter Singer in front of a trolley. (That's a joke, by the way, if you're not much of a trolley-ologist.) There are a bunch of ways in which utilitarianism is often (according to Greene) misconstrued, but the one that resonated most with me was Greene's response to the idea that "Utilitarianism requires you to turn yourself into a happiness pump."
This is what turned me off to, at the very least, Peter Singer's utilitarianism, but Greene brings up a really great point:
There's a social dimension to the problem that may, in the long run, favor strong efforts over heroic ones. Your life is a model for others...If you improve the lives of hundreds of people every year through your charitable donations, but your life remains happy and comfortable, you're a model that others can emulate. If, instead, you push yourself to just shy of your breaking point, you may do more good directly with your personal donation dollars, but you may undermine the larger cause by making an unappealing example...

Yes! This is the point I wish I had been coherently able to make to the vegan in one of my classes (note: I am a non-dairy consuming vegetarian) who wouldn't drink beer because of the yeast in it. I'm sure there's some argument to be made for his case, but I just felt like he made vegetarianism and veganism seem absurd. And ridiculous. Ok, I'll move on.


This book is applied moral psychology. He explains how our brains work, why we might think the ways we do, when our intuitive thinking is useful, and when it causes trouble for us. What Greene addresses is how we, as a society, might be better off addressing issues that are controversial. He doesn't solve these issues, but he makes a good case for why (as we tend to do) having each side justify its own beliefs is a recipe for polarization and disaster.
Profile Image for Eduardo Santiago.
676 reviews39 followers
December 25, 2013
As a fresh take on utilitaniarism it’s first-rate: new perspectives, new research, insightful questions. But ultimately he’s just preaching to the choir because the single most important question of our age is not even mentioned: how to reach those who don’t realize they are immoral? That is, people whose brains—through no fault of their own—consider Loyalty To Tribe and Obedience To Authority to be moral, rendering them vulnerable to charismatic psychopaths like Rush Limbaugh or evangelical preachers or anyone on Fox “News”. They’re not going to read this. They’re not going to question their gut reactions or listen to anyone suggesting that they do (“heresy!”). This is a very real problem, and unfortunately no amount of philosophical arguing is going to address that. And on that depressing note, Happy Newtonmas!
Profile Image for Richard.
1,174 reviews1,068 followers
July 21, 2019
Update, July 2019: As I noted in the review, Greene cemented his reputation (partially) by putting folks into fMRI machines and asking them Trolleyology–type questions. Well, if you find that interesting, you should check out the Kickstarter game Trial By Trolley: A party game of moral dilemmas and trolley murder. It’s offensively gruesome, so maybe it’s best to think of it as Trolleyology by way of Cards Against Humanity. Definitely not for the squeamish, but I’ve definitely ordered a copy.

                    ☠️🚋☠️

Greene looks at the evolutionary origins of intergroup conflict, and attempts to demonstrate that “deep pragmatism” (a form of utilitarianism) can address the dilemma that arises due to human’s evolution as a tribal species.

He doesn’t succeed, however. His reasoning contains a few flaws, but ultimately he simply doesn’t address the toughest cases and relies on something akin to an “appeal to urgency”. That isn’t listed as a fallacy in my textbook on critical thinking, but so what?

A wealth of background and history is given, though, which makes the book a fairly useful one. Greene does repeat himself somewhat (probably a subconscious effort to bolster his weak case), and a good editor could probably have shaved off a few dozen pages, at least.

The problem at hand is described as the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality. This is Greene’s intergroup analogue of the well-studied intragroup paradox known as the Tragedy of the Commons. Both are gradually explored through the use of game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

Trolleyology is used a lot in his analysis. This is understandable: Greene cemented his reputation as a cognitive researcher by asking test subjects about that infamous moral dilemma while inside of a fMRI machine. So it is a little ironic that this is also where he stumbles.

First, he conflates two sets of answers. He argues quite persuasively that evolution took some shortcuts in coming up with quick-and-dirty responses to different patterns, and that the divergence in those responses to very similar situations is arbitrary for an understandable reason. To put it very briefly, our different answer to the “footbridge” versus the baseline “switch” situations is because we are “blind to side effects” because evolution didn’t give us the ability to intuitively keep track of multiple chains of causality (see page 225 and following). That’s fine… except he later tells us that when philosophers created a deontological reason for the same thing, that we must dismiss their reasoning as mere rationalization. Uh, no: very poor logic. Even if it is true that the flawed evolutionary-constructed intuition is inconsistent in its conclusions, that doesn’t mean that any other analysis of the same situation must be as well. The remainder of the book relies on his erroneous belief that he could effectively dispense with ethics.

Second, Greene introduces a very hard ethical case early in his discussion of trolleyology: that of a surgeon who is able to heal several other people by stealing organs from one healthy (albeit unwilling) donor (see page 109). He admits to being blindsided by that, so I anticipated him showing how it would be dealt with at some point with his utilitarian approach. But he never did. Instead, he relied on some hand-waving, asserting that utilitarianism, if wisely applied, would prove capable of being deeply pragmatic. Wait — we have to rely on wisdom? But isn’t that precisely what is in short supply? In fact, he points out that just thinking really hard isn’t going to help us — our brains are wired very poorly for that (page 296).

The “rationalizations” of ethics address the hard cases fairly well. Specifically, the doctrine of double effect in conjunction with Kant’s categorical imperative, “God damn it, you've got to be kind.” His goal was laudable, but the problem is harder than he perceived.


Ultimately, however, this wasn’t the book I expected it to be. The word “tribes” in the title implied something a bit different to me than Greene intended, and I was disappointed about that, too.

As I’ve noted, the “tribe” Greene points to is the evolutionary source of our quite irrational thinking about intergroup conflict resolution. What I hoped the book was going to be about was the highly “tribal” partisan behavior that plagues society today. My favorite academic addressing this is still Dan Kahan, who researches Identity-Protective Cultural Cognition at Yale Law School. But he hasn’t written any books that cover the subject broadly, and his risk-perception orientation isn’t quite what I’m looking for. The basic idea is that the tribal roots of our cognition (what Greene is also pointing to) create a very strong impetus for us to “think” in terms of tribes even today, and that kind of motivated thinking is becoming increasingly prevalent. A good primer on that is the New Yorker article, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds .

Postscript —

I will say: his endnote and bibliography are great. There are a lot of classic journal articles that I’ve always wanted the citations to, and he definitely delivers.

Post-postscript —

My original pre-review listed a number of reviews and interviews, which I’ll tack on here, just in case someone wants to dig into the archives.

• Good hour-long radio interview with author on KQED Forum at https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2013/11/14...

