Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them | Joshua Green | Talks at Google
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- Опубликовано: 2 ноя 2024
- Joshua Greene stops by the Googleplex for a conversation with Kent Walker. You can find Joshua's book on Google Play: goo.gl/c2u3hW .
Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world's tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground.
A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings ("portrait," "landscape") as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions-efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain's manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight-sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words-often with life-and-death stakes.
An award-winning teacher and scientist, Greene directs Harvard University's Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive techniques to understand how people really make moral decisions. Combining insights from the lab with lessons from decades of social science and centuries of philosophy, the great question of Moral Tribes is this: How can we get along with Them when what they want feels so wrong to Us?
Ultimately, Greene offers a set of maxims for navigating the modern moral terrain, a practical road map for solving problems and living better lives. Moral Tribes shows us when to trust our instincts, when to reason, and how the right kind of reasoning can move us forward.
A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.
The book was perhaps the best I've read all year. I highly recommend it. Greene understands how to synthesize ideas, and he understands how to present them, too.
one of the best, most important, most needed books of the decade. Will it find its readers? will it find a path to the heart and mind of those who need it most? Not sure
I agree - human behaviour needs to be part of human education
I’ve heard this context of “tribalism” a lot in 2020.
A "Meta-Morality" expedites and harmonizes, as much as it can, the differences between the Tribal Moralities.
You can give privately until it really hurts but only publicly support a less demanding policy (in order to light the fire). What you give and what you promote are two different choices. The strict utilitarian just needs to bite the bullet on demandingness.
So on the one hand Greene presents support for "point & shoot" Kantian ethics for "tribal" life (the normative range of innate pro-social behavior supposed by Harris's 'Moral Landscape') & Utilitarianism as a global solution as undertaken by large groups or nations - which seems to equate to continuing 20th C style international realpolitik with the hope that greater economic integration, security agreements, increased global living standards, information sharing will continue to correlate to increasing prioritized global investment that reduces human suffering
Wonder what Prof. Greene thinks about Benatar's Antinatal Asymmetry?
What happens when someone has no desire to progress?
Then they don't progress
25:26 This is very #Smithian
whats the point on that 10$ sharing and stuff?
to understand how people within across nations cooperates
Is this the news
It's not a tough question! Make the guy pay for his own care. Make him pay the doctors and nurses who served him for 6 months. They would know the situation when they help him.
I can't believe that he begins with the preposition that moral = altruistic, thus implying that acting in ones own self interest is immoral. How did he arrive at this seemingly arbitrary conclusion?
He also wants to say we can measure the moral worth of an action by looking at the consequences. Again this is clearly dubious as we can rarely anticipate the consequences. Indeed most of the worlds worst atrocities were perpetrated by people with the best intentions.
I would not push the man because in a liberal society we don't get to make moral decisions on behalf of others. Because we can not know what is "moral" or what would yield the "best" result.
I agree, he has way too much of an ideological approach than merely a scientific one, which is problematic.
Unfortunatly only certain types of people with certain types of opinions get promoted to give talks like this..
I think you have to see the difference between descriptive and normative parts of the presentation! Greene argues that the crucial ingredient that enables good cooperation is altruism. The largest treat to successful group cooperation (and thus survival) is "free-riders", people who take more than they give. According to Greene, morality is simply nature's way of dealing with the "free-rider" problem, and that is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. Selfishness might be bad for cooperation, but since it is a descriptive argument, it does not follow that selfishness is immoral.
Owen Doyle He arrives at this conclusion because there's no rational justification for putting one's own interests above those of other people's. Each person's preferences are just as real and valid to them as yours are to you, so any objective conception of morality will recognise this. (Ironically, Rand's "objectivism" is actually the most subjective view one can take of morality.) Thus, if we are to try to satisfy our own preferences, increase our own happiness and reduce our own suffering, we must do the same for others.
I would push the man because we each have to make moral decisions based our our circumstances. We can know what is moral, as explained above, and the fact that uncertainty often exists as to what yields the best result is irrelevant: we can calculate the expected value, or expected utility, of taking an action.
The world's worst atrocities were often perpetrated by people who thought they had good intentions, which is precisely why consequentialism, and, specifically, utilitarianism does not take intentions into account. If those who had committed these atrocities had thought about whether they are maximising happiness impartially, they would have answered no, and so they wouldn't have committed those atrocities. Or, if they did, it's precisely because they didn't take a utilitarian viewpoint, not because they did.
geniusofmozart In his opinion there's no rational justification. But other people do not agree. My point was there is no objective conception of morality. Math is objective but morality is not.
It's not an opinion. Nobody, insofar as I am aware, has been able to offer a rational justification for valuing one's own interests above others.
"Utilitarianism"? That's the answer? Man that's disappointing... I appreciate that he's trying to spread the concept but I thought it would get deeper than that.
This guy is so arrogant. He's saying I need to pay taxes (which are collected at gunpoint by the way) to pay for roads? Just bill me for the roads. I'll pay gladly for that. I'd even pay for my own health insurance. But I don't want to pay for NSA spying, for wars, torture, nuclear weapons, for ousting or assassinating foreign leaders, for assassinating Americans now, for Reaper drones, Hellfire missiles, for minefields, and depleted uranium rounds that are causing so many birth defects in war zones right now. There's a whole war in Africa going on right now we're not even being told about.
I think you might be reading into what he says too much. While I believe much of what you are ranting on about, one would logically conclude that the role of charity would indeed work with mutual aid societies, charities, family and friends, and not done with the violence of The State. He picked the philosophies of Ron Paul and Elizabeth Warren as mere polarizing examples to get everyone's attention to launch into the greater moral discussion.
Kic Start A "greater" moral discussion? Indeed, he also implies there are different moralities, and spoke of a greater good. Since you are logical, that should tell you something right away. He is a moral relativist. After the first 6 minutes, I only skimmed, but he actually said people can just go with their instincts and they'll probably be morally sound on a small scale. IT's like saying it's okay not to think, but he is the one who is not thinking, and it's not okay. People need to actually engage their higher brain function to be moral. Compassion is useful, but by itself, will generate mistakes. And then he said there's a different morality for higher level organizations such as the nations. Also, no. That is pure immorality, designed to appeal to a person's emotions. He'is propagating brainwashing, it seems, not discussing actual ideas.