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

Introduction

Cooperation between groups is often undermined by self-interest or a group’s own sense of morality

The world is changing rapidly, but humans are still biologically much the same. Evolution has given us the skills to cooperate within groups, but unfortunately, our ability to cooperate between groups still leaves much to be desired. The history of conflict is enough to tell us that.

Greene begins with a hypothetical discussion of tribes (Northerners, Southerners etc.) that have very different culture (individual vs collectivist for example) and thus different moralities.

Mutually beneficial cooperation is endangered by many things, but the clearest threat is what’s known as the tragedy of the commons, which is the conflict between self-interest and collective interest. Also, problems can arise about the boundaries about our respective collectives.

A second threat to mutually beneficial cooperation is known as the tragedy of commonsense morality. This time it’s a question of Us Versus Them. In other words, one group sets its own values against those of another. So you have 2 groups who are fighting for what each side thinks is common sense morality.

His goals are to explain how morality works in the brain and how it got to be that way, and, much more ambitiously, to turn this understanding into a universal moral philosophy that all humans can share.

• The tragedy of the commons

Cooperation becomes challenging when individual and collective interest are neither perfectly aligned or perfectly opposed. There’s always some tension between me and others, so it’s always in danger of eroding.

Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. It evolved to enable cooperation. But it evolved to just work within our small groups, not broadly, as a device for intergroup cooperation.

So what we need in the modern world is a metamorality, something that can resolve disputes between competing groups with different moralities.

• Moral machinery

If we understand how our moral machinery works, we can understand how it fails us, and intervene. Here are some principles by which our moral machinery operates:

-Family values: we value our kin, this can be extended a bit into our close in-group

-Tit for tat: our primate relatives engage in this kind of conditional cooperation, and it’s been shown to be one of the most stable cooperation strategies in computer simulations. As long as there’s the capacity for forgiveness of occasional missteps.

-Besties: we’re inclined to care about individuals with whom we have cooperative futures, typically judged based on cooperation in the past. We call this friendship.

-minimal decency: we don’t want to see others, even unrelated others, in unnecessary pain. It makes us uncomfortable, especially if we cause it.

So we’re a caring species, albeit in a limited way, and especially towards those we’re related to or friends with. We don’t usually like to harm strangers, and we’re willing to help strangers as long as it doesn’t cost us much.

In addition, threats and promises, as well as a predisposition for building and valuing loyalty are helpful cooperation tools we’ve evolved. Human societies the world over spend a huge amount of time gossiping. This likely evolved as a mechanism of enforcing cooperation.

Membership into groups often drives our cooperative behavior. Some of it is more built in than others. Like t-shirt color (of 2) was easily confused in one experiment where participants had to keep track of the behavior of several actors, but sex was much less commonly mixed up.

Religion may be a device that evolved to enable cooperation in large groups.

• Strife on the new pastures

Tribes fight for two main reasons: preferring in group members over out group members, and having different fundamental ideas of what is morally right.

• Trolleyology

The trolley problem, and variations on it, helps us ask the important question: When, and why, do the rights of an individual take precedence over the greater good?

Patients with VMPFC damage are more likely to give “utilitarian” response even in personal versions of the footbridge problem (like pushing the man onto the tracks instead of flipping the switch). They’re more likely to do this even when it’s killing their own family members. Amygdala activity also correlates positively with how likely people are to report negative feelings about the utilitarian response in the trolley problem.

When people make utilitarian decisions, they exhibit increased activity in the DLPFC (associated with top-down control).

• Efficiency, flexibility, and the dual process brain

Greene introduces the dual process theory of morality. We have an automatic, emotional mode (VMPFC and amygdala) that tends to favor rule-based actions, like shouldn’t hurt another person on purpose. Manual tends to favor utilitarian judgment. These modes can produce conflicting results.

• A Splendid idea

He thinks utilitarianism get a bad reputation as being too stark and austere, so he’s calling it deep pragmatism.

He spends a lot of time defending utilitarianism against various objections. Yes happiness is hard to quantify exactly, but we can get close enough to use it functionally, just from self report. Happiness isn’t just hedonism, includes long term fulfillment.

Utilitarianism views everyone’s happiness as exactly equal.

Who decides how to maximize happiness. Greene says just like anything else, democratically.

• In search of common currency

There are some proposed models for approaching moral truth: religious model, the mathematical model, and the scientific model. None of these will work, says Greene. Instead we’ll need to settle for a more modest meta-morality, that enables us to coexist, whether or not it’s the moral truth.

Religion won’t work because people have different religious beliefs. Math won’t work because there aren’t any self-evident moral truths, there are no moral axioms. Math will only help us be more consistent in how we apply moral principles. What about science? He means evolution. Should we just behave how our moral programming predisposes us to behave? No because we don’t live in that kind of world anymore.

• Common currency found

Surprise, it’s utilitarianism. He thinks this is the native philosophy of the manual mode anyway.

“Human empathy is fickle and limited, but our capacity for empathy may provide an emotional seed that, when watered by reasoning, flowers into the ideal of impartial morality.”

Where does our recognition that impartiality is good come from? Might be that it’s just a stable solution. Might be a cognitive leap, the collision of empathy and the recognition that no one is objectively special.

But is utilitarianism a happiness pump? Does it require that you bleed out your resources until all resources are equitably distributed?

• Alarming acts

In the trolley problem, people care if the victim is harmed through direct application of personal force vs something indirect like flipping a switch. People also care if the person is harmed as a means (used as a trolley stopper) or a side effect (collateral damage). But these aren’t consistently applied principles, and depend on the specifications of the example.