• Another interview with the author at the podcast Inquiring Minds: http://www.motherjones.com/environmen...

• Review in GuardianUK: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...

• Review in Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...

• Review in Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

• Review in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a... (by Robert Wright, researcher and author of a number of books on point)

• Review in the New Republic: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11...

• Review in Boston Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books...

Annoyingly, the NY Times didn't bother with it.
Profile Image for Bruce.
77 reviews
January 14, 2015
4 stars for the science related material, a generous 2 stars for the philosophical goop, which comprises the bulk of the book. To deflect criticisms of utilitarianism, Greene qualifies its "rules" to such a degree that nothing is left save: think carefully about things and your obligation to help others. That's fine, but I don't need to read hundreds of pages to arrive at that dictum.

The science portions of the book could have been better directed. The author goes into great detail regarding the trolley dilemma. While this discussion was interesting, and this dilemma nicely traces the interplay between emotion and reason, other emotional modules are highly relevant to group/tribe formation and interactions; these should have been discussed (in addition to the trolley stuff). These other modules may be especially important, since in modern Western society, groups do not result from geographical isolation.

Group formation in modern societies may depend on one's location on the individualist vs. collectivist spectrum, which might be determined from a complex interplay between genetics and one's assessment of whether one will benefit or be harmed by redistribution of wealth. In turn, one's location on this spectrum may influence group membership, and that membership likely profoundly affects the emotional (mis)interpretation of real world data (even by a Harvard professor). I don't require a book on groups to adopt my view, but in such a book, I really want to read an attempt to understand what underpins group formation in Western society.
Profile Image for Atila Iamarino.
411 reviews4,425 followers
February 14, 2017
Uma leitura que estava adiando mas caiu muito bem depois de ler o The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. O Joshua Greene faz uma expedição por diferentes formas do Dilema do Bonde para demonstrar como as duas formas de pensar que temos (vide Rápido e Devagar: Duas Formas de Pensar) colocam emoção e razão em conflito quando tomamos decisões morais. Basicamente porque, como ele argumenta e acredito também, formamos nosso sistema moral dentro de um ambiente muito mais particular e cercado só de pessoas que conhecíamos ou com quem nos relacionávamos. Tanto que muitos conflitos éticos acontecem na fronteira entre nosso bando e outros bandos – refugiados, por exemplo.

Para mostrar como nossa ética é falha, ele usa o utilitarismo ao longo do livro todo. Que serve muito bem para apontar discrepâncias em uma situação como salvar alguém que estamos vendo vs. salver alguém que não vemos, já que o "benefício" nas duas situações é o mesmo. Só não compro muito o argumento final de que o utilitarismo seria o sistema ético global ideal, capaz de unir todos. Acho que somos egoístas demais para algo assim, pelo menos no futuro próximo.
Profile Image for Théo d'Or .
468 reviews213 followers
Read
September 24, 2022
Finally, finished this review, started last month, and abandoned due to some ambiguities of my condition.
Okay , you can translate it as lazyness.
Greene writes that anger would be useful, not to me, but to us, humans, as a species. And not just anger, but also other uplifting feelings such as contempt, shame or guilt, and he draws a very interesting theory of the benefits and limitations of the moral compass made up of emotions. Here is what he claims, in short :
Mankind got where it got because of coopération, which cooperation was done in small groups, in competition with each other. And from here, two tense camps result : I vs Us , and We vs Them. The author uses here a unusual metaphor for the way we make moral choices, describing a " dual process morality ". A process is similar to the automatic module of a caméra, and represents the réaction based on emotion. The disadvantage is that the automatic module does not " know " to differentiate special shades, they are all treated the same. The other process is similar to manually adjusting camera settings, and represents rational behavior. The advantage is the differentiated approach to each situation, the disadvantage is the mental effort and the time allocated. Greene concludes by saying that we should use the automatic mode in the Me vs We paradigm, and the manual mode ( to ignore the emotional impulse, in favor of reason ) - when we talk about Us vs Them. But how the hell do we distinguish the two paradigms ? He also gives us a simple criterion : If we're not dealing with a moral dilemma, debated by society, we're dealing with Me vs We. But if the topic is a hot one, with noisy camps, it already means that it is Us vs Them, traditionalists vs progressives, populists vs immigrants , and so on. In these cases, Greene advises us to suppress our disgust and intolerance, and to judge the right to abortion or the right to have guns not according to how we feel the little toe on the left foot, but after having quantified the benefits and disadvantages of all options.
In short , Greene's book is à kind of primer , an initiation into the no-gloves fight between Reason and Feeling, where the KOs are always chained. Quite good, with many engaging examples.
1,247 reviews897 followers
August 8, 2020
Joshua Greene, an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist and philosopher, sets out to “use twenty-first-century science [neuroscience] to vindicate nineteenth-century moral philosophy [utilitarianism] against its twentieth-century critics [Rawls and other deontological ethicists].” And he succeeds admirably. This book persuasively and creatively tied together several strands of literature that interest me and will have an enduring impact on the way I think about ethical issues.

Greene’s core argument is that humans evolved to be able to cooperate with each other, solving the problem of “me vs. us” (the “Tragedy of the Commons”) but in the process we created a new problem that is increasingly bedeviling us today of “us vs. them” (the “Tragedy of the Commonsense Morality”) where different “tribes” clash not because they are selfish and immoral but instead because they are deeply motivated by their morality to see their tribe as right and the other tribe as wrong. Greene proposes a solution to this which is to use “utilitarianism” as a “metamorality” to adjudicate places where different tribes have fundamental disagreements with each other. Greene grounds his arguments in a combination of critique of traditional deontological philosophical attempts to settle these issues (e.g., Kant and Rawls) along with an understanding of the neuroscience and psychology of how we actually do make decisions.

A little more detail (and most of this is a summary of the book rather than a critique, in part for my own sake):

Greene points out that humans are much better at solving the “tragedy of the commons” or the “prisoner’s dilemma” than a simplistic, selfish economic model would lead you to believe. A combination of moral beliefs, reciprocity, repeated games, willingness to punish, willingness to have asocial punishments of others, etc., can keep us working together. The way we overcome the Tragedy of the Commons is not original to Greene, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for it in the context of the tragedy of the commons and Thomas Schelling in the context of the prisoner’s dilemma.

Greene puts these solutions in the context of our “automatic settings” or quick reactions, that put us in a better position to solve these types of problems.

Part of the solutions to the tragedy of the commons to have a tribal identity which comes with incidental beliefs about what is and is not wrong about a wide range of behavior. This is what gives rise to the tragedy of the commonsense morality where different tribes clash on issues like religion, abortion, LGBT rights, etc. This tragedy can’t be solved by our automatic settings but instead requires us to use our “manual mode” or reason. Greene argues that we all “get” utilitarianism, agree in general, and just need to work together on the facts/analysis so that we can use it in practice.

