{"id":3837,"date":"2014-01-24T15:30:14","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T20:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3837"},"modified":"2014-01-24T15:30:14","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T20:30:14","slug":"joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-the-minting-of-a-new-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2014\/01\/24\/worldview\/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-the-minting-of-a-new-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes”: The Minting of a New Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua Greene<\/a> is a professor of psychology at Harvard.\u00a0 In reality,\u00a0he’s\u00a0not proposing\u00a0an entirely\u00a0new morality, but an updated version of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism<\/a>.\u00a0 Greene refers to it as “Deep Pragmatism.”\u00a0He describes his goal in writing Moral Tribes <\/em><\/a>as follows:<\/p>\n

This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up.\u00a0 It’s about understanding what morality is, how it got here, and how it’s implemented in our brains.\u00a0 It’s about understanding the deep structure of moral problems as well as the differences between the problems that our brains were designed to solve and the distinctively modern problems we face today.\u00a0 Finally, it’s about taking this new understanding of morality and turning it into a universal moral philosophy that members of all human tribes can share.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I won’t go into too much detail about Greene’s version of utilitarianism, or his rationale for proposing it.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that Greene is familiar with Darwin.\u00a0 He knows that our moral emotions exist because they promoted our survival and procreation.\u00a0 In other words, they evolved, as he puts it, as a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons<\/a>, familiar to students of philosophy.\u00a0 However, while they solved that problem by promoting cooperation within groups, they did nothing to solve the problem of hostility between groups.\u00a0 In Greene’s words,<\/p>\n

Our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).\u00a0 How do we know this?\u00a0 Why couldn’t morality have evolved to promote cooperation in a more general way?\u00a0 Because universal cooperation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolution by natural selection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Greene knows about ingroups and outgroups.\u00a0\u00a0 He refers to this lack of universal cooperation as the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality.”\u00a0 As he puts it,<\/p>\n

Morality did not evolve to promote universal cooperation.\u00a0 On the contrary, it evolved as a device for successful intergroup competition.\u00a0 In other words, morality evolved to avert the Tragedy of the Commons, but it did not evolve to avert the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In proposing a solution to this problem, Greene introduces us to a metaphor that appears repeatedly throughout the rest of the book.\u00a0 He compares the human moral machinery to a camera that has both an automatic, point and shoot mode and a manual mode.\u00a0 It’s basically just a revamped version of the old reason versus untamed emotion dichotomy that has busied philosophers since Plato’s allegory of the chariot<\/a>.\u00a0 In general, the automatic mode is fine for dealing with problems within groups.\u00a0 However, as Greene puts it,<\/p>\n

…the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is a tragedy of moral inflexibility<\/em>.\u00a0 There is strife on the new pastures not because herders are hopelessly selfish, immoral, or amoral, but because they cannot step outside their respective moral perspectives.\u00a0 How should they think?\u00a0 The answer is now obvious:\u00a0 They should shift into manual mode.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, we need to stop and think.\u00a0 However, as he points out, “reasoning has no end of its own.”\u00a0\u00a0I other words, he explicitly agrees with\u00a0Hume, who wrote that reason is a “slave of the passions,” noting that “reason cannot produce good decisions without some kind of emotional input, however indirect.”\u00a0 And what is that emotional input to be?\u00a0 Basically, the desire for “happiness,” that sine qua non<\/em> of utilitarians everywhere, combined with impartiality<\/em>, which Greene claims is the “essence of morality.”\u00a0 Now, of these two, impartiality is the only one that really has anything to do with human moral emotions per se<\/em>.\u00a0 Assuming for the sake of argument that happiness, and particularly the esoteric version\u00a0in which\u00a0utilitarians take such delight, is something we all want, it can hardly be said that people who are unhappy are also evil, and vice versa<\/em>.\u00a0 Focusing on impartiality, Greene writes,<\/p>\n