Green introduces the modular myopia hypothesis of moral judgment: our brains sound an alarm at the prospect of harming others, but it’s myopic (short sighted) in that it can’t see collateral damage well, only indirect damage. So we end up reasoning in the trolley problem in inconsistent ways if the situation is tweaked a bit, because we’re using this imperfect module.

Our brains also make a distinction between doing and allowing, but from a utilitarian perspective, they’re equivalent.

• Justice and fairness

Is utilitarianism a happiness pump? Greene says no because that type of thing would never actually work in the real world, and so wouldn’t actually lead to a better outcome practically speaking. What a cop out! Just like you can have a healthy diet without eating only maximally healthful foods.

“trying to be a perfect utilitarian is in fact, a very un-utilitarian thing to do.”

“If what utilitarianism asks you to do seems absurd, then it’s not what utilitarianism actually asks of you…it’s an inherently practical philosophy, and there’s nothing more impractical than commanding free people to do things that strike them as absurd and that run counter to their most basic motivations.”

• Deep pragmatism

Our ideas of rights and duties are the manual mode’s attempt to translate elusive feelings into more object-like things that it can understand and manipulate. When you appeal to rights, you’re not helping to resolve the issue. Instead you’re pretending that the issue has already been resolved in some abstract realm to which you and your tribespeople have special access.

• Beyond point-and-shoot morality: 6 rules for modern herders

• In the face of moral controversy, consult, but don’t trust your moral instincts

• Rights are not for making arguments, they’re for ending arguments

• Focus on the facts and make others do the same

• Beware of biased fairness (e.g the version of “fairness” that suits you best)

• Use common currency

• Give. Even though we aren’t programmed to be empathetic towards distant strangers, try to be.

Thought questions:

• I really liked the idea of "rights" as defined by being non-controversial moral principles. The idea gave me warm, fuzzy feelings about the existence of real human progress in moral theory. However, I also felt like simply advising the reader to not question non-controversial decisions is weak from an academic point-of-view. What do you think about his characterization of rights and when we should and should not discuss rights?

• It is fascinating to me that all our sensibilities about morality come from the innate values that are determined by our biology, but some innate value seem good, while others seem bad. In the book, Greene talks about how some of our moral sensibilities have "nothing to do with morality, but only with the cognitive constraints placed on our brains." Reflecting further, I thought of how the emotion of "jealousy," which is innate to varying degrees in people, might drive some moral sensibilities (e.g. that polyamory is bad). Some people instead see jealousy as an ancient or outdated feature of the brain - like Greene's idea of one of those inconvenient "human" constraints getting in the way of our morality. How is it that we can have this dual sense of the good innate values and the bad innate values and separate the two? How can we justify building a moral framework, like utilitarianism, off of some axioms of innate human values (egalitarianism, maximizing total happiness to strangers, minimizing total suffering to strangers) while ignoring other axioms of innate human values (never use pre-emptive violence, focus on actions rather than inactions, focus on physical distance when directing attention to moral decisions)?

• I'm a little worried, as apparently other critics of utilitarianism are, that the separation between good and bad innate values is mostly based on a theory of what is good for the collective of all humans vs. what is good for an individual or small group. Greene tones down his version of utilitarianism by creating a rule that moral behavior has to be workable in the real world. Thus moral ideals are different than recommended moral behavior. This seems like a very difficult stance to me! How does it help in making moral decisions?

• Joshua Greene's rules of deep pragmatism seem very reasonable to me, but also seems to miss a lot about where moral controversy starts. If everyone agreed that their moral convictions were relative, I think that his rules would work pretty well, and in fact, I think that his rules are often used by negotiators and compromisers in creating policy and law. But, what if your fundamental moral belief is that morality is not at all relative, but is absolute and comes from a higher power? My sense is that this isn't a rare example, but actually behind the most common moral disagreements between people. Many people who are pro-life do not believe that life starts at conception because "someone told them;" they believe it because the Pope of the Catholic Church, the supreme authority in interpreting the moral laws set by God, told them.

• In the movie, The Avengers, the "supervillain" Thanos gains ultimate power in the universe and uses this power to eliminate half of the life in the universe. He does this completely randomly including risking his own life. Thanos has seen extraordinary suffering and war due to conflict around resources in the universe. His belief is that obviously one generation of living, sentient beings will be very unhappy, but that afterwards intelligent beings can create more sustainable lives on their planets learning from their past mistakes. At the very least, it will prevent suffering around competition for resources for a long period of time that will far outweigh the "badness" of the painless death he inflicts on 50% of the universe. Is Thanos a utilitarian master ethicist? I was generally confused about how we, as good utilitarians, account for the amount of time we model in our utilitarian moral decision making.

• I was also confused about the treatment of non-humans. Is utilitarianism just for intra-human relations? Here's a scenario: A planet with ten billion intelligent, sentient aliens is destroyed. But before it is destroyed, the entire population of the planet escapes and sets off towards Earth. This species is very egalitarian among members of its own species - in fact they are perfectly utilitarian in their actions towards each other. However, they have no moral sense of altruism at all towards other intelligent, sentient beings. It just was never part of their biology. They invade Earth and start killing humans in order to eliminate their greatest threat and resettle the planet. Should we as good utilitarians fight back, liking leading to a war that causes immense suffering to both sides? Or should we do our best to "change the rails of the trolley" to kill 7 billion people (all humans) for the sake of saving 10 billion people (all aliens)?