Greene is scathing on the alternatives to his approach. One is religion/virtue, but this can solve the tragedy of the commons, but is really just elevating one tribe’s moral views and thus can’t solve conflicts between tribes. Another is Kant/Rawls, which Greene argues have failed to actually use reason, are riddled with logical flaws, and instead are just rationalizations of their particular tribe’s moralities. Instead utilitarianism allows one to transcend the limits of one’s tribal views.

Greene defends utilitarianism against the idea that it us overly strong (e.g., requiring us to give up all our money to the least well off) by saying utilitarianism is really “deep pragmatism” and asking people to do something impossible they won’t do is itself not actually utilitarian. And he argues against the idea that it is to weak in not respecting “fundamental right” by pointing out that the reason these rights see so important is that they involve horrible consequences, and that more generally no one actually views the rights as absolute, and that they exacerbate tribal tensions, so appealing to rights is an emotional weapon not a sound argument.

A lot of the argument and analysis of the book also involves empirical psychology, in particular Greene’s studies of various Trolley dilemmas, and trying to learn from how people make moral decisions and infer from this what a workable “deeply pragmatic” moral approach could be.

As an aspiring but highly imperfect and inconsistent utilitarian/consequentialist, I was very happy to see that Greene grounds the approach in 21st century science, makes an argument for its universality, and addresses some of the shortcomings that intuitively bothered me, including the ways in which all of us fail to live up to Peter Singer’s vision of utilitarianism. I also appreciated that while Greene shared a certain amount of the analysis of Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, he was much less nihilistic and actually reached a conclusion with more teeth than just that liberals were morally deficient and we should understand each other better.

But I still have a nagging worry that all of this is less reason than rationalization for a particular modern ideology that I happen to like. Moreover, even if it is correct, I’m still not sure that it is as applicable to solving the problem’s of warring tribes as Greene believes when so much of the wars involve different views of happiness, whose happiness and what happiness (e.g., in the case of abortion, does the “happiness” of the fetus count or not? Greene thinks utilitarianism can solve the abortion debates, I’m less sure). But those are nagging suspicions and I don’t think there is a better moral approach. And more important, by grounding this in empirical psychology and neuroscience Greene’s approach holds out the prospect of making further progress. I look forward to seeing it.
Profile Image for Satyajeet.
111 reviews334 followers
July 24, 2020
This is a powerful blend of neuroscience, psychology, and sociology. The first third or so is probably the most fascinating, with ideas about Individualism v/s Collectivism taking a front seat in the discussion. This is worth reading as it could fuel discussion around a variety of areas, including values-based decision making, inherited perspective, biases, bystander-intervention, and responding to the controversy.

It points out that 'Reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context. This makes much more sense if you've studied more on Cognitive dissonance and Biases before (One of them is confirmation bias: the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and rejects information that contradicts them)
Humans' biggest advantage over other species is the ability to co-operate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

“Humans, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.”
March 3, 2016
The first half of the book was somewhat interesting and not terribly written. The second half is a long plea by the author for the reader to accept his philosophy. Even the author seems to not really support it, he constantly is saying things along the lines of "well even though this seems awful and unworkable, just over look that & agree with my philosophy". The second half of the book is just terribly, terribly written. I finished it because of my own masochistic tendencies, but I would recommend you don't even start this dull, rambling book.
Also, the author regularly tells us about how amazing and smart he is. Basically, he went to Ivy league schools for undergrad and grad school; aren't you amazed?! He sure thinks he's the smartest person out there! To me these incessant reminders of how "smart" the author thinks he is just made him come off like an idiotic prick, completely unaware of how out of touch he is.
Author 6 books105 followers
December 22, 2015
The moral psychology felt top-notch; however, the author's defenses of utilitarianism in the later chapters felt like they were showing the same rationalization biases that he had spent several chapters warning his readers about (and I say this as someone who's generally sympathetic to utilitarianism). Still worth reading for at least the early chapters, though.
Profile Image for Ariel Pontes.
8 reviews4 followers
July 26, 2020
A great contemporary defense of utilitarianism against the accusations of deontologists, virtue ethicists, and more recently of authors like Rawls, Nozick, and Jonathan Haidt. Essentially, its central argument is: if we want cooperate at the global scale, the widespread adoption of utilitarianism as a universal standard for public policy is the only available solution at this moment. The book adopts a pragmatist approach, avoiding metaethical questions such as "but is this really the right thing to do in an absolute sense, or only as a means to achieve greater cooperation?" or "are moral truths discovered or invented?", which I believe are interesting and should be explored, but perhaps in a dedicated volume. The book does a great job at defending utilitarianism against the classical thought experiments used to attack it (e.g. the footbridge dilemma, the transplant problem, the sheriff scenario, the utility monster, etc.), and explains using results from moral psychology that utilitarianism sometimes seems counterintuitive due to "bugs" in our cognitive machinery, which is like a dual-mode camera, with automatic settings (landscape, portrait, etc) and a manual mode. Our automatic settings are inflexible and uses fast, heuristic thinking, which evolved to deal with a very particular set problems that were common in our evolutionary history, such as the problem of "me" vs. "us". Our manual mode, on the other hand, is slow and resource-consuming, but it is extremely flexible. It is a general purpose learning machine that can apply logical reasoning to any kind of problem, even completely new ones. Since our automatic settings evolved because it conferred a competitive advantage to one group against another, it couldn't evolve instincts capable of automatically solving the problem of "us" vs. "them". Therefore, if we want to cooperate at a global scale, we need manual mode, and using our manual mode to think about morality inevitably leads to utilitarianism, which Greene somewhat tentatively tries to rebrand as "deep pragmatism". At the end of the day, a cold rational analysis of ourselves will always lead to the conclusion that what ultimately matters for us is the quality of our subjective experience. Any other proposed moral "principle" ultimately derives its value from its propensity to improve the quality of the experience of sentient beings.
Profile Image for Duncan McLaren.
124 reviews2 followers
September 6, 2015
For a book described in its jacket quotes as 'a landmark', 'brilliant' and 'a masterpiece', this was a big disappointment. It is no such thing, and that Steven Pinker and Peter Singer should make such comments about it is - I suspect - testament to the power of confirmation bias.