First, the human manual mode is, by nature, a cost-benefit reasoning system that aims for optimal consequences.\u00a0 Second, the human manual mode is susceptible to the ideal of impartiality.\u00a0 And, I submit, this susceptibility is not tribe-specific.\u00a0 Members of any tribe can get the idea behind the Golden Rule.\u00a0 Put these two things together and we get manual modes that aspire, however imperfectly, to produce consequences that are optimal from an impartial perspective, giving equal weight to all people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here I can but wonder what species Greene is talking about.\u00a0 It certainly isn’t ours.\u00a0 I could cite dozens of passages in his own book that demonstrate that he himself has anything but an “impartial perspective.”\u00a0 In any case, the result of brewing together happiness and impartiality to create what Greene refers to as a new “metamorality” is predictable.\u00a0 It stands human morality completely on its head.\u00a0 Divorced completely from the reasons it evolved to begin with, this new\u00a0utilitarian morality, which Greene likes to refer to as “Deep Pragmatism,” insists that we reject the “inflexible, automatic mode, moral gizmos” that belong to the normal human complement of moral emotions whenever they don’t promote “happiness.”\u00a0 We are not referring to our own happiness here.\u00a0 Rather, we are to become servants of the happiness of all mankind.\u00a0 As Greene puts it,<\/p>\n

Utilitarianism is a very egalitarian philosophy, asking the haves to do a lot for the have-nots.\u00a0 Were you to wake up tomorrow as a born-again utilitarian, the biggest change in your life would be your newfound devotion to helping unfortunate others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can excuse Mill for promoting such a philosophy.\u00a0 He wrote before his\u00a0philosophy could be informed by work of Darwin.\u00a0 As a result, even though he was aware of contemporary theories claiming an innate basis to moral behavior, he rejected them.\u00a0 In other words, he was a Blank Slater, though certainly not in the same sense as the ideologically motivated Blank Slaters who came after him, or the religiously motivated Blank Slaters, like Locke, who came before him.\u00a0 As a result, he believed that the human mind could adopt virtually any morality, and concluded that the best one would be that which was also most useful.\u00a0 Clearly, he realized that, if morality were innate, it would have profound implications for his theories.\u00a0 As I have written elsewhere<\/a>, I think it highly probable that, if he had lived in our times, he would have put two and two together and rejected utilitarianism.<\/p>\n

Not so Greene.\u00a0\u00a0 As he puts it,<\/p>\n

We can, for example, donate money to faraway strangers without expecting anything in return.\u00a0 From a biological point of view, this is just a backfiring glitch, much like the invention of birth control.\u00a0 But from our point of view as moral beings who can kick away the evolutionary ladder, it may be exactly what we want.\u00a0 Morality is more than what it evolved to be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kick away the evolutionary ladder?\u00a0 Turn morality on its head?\u00a0 Such notions are delusional unless you believe in some kind of objective “moral truth.”\u00a0 Greene claims that he’s “agnostic” when it comes to the idea of moral truth, and it doesn’t really matter as far as utilitarianism is concerned, but that’s nonsense.\u00a0 There has to be some reason for rejecting normal human “automatic mode” moral emotions in favor of some “meta-morality” that serves purposes that are diametrically opposed to the reasons that moral emotions evolved to begin with, and I can think of no other reason than an irrational faith in some kind of objective moral truth.\u00a0 And in spite of his disclaimers, one can cite dozens of passages in his book that demonstrate that he does embrace what Mill referred to as “transcendental morality.”\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n

(referring to someone in a fine Italian suit that will be ruined if he wades into a pond to save a drowning child) Is it morally acceptable to let this child drown in order to save your suit?\u00a0 Clearly not, we say.\u00a0 That would be morally monstrous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Utilitarianism says that we should do whatever really works best, in the long run, and not just for the moment.\u00a0 (Implies that there is a universal standard of what is “best.”)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Happiness is the ur<\/em>-value, the Higgs boson of normativity, the value that gives other values their value.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We’ll dispense with the not especially moral goal of spreading genes and focus instead on the more proximate goal of cooperation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, dangling before Greene’s imagination is a Morality that has nothing to do with the reasons that led to the evolution of moral behavior to begin with.\u00a0 I have different goals.\u00a0 I don’t hide them behind a smokescreen of “meta-morality.”\u00a0 They are, first,\u00a0to promote the survival of my own genes, second, to promote the survival of my species, and third, to promote the survival of terrestrial life.\u00a0 I do not consider my conscious mind anything but a transitory, evolved aspect of my phenotype, but to that mind there is something sublime and majestic in being the link in a chain of life that has existed for billions of years.\u00a0 The idea that I will be the last link in that chain is repugnant to me.\u00a0 Serving as a “happiness pump” for a huge colony of happy ants that has no perceptible reason for existing except to “flourish” and be “happy” is completely repugnant to me.<\/p>\n

