Philosopher Thomas Nagel reviews Joshua Greene’s new book Moral Tribes, in which he advocates adopting a single “metamorality” based not on divergent philosophies and moral codes but a common ethics discovered through psychology and neurology:
Greene wants to persuade us that moral psychology is more fundamental than moral philosophy. Most moral philosophies, he maintains, are misguided attempts to interpret our moral intuitions in particular cases as apprehensions of the truth about how we ought to live and what we ought to do, with the aim of discovering the underlying principles that determine that truth. In fact, Greene believes, all our intuitions are just manifestations of the operation of our dual-process brains, functioning either instinctively or more reflectively. He endorses one moral position, utilitarianism, not as the truth (he professes to be agnostic on whether there is such a thing as moral truth) but rather as a method of evaluation that we can all understand, and that holds out hope of providing a common currency of value less divisive than the morality of individual rights and communal obligations. “None of us is truly impartial, but everyone feels the pull of impartiality as a moral ideal.”
While we cannot get rid of our automatic settings, Greene says we should try to transcend them—and if we do, we cannot expect the universal principles that we adopt to “feel right.” Utilitarianism has counterintuitive consequences, but we arrive at it by recognizing that happiness matters to everyone, and that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, even though subjectively we are each especially important to ourselves. This is an example of what he calls “kicking away the ladder,” or forming moral values that are opposed to the evolutionary forces that originally gave rise to morality. Yet Greene cannot seem to make up his mind as to whether utilitarianism trumps individual rights in some more objective sense.
Last month, Robert Wright sparred with Greene in this Bloggingheads clip, elaborating on his suggestion that a problem with Greene’s argument is “overestimating the role played by divergent values.” Bob unpacked one of Greene’s examples:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its root a conflict between two peoples who think they’re entitled to the same piece of land.
When they argue about this, they don’t generally posit different ethical principles of land ownership. They posit different versions of history—different views on how many Arabs were living in Palestine before 1948, on who started the fighting that resulted in many Arabs leaving the area, on which side did which horrible things to the other side first, and so on. It’s not clear why these arguments over facts would change if both groups were godless utilitarians.
In fact, Greene’s own book suggests they wouldn’t. Notwithstanding its central argument, it includes lots of evidence that often the source of human conflict isn’t different moral systems but rather a kind of naturally unbalanced perspective. He cites a study in which Israelis and Arabs watched the same media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre and both groups concluded that the coverage was biased against their side. Any suspicion that this discrepancy was grounded in distinctive Jewish or Arab or Muslim values is deflated by another finding he cites, from the classic 1954 study in which Princeton and Dartmouth students, after watching a particularly rough Princeton-Dartmouth football game, reached sharply different conclusions about which side had played dirtier.
Was the problem here a yawning gap between the value systems prevailing at Princeton and Dartmouth in the 1950s? Maybe a mint-julep-versus-gin-and-tonic thing? No, the problem was that both groups consisted of human beings. As such, they suffered from a deep bias—a tendency to overestimate their team’s virtue, magnify their grievances, and do the reverse with their rivals. This bias seems to have been built into our species by natural selection—at least, that’s the consensus among evolutionary psychologists.
(Photo from Zach Klein)
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