So why I am I still awarding it 3 stars? Because it is in many ways two books woven into one, and one of the two books is indeed stimulating, challenging and innovative (sadly the other is almost entirely without logical foundation. Book one is the melding of psychological research and moral philosophy to demonstrate the ways in which differently evolved cultures have developed distinctive moral approaches which can be internally consistent, and yet generate conflicts in which each group (or 'tribe') believes itself morally correct. In doing this he contrasts the parable of 'the tragedy of commonsense morality' with the 'tragedy of the commons'. Greene's innovative approach is to weave together evidence on humans' two-speed brains (as elaborated in Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow') with evidence on how we approach moral dilemmas. The research findings he presents on how test subjects (albeit primarily weird (western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) people) respond differently when triggered to use their gut reactions, rather than considered rationalism should provoke all philosophers to think hard about how far they are and should seek to 'justify their instincts'.

Book two attempts (and imo, almost completely fails) to demonstrate that a variant of utilitarianism that Greene calls 'deep pragmatism' can provide a universal language and currency for negotiation and compromise between different 'moral tribes'. His quest fails on at least three counts. Most fundamentally he cannot escape the accusation he levies at almost all other philosophers - including such eminences as John Rawls - that he is seeking intricate ways to justify his own gut instincts. For instance his cultural setting means he largely fails to recognise the extent to which our biological and cultural evolution has not left humans as competitive savages with a veneer of collaborative culture, but as highly evolved collaborators with a healthy streak of competitiveness. Moreover, he redefines happiness or welfare (the underlying currency of utilitarianism) in ways that leave it almost meaningless (and certainly distinctive from other utilitarian scholars) - as including sacrifices on behalf of others, and over indefinite time periods. Worse he redefines the 'moral community' - by suggesting that anyone who doesn't get their happiness in the same way, is simply 'not part of the we in this conversation'.

So ultimately Greene's effort to transcend moral differences through utilitarianism fails. But his book is still valuable as it illuminates important obstacles that will have to be overcome in any other effort to develop a universal ethical framework, whether based in human rights, cosmopolitanism or recognition, for example. But here lies what I see as Greene's final failure: in his determination to find in 'deep pragmatism' the one and only way to something approximating moral universalism; he becomes increasingly determined to rubbish any alternative approaches, and rather overlooks and demeans the massive progress made by non-utilitarian approaches which have incrementally widened the ambit of our moral community to increasingly accept differences in gender, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality. In this I think he is not only hampered by his own psychological blinkers, but the cultural blinkers of living in the current polarised era of US politics.

Nonetheless, I neither regret reading this, nor would I do other than recommend it to others ... despite my criticisms, it made me think and reflect, and there is little more that we could reasonably ask from a book of such ambition that attempts to present both science and philosophy to a mainstream audience.
Profile Image for John.
15 reviews3 followers
October 28, 2014
Greene takes pains to source philosophy, social and cognitive sciences, psychology, and other material pertinent to having a reasoned conversation about why different groups of people can disagree about things each is so sure is moral and right[eous]. By chapter 5 he's plainly depicted the landscape of our biological proclivities, inherited perspectives, decision making, and biases. He's set upon that landscape metaphysical and reasoning tools with which you expect him to construct and reveal grand insight.

Perhaps because of this groundwork, even more than the desire for understanding between the seemingly irreconcilable, Greene tragically disappoints the reader by repeatedly begging appeal for open-mindedness followed by what can only be described as half-assed, rushed, shoddy hand-waving rather than concerted (let alone rigorous) use of the tools he's laid out. No, the reader isn't left with insight beyond what a high school debate coach might give. They're left knowing Greene as a partisan hack, as convinced of his moral superiority as anyone else on the partisan spectrum.

Summing Greene's position: Utilitarianism is the only means by which compromise can be attained. Though you may find Utilitarianism unworkable idealistic and its result morally reprehensible, this is simply because you've failed to use reason over emotion... ...or if you have used reason, because you've done so only to further rationalize your own position (something Greene provides heaping examples of in his own rhetoric). "You see", Greene says, "disagreeing with Utilitarianism is ridiculous because it means forsaking the /deeply pragmatic/ compromise required of reason." Wherein such a compromise demands judgement? These are precisely the situations in which one would turn to an expert... ...this expert just sticks his finger in the air and spouts the American Liberal line verbatim.
Profile Image for Eliana.
4 reviews1 follower
November 22, 2013
So when my mom got this book I was sure it was going to be either about how Group A is right, and everyone else should GTFO, or about how really dead down we all agree on everything and conflict is really the vault of insert group name here. It turned out to be neither of those things. Instead, it's an extremely interesting look at why some actions make humans uncomfortable, why that impulse isn't always correct, and how to make ethical decisions without completely relying on "gut feeling".
Profile Image for Morgan Blackledge.
680 reviews2,246 followers
March 16, 2014
I started writing this review by trying to list and explain all of the cool constructs covered in the book. But there are so many amazing points to Greene's argument that the review was beginning to approach book length. So I said fuck it.

Just read the book. But read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind first. Moral Tribes stands alone, but is best taken as a retort to Haidt's work.
Profile Image for Teo 2050.
840 reviews87 followers
April 5, 2020
2016.01.06–2016.01.17

If you're into all three of these, relevant background reading for, and referenced in, Moral Tribes might include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Haidt) and Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman). I agree that utilitarianism (or 'deep pragmatism') basically is what we do when trying to find common ground (weighing harms and benefits), and I'm sympathetic to these kinds of 'Morality, Fast and Slow' trains of thought and research. (It's good to have Moral Cognition labs.) But I've yet to look into whether this/they help disagreeing moral tribes find common currency or manage to mostly preach to the already utilitarian crowd. Ultimately, harmonizing moral intuitions might require education in science and changes in metaphysical views. And maybe Moral Tribes falls under such education; but is it accessible enough to have effects outside the already sympathetic camp?

Contents

Greene J (2013) (14:53) Moral Tribes - Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

Introduction: The Tragedy of Commonsense Morality
• Life on the New Pastures
• Toward a Global Moral Philosophy
• The Plan

Part I: Moral Problems

01. The Tragedy of the Commons
• The Function of Morality
• Metamorality

02. Moral Machinery
• The Magic Corner
• Family Values
• Tit For Tat
• Besties
• Minimal Decency
• Threats and Promises
• Watchful Eyes and Discerning Minds
• Members Only
• Interested Parties
• Moral Machinery

03. Strife on the New Pastures
• The Psychology of Conflict
• Tribalism
• Cooperation, On What Terms?
• Honor Versus Harmony
• Local Morality
• Biased Fairness
• Biased Perception
• Biased Escalation
• Life and Strife on the New Pastures

Part II: Morality Fast and Slow

04. Trolleyology
• The Trolley Problem
• Into the Scanner
• Experimental Trolleyology Takes Off
• The Patient on the Trolley Tracks
• Of Two Moral Minds

05. Efficiency, Flexibility, and the Dual-Process Brain
• Emotion Versus Reason
• The Dual-Process Brain
• Getting Smart

Part III: Common Currency

06. A Splendid Idea
• A Splendid Idea
• The Wisdom of the Elders
• Consequentialism, Utilitarianism, and Pragmatism
• (Mis)understanding Utilitarianism
• A Remarkable Convergence

07. In Search of Common Currency
• Does Our Common Currency Come from God?
• Is Morality Like Math?
• Does Science Deliver the Moral Truth?
• Plan B: In Search of Shared Values

08. Common Currency Found
• What is Utilitarianism?
• From General Rationality to Utilitarian Morality
• What's Wrong with Utilitarianism?

