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

Joshua Greene introduces his recent Moral Tribes as an "ambitious book" (2013, 5). 1 It covers a vast range of empirical and philosophical ground, including an overview of Greene's research in the neuroscience of morality, a survey of the current state of much recent experimental moral philosophy and related areas in the social sciences, and an ethical argument for the "deep pragmatism" interpretation of utilitarianism.Greene is not only ambitious in his coverage, but also in his philosophical targets.He challenges the foundations of many historical and contemporary approaches in ethics: emotion, reason, religion, and science.The book, intended for a general audience, will likely be received as part of a recent class of experimentally-informed works like Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.But Greene's aims are different, as his arguments and conclusions are presented as deep philosophical ones.I suspect professional philosophers may find Tribes, with references to current events and children's books, distinctly unphilosophical.But under the surface of fMRI brain scans and tribal parables lurks a grand ethical argument, one whose success is worth philosophers' attention.Moral Tribes contains five parts.First, in "Moral Problems" Greene sets out two moral problems: the Tragedy of the Commons and the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality.The former of these he describes as a problem of "Me vs. Us" or "selfishness versus concern for others" (14).The moral machinery in our brains solves this problem, argues Greene, but it also creates a second type of problem.This problem, the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality, is a problem of values: "Us versus Them" (14).Evolution has endowed us with moral processing that fosters cooperation, solving "Me vs. Us" problems, but this same machinery produces opposing values.While nature has given us resources to solve problems within our own moral tribe, these same resources lead to massively problematic inter-tribal conflicts.Part two, "Morality Fast and Slow," contains what readers familiar with Greene's previous work might reasonably expect: utilitarianism, emotion, trolley problems, and brain-scans.Here Greene presents his dual-process theory of moral judgment.Roughly, the brain has two types of settings, one automatic and one manual.The former is efficient but inflexible, while the latter is inefficient but flexible.Greene claims, "the moral brain's automatic settings are the moral emotions… the gut-level instincts that enable cooperation within personal relationships and small groups.Manual mode, in contrast, is a general capacity for practical reasoning" (15).The automatic settings, or moral emotions, are what evolution has provided us to solve "Me versus Us" problems.But these same settings create "Us versus Them" problems.Parts of Tribes might be well described as empirically informed philosophy.Greene draws on a wide array of scientific literature to inform theories of mind and moral