Greene, of course, is of a different opinion.\u00a0 I agree that it may be possible to sort out such differences in “manual mode,” but one that is based as much as possible on reason and that takes as little account of morality as possible.\u00a0 As far as I’m concerned, nothing could be more selfish than attempting to tart up my own whims as a “meta-morality.”\u00a0 The result of such attempts in the past should serve as a sufficient deterrent from trying it again, even with a philosophy as transparently impractical to implement as utilitarianism.\u00a0 Greene is well aware of these potential drawbacks.\u00a0 He writes,<\/p>\n

History offers no shortage of grand utopian visions gone bad, including the rise and (nearly complete) fall of communism during the twentieth century.\u00a0 Communists such as Stalin and Mao justified thousands of murders, millions more deaths from starvation, and repressive totalitarian governments in the name of the “greater good.”\u00a0 Shouldn’t we be very wary of people with big plans who say that it’s all for the greater good?\u00a0 Yes, we should.\u00a0 Especially when those big plans call for big sacrifices.\u00a0 And especially, especially when the people making the sacrifices (or being sacrificed!) are not the ones making the big plans.\u00a0 But this wariness is perfectly pragmatic, utilitarian wariness.\u00a0 What we’re talking about here is avoiding bad consequences.\u00a0 Aiming for the greater good does not mean blindly following any charismatic leader who says that it’s all for the greater good.\u00a0 That’s a recipe for disaster.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Greene thinks that the whole Communist debacle, with its gestation period of well over a century, during which time its development was carried forward by a host of convinced theorists, many of whom were neither charismatic themselves nor particularly attracted to charismatic leaders, could have easily been avoided if its adepts had just been “pragmatic,” and had been more circumspect in their choice of leaders?\u00a0 Sorry, but I think a better way to avoid such catastrophes in the future would be to stop cobbling together new “meta-moralities” altogether.<\/p>\n

We cannot dispense with morality, at least at the level of individual interactions.\u00a0 We’re not smart enough to do without it.\u00a0 That said, we can at least attempt to understand its evolutionary roots and the reasons for its existence, and, in the realization that the traits we associate with moral behavior evolved at times utterly unlike the present, do our best to keep our moral emotions from blowing up in our faces.\u00a0 Greene’s utilitarianism will never be a miraculous solution to the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality.”\u00a0 There will always be ingroups and outgroups, and they will always be hostile to each other, manual mode or no manual mode.\u00a0 What could possibly be more manifest than the furious hostility of Greene’s own liberal tribe to their conservation outgroup?\u00a0 If we are to survive, we must learn to manage this hostility, and creating yet another new moral system seems to me an extremely unpromising approach to the problem.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joshua Greene is a professor of psychology at Harvard.\u00a0 In reality,\u00a0he’s\u00a0not proposing\u00a0an entirely\u00a0new morality, but an updated version of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism.\u00a0 Greene refers to it as “Deep Pragmatism.”\u00a0He describes his goal in writing Moral Tribes as follows: This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up.\u00a0 It’s about understanding what … Continue reading “Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes”: The Minting of a New Morality”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[181,110,48,6,28,135,5,94,234,1],"tags":[120,240],"class_list":["post-3837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blank-slate","category-ethics","category-evolution","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-ingroups-and-outgroups","category-morality","category-reason","category-the-purpose-of-life","category-worldview","tag-morality-2","tag-utilitarianism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-ZT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3837"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3839,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3837\/revisions\/3839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}