Part IV: Moral Convictions

09. Alarming Acts
• Pushing Moral Buttons
• Means and Side Effect
• Modular Myopia
• Why Aren't We Psychopaths?
• Blindness to Side Effects
• Doing and Allowing
• Utilitarianism Versus the Gizmo

10. Justice and Fairness
• Is Utilitarianism Too Demanding?
• The Duty to Help
• Personal Commitments
• Human Values Versus Ideal Values
• Just Desserts
• Ideal Justice
• The Just Society
• The "Wealthitarian" Fallacy
• Justice and the Greater Good

Part V: Moral Solutions

11. Deep Pragmatism
• Two Compasses
• When to Point and Shoot?: (Me Vs. Us) Versus (Us. Vs. Them)
• Out of Our Depth
• The Secret Jokes of Our Souls: Rationalization and the Dual-Process Brain
• "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose": Rights as Rationalization
• Rights as Weapons and Shields
• Abortion: A Case Study
• Abortion: The Pragmatic Approach
• Waiting for Godot
• Why I'm a Liberal, and What It Would Take to Change My Mind

12. Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Six Rules for Modern Herders
• 1. In the face of moral controversy, consult, but do not trust, your moral instincts.
• 2. Rights are not for making arguments; they're for ending arguments.
• 3. Focus on the facts, and make others do the same.
• 4. Beware of biased fairness.
• 5. Use common currency.
• 6. Give.
Profile Image for Rossdavidh.
535 reviews183 followers
December 4, 2014
I really wanted to like this book a lot, because it is aiming at a very important question, and the author has done his research. Unfortunately, just because you have the right weapon and the right target, doesn't mean you hit the mark.

The target, in this case, is what happens when numerous tribes whose morality systems (largely intuitive), which work fine within their own societies, impinge upon each other (as with globalization).

The weapon, is all the science that's been done in the last 20 years about how the human brain thinks about moral issues. We know orders of magnitude more about this than when, for example, Mill and Kant and Bentham and others thought about this several centuries ago. We have testable predictions about what changes people's opinions on moral issues, and how the different parts of the human brain interact with each other and with culture to produce our moral responses to things like violence, selfishness, novelty, sex, and so forth. Greene's overview of this is actually quite good, and anyone who isn't aware of all of this research would do well to start with this book as a survey.

The problem is that, armed with this and a meta-morality that Greene calls "deep pragmatism", a kind of modernized utilitarianism, he then attempts to determine whether we can find a better way to resolve moral disputes between "tribes". The theory is that, since our instincts and intuitions are irreconcilably different, only an appeal to conscious reason (informed by scientific facts) can offer a way out of the morass (besides just fighting it out, of course).

So far, so plausible, but the conclusions that Greene arrives at look suspiciously identical to the typical liberal-with-a-dash-of-libertarianism that 90% of all academics arrive at by following their instincts. The low point is probably when, in a discussion of abortion, he pronounces the conservative argument as "too good", and settles conveniently on the only conclusion that would not have alienated his peers.

It's not so much even his conclusions that I disagree with, though I disagree occasionally, it's rather the idea he has that anyone who doesn't already agree with them will be convinced by his argument any more than the quicker, and in some ways more honest, assertion of one's position as being morally right and beyond question.

In many ways it reminds me of Daniel Dennett's attempts to appear that he was considering religious views in a dispassionate way in "Breaking the Spell". No one who wasn't already convinced, will be convinced. If I found it to be biased and headed towards a predetermined conclusion, surely no religious and/or conservative reader will do otherwise.

In Greene's case, though, he is at least shining a light on the right question, and as mentioned earlier providing a pretty good survey of the relevant science of the last 20 years. Good. But not great, and not up to the task he seems to set himself.
Profile Image for Leif Denti.
Author 3 books8 followers
January 25, 2015
I enjoyed this book. It is generally well argued and lays out a pretty clear map over the moral philosophy and psychology field as of today. Greene does a good job in arguing for the distinction between the Tragedy of the Commons (within-group moral reasoning), and what he calls the Tragedy of Common Sense Morality (between-group moral reasoning). In essence: we are good at cooperating and empathizising with each other when it comes to our own in-group, but bad at cooperating and empathizising with out-groups as our emotional circuitry doesn't seem to extend to out-groups very well. Greene seeks to bridge this gap and calls for a "meta-morality", one that everyone can accept regardless of our particular in-group ideosyncrasies.

The meta-morality most fitting, according to Greene, is utilitarianism. Sadly, this is where the book loses its momentum and Greenes argumentation becomes sloppy. We are to accept utilitarianism because it is pragmatic and that other attempts at creating a meta-morality (like Kant) have failed. I do like Greenes notion that utilitarianism offers a universial moral "currency", that is happiness, however, this only pushes the problem one step further. Instead of arguing over what is right and what is wrong, we should argue over happiness, which of course comes with the usual problems like how we should measure happiness and how we would know which option impacts happiness most.

