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A review by drset
Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua D. Greene
3.0
The book main tenets are:
Human society organizes itself in different tribes.
Our brains are wired for tribalism. We intuitively divide the world into Us and Them and favor Us over Them. People readily favor in-group members even when groups are defined arbitrarily and temporary. A neurotransmitter called oxytocin is largely responsible for the behavior.
Tribes fight each other not because they are fundamentally selfish and immoral but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be. Each tribe has its own version of moral common sense. The author calls conflict the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality”.
Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.
The essence of morality is altruism, unselfishness, a willingness to pay a personal cost to benefit others.
Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only within groups. Our moral brain did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).
Universal cooperation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolutions by natural selection.
Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage.
Morality is a biological adaptation to promote cooperation within groups for the sake of competition between groups, it evolved to put Us ahead of Me and Us ahead of Them. Cooperative individuals are better able to outcompete others. The ultimate function of morality, like all other biological adaptations is to spread genetic material.
For each cooperative strategy, our moral brain has a corresponding set of emotional dispositions that execute the strategy:
• Concern for others
• Direct reciprocity
• Commitments to threats and promises
• Reputation
• Assortment (group members can reliably identify each other)
• Indirect reciprocity (punishing non cooperators despite having nothing to gain)
Partisan support completely obliterated al effects of policy content. Liberals like extreme conservative policies in liberal clotting better than they like extreme liberal policies in conservative clotting.
One’s views on any topic, for example climate change or abortion, have more to do with one’s cultural outlook, one’s tribal allegiances, that with one’s scientific literacy. People who are more scientifically literate will simply be more adept at defending their tribes’ position whatever it happens to be.
The human brain is like a dual mode camera with both automatic settings (fast) optimized for typical situations and a manual mode (slow). The automatic settings are highly efficient, but not very flexible, and the reverse is true of the manual mode.
Emotions are devices for achieving behavioral efficiency. They produce behavior that is generally adaptative, and without the need for conscious thought about what to do.
To avoid the tragedy of the commonsense morality we have to find a meta-morality, a higher-level moral system that adjudicates among competing tribal moralities based on the “manual mode”. The author clams that the Utilitarian philosophy of maximizing collective happiness is the best solution.
In the end, there may be no argument that can stop tribal loyalist from heeding their tribal calls. At most, we can urge moderation, reminding tribal loyalist that they are not acting on “common sense”, but rather imposing their tribe’s account of moral truth onto others who do not hear what they hear or see what they see.
There’s no objective way of resolving the conflict of competing moral values, so we must seek our common currency by identifying our shared values.
Moral abstractions such as “family” can provide an illusion of shared values and the same goes for values such as “freedom”, equality, “life”, “justice”, “fairness”, “human rights” and so on but this illusion is conterproductive and will do more harm than good. The author claims that the values behind utilitarianism are our true common ground.
Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness. Thus, we should expect our moral intuitions to be on the whole, more selfish and more tribalistic than utilitarianism prescribes.
Human society organizes itself in different tribes.
Our brains are wired for tribalism. We intuitively divide the world into Us and Them and favor Us over Them. People readily favor in-group members even when groups are defined arbitrarily and temporary. A neurotransmitter called oxytocin is largely responsible for the behavior.
Tribes fight each other not because they are fundamentally selfish and immoral but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be. Each tribe has its own version of moral common sense. The author calls conflict the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality”.
Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.
The essence of morality is altruism, unselfishness, a willingness to pay a personal cost to benefit others.
Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only within groups. Our moral brain did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).
Universal cooperation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolutions by natural selection.
Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage.
Morality is a biological adaptation to promote cooperation within groups for the sake of competition between groups, it evolved to put Us ahead of Me and Us ahead of Them. Cooperative individuals are better able to outcompete others. The ultimate function of morality, like all other biological adaptations is to spread genetic material.
For each cooperative strategy, our moral brain has a corresponding set of emotional dispositions that execute the strategy:
• Concern for others
• Direct reciprocity
• Commitments to threats and promises
• Reputation
• Assortment (group members can reliably identify each other)
• Indirect reciprocity (punishing non cooperators despite having nothing to gain)
Partisan support completely obliterated al effects of policy content. Liberals like extreme conservative policies in liberal clotting better than they like extreme liberal policies in conservative clotting.
One’s views on any topic, for example climate change or abortion, have more to do with one’s cultural outlook, one’s tribal allegiances, that with one’s scientific literacy. People who are more scientifically literate will simply be more adept at defending their tribes’ position whatever it happens to be.
The human brain is like a dual mode camera with both automatic settings (fast) optimized for typical situations and a manual mode (slow). The automatic settings are highly efficient, but not very flexible, and the reverse is true of the manual mode.
Emotions are devices for achieving behavioral efficiency. They produce behavior that is generally adaptative, and without the need for conscious thought about what to do.
To avoid the tragedy of the commonsense morality we have to find a meta-morality, a higher-level moral system that adjudicates among competing tribal moralities based on the “manual mode”. The author clams that the Utilitarian philosophy of maximizing collective happiness is the best solution.
In the end, there may be no argument that can stop tribal loyalist from heeding their tribal calls. At most, we can urge moderation, reminding tribal loyalist that they are not acting on “common sense”, but rather imposing their tribe’s account of moral truth onto others who do not hear what they hear or see what they see.
There’s no objective way of resolving the conflict of competing moral values, so we must seek our common currency by identifying our shared values.
Moral abstractions such as “family” can provide an illusion of shared values and the same goes for values such as “freedom”, equality, “life”, “justice”, “fairness”, “human rights” and so on but this illusion is conterproductive and will do more harm than good. The author claims that the values behind utilitarianism are our true common ground.
Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness. Thus, we should expect our moral intuitions to be on the whole, more selfish and more tribalistic than utilitarianism prescribes.