The book has a few straw-man arguments as well as other biases which isnt fitting for a book (and author) of this calibre. It recieves four stars from me.
Profile Image for عبدالرحمن عقاب.
716 reviews858 followers
January 29, 2014
قبل أيامٍ من قراءتي لهذا الكتاب، كنت أقرأ في كتابٍ عن تاريخ العلوم، وفيه انتبهت إلى تلك الكتب التي حوت الأفكار التي هزّت العالم، وشكّلت منعطفًا في تاريخ الفكر البشري. كان بعضها-وربّما غالبها- كتبًا تحوي ما يقلّ عن 200 صفحة . فقلت في نفسي : هذا جميل، والله.
فكرةٌ مبهرة رائعة مبتدعة في صفحات، تُقرأ سريعًا أو على مهل!
ثمّ جاء دور هذا الكتاب ليجعلني أترّحم على تلك الأيام التي لم أشهدها بالتأكيد. فهذا زمن "الثرثرة" بحق. ولعلّ توفّر الورق وسهولة الطباعة، و بعضٌ من جشع ومطامع مالية فيها بعض الإجابة.
الكتاب في مجمله- وعلى مدى 350 صفحة- يحاول إثبات مبدأ "النفعية" من خلال طروحات فلسفية، وقليل جدًا من علم الأعصاب الإدراكي (وهو مدار اهتمامي) . لكنّه في مجمله "ثرثرة" واستطرادات يمكن تجاوزها أو تلخيصها بأسطر معدودة.
وأظنّ أنّ العنوان (القبائل الأخلاقية) أو (القبلية الأخلاقية) يعد بدراسة معمقة ومهمة لم يوفي بها هذا الكتاب .
Profile Image for Pipat Tanmontong.
111 reviews14 followers
October 29, 2020
เรารู้สึกว่าเป็นหนังสือจิตวิทยาการทดลองที่มีจุดแข็งในการพยายามอธิบายศีลธรรมการอยู่ร่วมกันในทางวิทยาศาสตร์ แต่จุดยืนด้านจริยธรรมมันน่าสะอิดสะเอียนมากสำหรับเราอ่านด้วยความรู้สึกต่อต้านแบบสุดๆ แทบจะอ่านผ่านๆให้มันจบๆไป ถ้าคุณไม่ได้มีมุมมองในแง่ศีละรรมคล้ายๆเรามันอาจเป็นเล่มที่ใช่ของคุณก้อได้
Profile Image for Aseem Kaul.
Author 0 books23 followers
January 2, 2014
There's a great deal to love about Moral Tribes, which is just about the most intellectually stimulating book I read in 2013.

Here's my brief (possibly somewhat inaccurate) summary of what Greene is saying:

1 Human beings face two types of moral problems: the problem of small-group cooperation (Me vs. Us) and the problem of global cooperation (Us vs. Them). Where small-group cooperation fails we end up with the Tragedy of the Commons. Where global cooperation fails we end up with what Greene calls the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality - groups of people in conflict with each other because they both avidly subscribe to distinct moral codes

2. The moral codes we subscribe to within groups are the result of a long process of psychological and social evolution that has helped us develop emotional instincts that promote intra-group cooperation. As a result, most people possess strong moral intuition (enforced through emotional triggers) that pushes them to automatically make choices that are *moral* from an intra-group perspective

3. Unfortunately, this kind of intuitive or knee-jerk morality is subject to several limitations, not being designed to deal with complex global problems. In particular, while our automatic response may help promote intra-group cooperation it also tends to foster inter-group competition and conflict, making us biased towards our own 'tribal' ways of thinking, and causing us to make inconsistent and irrational choices driven by emotional response.

4. We therefore need some basis of metamorality - a principle or rule to allow us to resolve conflicts between groups and their diverse moral codes

5. Utilitarianism (or what Greene calls deep pragmatism), which is defined as the pursuit of human happiness with everyone's happiness (or utility) being weighted equally is the best available candidate for such a metamorality. It is not the ideal candidate - Greene is not claiming that is it the supreme moral principle - it is simply the metamorality most likely to end conflict and enable inter-group cooperation.

6. Utilitarianism is uniquely positioned to serve as a pragmatic metamorality because:
6.1 It is based on an underlying value - happiness, or the value of the human experience - that is shared by all cultures and people, and deeply ingrained in our rational minds
6.2 It is a good complement to our tribal moral intuitions:
6.2.1 On the one hand it helps to overcome the our automatic bias of only caring about those proximate to us, by giving equal weight to everyone's happiness - ours and the other tribes
6.2.2 On the other hand, our natural moral instincts protect against the worst conceptual problems with utilitarianism - excessive egalitarianism (what Greene calls turning ourselves into happiness pumps) or the oppresion of minorities


7. Greene's prescription, then, is that we need to use two moral compasses - an instinctive / emotional / fast compass based on moral intuition to be invoked when dealing with me vs. us problems, and a rational / cognitive / slow compass based on utilitarian principles when dealing with morally controversial issues involving us vs. them conflicts.

8. More specifically, Greene believes that shifting morally controversial discussions away from claims about 'rights' and 'duties' (that cannot, ultimately be unsubstantiated, and really reflect nothing more than rationalizations of our (tribal) moral instincts), towards a dialog about the effect of moral choices on overall utility (that may be subject to empirical investigation) will help us to overcome (or at least make progress towards overcoming) the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality.


Personally, I agree with most of Greene's points here, and found the overall argument quite thought-provoking and insightful. I think Greene does an especially convincing job of laying out the nature of the problem (points 1 to 4) and while I'm less convinced about the supremacy of utilitarianism, I did find his analysis of the complementarity between rational utilitarianism and moral intuition quite insightful, and think he offers one of the strongest defenses of utilitarianism I've read in a long time. Plus, it helps that his writing is both precise and accessible, and that he peppers his argument with an assortment of experimental studies in psychology that make for fascinating reading.

This is not suggest, of course, that Greene's argument is without its flaws. Here, in no particular order, are the main issues I had with the book:

a) Greene pays too little attention to issues of agency and choice. Giving away half your income to help total strangers is a very different proposition from having half your income taken away and redistributed to total strangers. And the difference is moral in a utilitarian sense because the effect of the former action on your happiness is likely to be very different from the effect of the latter. In general, I think Greene's arguments work well at the level of personal choice (we should all give more) but not so well when we no longer have agency.

b) Perhaps as a consequence of being more a psychologist, Greene seems to pay too little attention to the social dimensions of happiness. What we derive utility from, and how much utility we derive from it, is often socially constructed. This creates three problems:

i. To the extent that our utility comes from the maintenance of our tribal norms, utilitarianism may not help to overcome inter-group conflict. If the fact that public policy is in conflict the code of my tribe genuinely makes me deeply unhappy then utilitarianism may not be a panacea. More generally, utilitarianism would logically lead to the beliefs of the group that had more fundamentalist beliefs being privileged over the beliefs of others.

ii. It creates a new set of me vs. us problems - if my happiness is based on social comparisons, then moral choices that I would accept if my entire tribe made them may be unacceptable to me personally. So for instance, making less money may not make me significantly unhappier per se, but making less money than my peers may. So evenly deeply pragmatic individuals may fail to accept alternate moral positions if they mean moving away from their peer group.

iii. While not strictly an issue for Greene's argument, I think it is worth thinking about where our utility functions come from. Utilitarianism makes a great deal of sense if the sources of human happiness are universal products of our psychological evolution as a species, and Greene often seems to assume they are. It makes a lot less sense if they are socially constructed and subject to manipulation by others within / outside our group.

c) I'm skeptical about the ability of a shift to utilitarianism to provide a evidence-based foundation for conflict resolution. As a social scientist myself, I understand the appeal of the idea that we base policy conclusions on empirical evidence (what works) rather than unsubstantiated beliefs, but I also recognize that most empirical evidence is contentious, provisional, and subject to multiple explanations. Which means that the shift to utilitarianism may achieve little more than a shift from unresolvable conflicts between the rights championed by different groups, to unresolvable conflicts between the empirical results championed by different groups.

d) This evidence problem is made worse by the fact that, as Greene himself points out, people are incredibly bad at understanding what utility means and thinking about it clearly, frequently confusing it with wealth, consumption, pleasure, etc. Greene makes this point in defense of utilitarianism, and I think he's right as far as utilitarianism as a theory goes. But to make a concept that ordinary humans have a difficult time getting their head around the basis for the metamorality that will solve all inter-group conflict seems like a particularly bad idea.

e) While I actually agree with Greene on pragmatism being a good basis for choosing a metamorality, it's worth noting that this is, in itself, a utilitarian conclusion. Why is the metamorality that best enables inter-group cooperation the best metamorality? That's only true if our goal is to reduce conflict and increase overall happiness (a utilitarian ideal). A different metamorality may prize conflict between groups. Theoretically, at least Greene's argument runs into the tautological problem of coming to the conclusion that utilitarianism (or deep pragmatism) is the best metamorality by adopting a utilitarian (or deeply pragmatic) criterion to evaluate metamoralities. Pragmatically, this is a problem because it represents a stumbling block that keeps Greene's arguments from being persuasive to anyone who doesn't already share his conviction about the primacy of utilitarianism. Say I'm a devotee of Rawls and believe that the best metamorality is the one that protects the rights of individuals, even if it makes cooperation between moralities harder. Does it then matter to me that utilitarianism is the metamorality that enables the greatest cooperation? No. So Greene is effectively preaching to the choir.

f) Finally, I can't help feeling that Greene's arguments don't really address an important class of moral dilemmas that involve situations where utilitarian comparisons are too unclear to be helpful. If we're comparing the utility of an expensive watch to the utility of a child's survival, then utilitarianism works well. But if we're comparing the utility of a five minute school prayer to believers vs. the utility of five minutes of free time to non-believers, the utilitarian implications are murky. And yet many of the most difficult moral problems we face are precisely problems where the maximizing overall utility guideline is not especially helpful.

All that being said, I still think Moral Tribes is one of the best books on questions of morality that I've read in a while - a book that offers insightful and important arguments that deserve careful consideration, and a book that anyone interested in these issues should read.
Profile Image for Joseph Stieb.
Author 1 book165 followers
March 26, 2016
I listened to this book as a follow up to Jonathan Haidt's excellent "The Righteous Mind." I didn't enjoy this book as much even though I probably would agree with Greene on more things than with Haidt. Haidt just had the advantage of going first and introducing me to the field of moral cognition. Greene is still a great read, and I recommend it to people even if they've already read Haidt.

This book centers around the quest for a universal moral currency that can adjudicate disputes between moral tribes, or the communities that the modern world increasingly throws into contact and conflict with each other. The book starts with the concept of the tragedy of the commons. In order for any community to work together, they need to mitigate the tragedy of the commons. Morality, in this evolutionary sense, is essentially a set of rules designed to facilitate cooperation within a group. However, we also have evolved, automatic settings that police our behavior from within, making us cooperative in the in-group almost by nature. We blush, gossip, get angry at taboo violators, have awe for the principles and sacred objects of the group, etc., and these automatic responses bolster (and are the basis of) the more abstract rules of humanity. Groups need this in-group harmony to survive, and the better they are at cooperation the more likely they are to survive.

So, the tragedy of the commons is solved! However, Greene says that this solution engenders its own new problem: the tragedy of common sense morality. When we meet other groups, we say "Hey, you guys don't do things like we do! What the heck! Let's fight." Each group's norms and values seem like "common sense" to the group, but they are nonsense (or worse) to the other group. Thus, Greene says we need a common language of morality

For that common language, Greene proposes happiness. It's something that we all agree that human beings should want. Ideally, we can put aside our common sense moralities and figure out what make human beings the happiest. Greene is a utilitarian in the spirit of Mill and Bentham, but he has drawn out a much more sophisticated version of utilitarianism than what most people associate with that term. Utilitarianism seeks the greatest good for the greatest number, but it also treats everyone's happiness as equally valuable. Slavery, for example, is not justified in utilitarianism because it makes some people a little happier but others a lot less happy. Greene argues that our debates about our ways of life should be based around figuring out what makes people the happiest without taking too much from any individual or group. Strangely enough, this reminds me a lot of Fukuyama's argument that liberal democracy is best at satisfying the individual's "struggle for recognition," dignity, and happiness.

In order to do this, Greene argues that we will have to rely much more on manual-mode, conscious reasoning to figure out what makes people the happiest. At this point he builds heavily on Kahneman and Tversky's Systems 1 and 2 arguments. Our automatic settings are too focused on in-group cooperation and out-group distrust, and they have a lot of weird biases to be reliable guides to inter-group disputes. For example, in the trolley problem, our automatic response is that pushing the person is wrong but pulling the switch is okay, even though they are the same result! Utilitarianism focuses on the outcomes rather than the inputs of these processes, helping us get closer to what ways of life work best in cases where we have to decide (abortion or gay marriage, for instance). I like the Greene puts more credence in our ability to consciously reason, whereas Haidt is a bit heavy on the point that our reasoning is just post hoc rationalization of our instincts.

One very interesting argument in this book is that the concept of rights aren't very good for settling tough inter-tribal disputes. Greene portrays rights as trumps: my right to speech, privacy, religion, etc trumps almost anything you can put against it. Rights claims are designed to end conversations about morality as final arbiters of what we can and can't do. However, in cases like abortion, rights-talk doesn't get us very far. One side says "right to life" and the other says "right to choose," but Greene says we don't get very far from those competing claims. You are likely to agree with the one from the tribe you come from, after all. Instead, Greene says that the common currency of happiness can help adjudicate these disputes. He concludes that outlawing abortion reduces happiness, especially the burden put on women, much more than it improves the happiness of somewhat theoretical lives, given that there's no scientific way to decide when "ensoulment" occurs. This is the pro-choice utilitarian argument that goes around the rights impasse.

Greene has a great section on why he's a liberal that successfully counters a lot of Haidt's arguments. Haidt argues that liberals have an impoverished moral palate. They are only sensitive to care/harm, fairness, and liberty arguments, whereas conservatives respond to these and other moral taste buds, including sanctity/defilement, authority/tradition, and loyalty. Haidt says that liberals have this problem because too many of their beliefs come from abstract moral reasoning, Enlightenment style, which is deeply disconnected from our social lives and evolutionary nature.

Greene's counterpoint is great: This removal from the common sense morality of one's tribe, this ability to reason more abstractly, is the core strength of liberalism. Unlike virtually any other code, liberalism strives to be a form of universal moral currency by basing its judgements not on what any given tribe finds to be right or wrong, but more objective measurements of happiness like harm and fairness. Liberalism arose from theorists like Locke, Mill, Bentham, Rawls, and others who were trying to figure out how to live peacefully and cooperate with different tribes than there own. They couldn't just command those tribes (other religions, peoples, etc) to obey their common sense moralities, so they had to figure out common principles that both sides could agree to: rights, balanced government, tolerance, the harm principle, equality, and fairness.

Social conservatism, in contrast, is in Greene's telling just a reflection of the common sense morality of each tribe. Do social conservatives value patriotism, sanctity, and tradition in the abstract, as Haidt claims? No: they value their own forms of patriotism, sanctity, and tradition. When Iranians rebel against their government, violating patriotism and respect for authority, American social conservatives rejoice. Social conservatives treat the traditions of other societies as wrong, weird, or sacrilegious, and, unlike liberal utilitarians, would never consider adopting those practices if they were proven to be more effective or better at generating happiness. If social conservatives value sanctity so much, why have so many of them been willing to desecrate the Qur'an, or support this kind of action? Why do they rejoice when Trump speaks of killing terrorists with bullets dipped in pigs blood? Social conservative movements operate from the common sense morality of "how we do things is how everyone else should do things, and our preferences should win out when they come into conflict with other tribes." This summarizes why Greene, and I, are liberals. I think we can see this point playing out right now in the great state of North Carolina.

I have two main problems with this book. First, I think the argument about rights is overstated. Greene doesn't really deal with the social contract aspect of liberal thought, which actually approaches rights from a fairly utilitarian perspective as well. Second, the book is a bit scattershot in its organization, and it has a little more philosophy than I wanted. Still, I recommend it highly to everyone. Yes, everyone! Moral cognition is an expanding field of moral psychology, and it cuts through so much BS and explains so much of our behavior that we should all at least engage with it.
Profile Image for Charlene.
875 reviews595 followers
April 12, 2016
Brilliant! Every time I read something of Josh Greene's, I love him more. He provides some of the most exciting aspects neuroscience has to offer. Malcolm Gladwell is very popular, but people who majored in neuroscience and those practicing in the field find him frustrating because he promotes sexy science (that is just how researchers refer to neuroscience because of how it has been portrayed in the media) at the expense of actual, solid, careful science. But, Josh Greene provides all the sexy-sci while also not compromising the quality of the science.

I recommend not only reading Greene's book, but also watching his talks. I had the chance to see him years ago when he was completing his work on the emotional and logical parts of the prefrontal cortex that battle it out to come to one fluid moral decision. His work in this area is absolutely spectacular. He was also working, at that time, on distance v. local empathy, which I was happy to see as a focus in this book. With his work, he helped neuroscientists answer some deep and unanswered questions.

Throughout his career, Greene has conducted brain imaging studies and questionnaires (with awesomely quirky questions and scenarios) in an effort to understand how people react differently within and between cultures. Are there universal behaviors or behaviors that more likely exist in all people? Do some cultures share similar ideologies? Are there key differences? How do the similarities and differences play out on a local and global scale? After examining his findings, he provides excellent explanations for how people come to form their moral decisions. Unlike so many researchers in similar fields, Greene avoids telling too many "just so" stories. It's not that he doesn't engage in the just-so-story thinking, but he keeps it to a minimum and seems to use the science in a more cautious way.

Greene used Daniel Kahneman's work on heuristics as a foundation for his own studies. Greene wants to know, not only how our gut reactions can fail us, but do they fail us in different ways if we are from different cultures? Some cultures are more trusting in general. Some cultures are less so. What does this mean for any standard of trust? Should we trust? Shouldn't we trust? Is there an optimal level of trust that allows us to be open but not be vulnerable to a predator? These are great questions.

Of course the reader will encounter his well used trolly dilemma. In addition to trolleyology Greene attempted to understand how people come to make (and keep or discard) ideas about climate change, abortion, politics, charity, and other moral aspects of the world. How does your local tribe (be it your political affiliation, religious affiliation, or the affiliation you have with the particular country in which you happen to live) affect what you think about issues in your local community and global concerns. Do people employ utilitarianism, or deep pragmatism as he likes to call it? His conclusions are extremely thought provoking. Is there an "ought" to which we should subscribe? If things "are", does that mean they "ought" ("is v ought problem") to be that way? How can we ever decide on any optimal moral decision making? If we want what is best for all, how can we make sure "all" really means *all*? This makes me think about the social contract and constitution, which assumed that humans had inalienable rights, but humans failed to include black humans. They were not included in the "all." It is important to think about who is not included in an of our "all" when using deep pragmatism.

It's often much easier to save a life than to save many lives. It is also easier to not help when humans are farther away from the problem. Greene forces the reader to examine some of their own silly ideas that lead to these phenomena, e.g. a child is dying but I won't save it because I value my expensive suit and don't want to ruin it vs. the person who sits at home and watches a child starve to death but doesn't donate so they can buy an expensive suit.

In the end, it seems to Greene that gut reactions are ok for local decision making but to make global decisions that are best for all, we need to overcome the heuristically-driven gut reactions to make more pragmatic decisions.
Profile Image for John Schwabacher.
58 reviews1 follower
April 30, 2014
Joshua Greene is the director of the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard. Cool job title!

He starts by arguing that many of our emotions developed as moral instincts designed to help individuals deal with society, addressing the "tragedy of the commons" problem.

Next he points out that different societies can develop different workable tradeoffs: more or less indivuality, collectivity, etc. A higher level problem then arises when these societies collide: each has built up structures to help individuals cope with supporting intuitions, but these intuitions tell them that other societies are immoral.

He then argues that we need to move beyond our intuitions to a meta-morality. By studying the mechanisms by which our moral intuitions function, we can use logical thinking (see Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) to move beyond them. He proposes Utilitarian Philosophy as a framework for this meta-morality.

I found his arguments fascinating, enlighting, and convincing. Your mileage may vary!
435 reviews5 followers
June 21, 2023
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Profile Image for Islomjon.
162 reviews5 followers
June 18, 2019
I wnated to read "Moral Tribes" beause of Robert Saposly, who cites this books several times in his "The behave". Joshua Greene's explanations of moral judgements and other really interesting ideas fit my view and I accepted them without any complexities. However, the heavy content of the book and its tone is really difficult to understand. What's more, this book is totally essential in our contemporary society. Perhaps, after a certain time I will re-read it due to ideas are very crucial and everyone should understand them.
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