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

“In an ideal world, we’d all transform ourselves into experts and make judgments based on extensive knowledge. Given that this will never happen, our next best option is to emulate the wisdom of Socrates: We become wiser when we acknowledge our ignorance.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched—once they’ve become tribal badges of honor—are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves only if individuals who are prone to cooperation outcompete individuals who are not (or who are less so).”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“It is plausible, if not inevitable, that we are more aware of the pain we suffer at the hands of others than of the pain that others suffer by our hands.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“After Darwin, human morality became a scientific mystery. Natural selection could explain how intelligent, upright, linguistic, not so hairy, bipedal primates could evolve, but where did our morals come from? Darwin himself was absorbed by this question. Natural selection, it was thought, promotes ruthless self-interest. Individuals who grab up all the resources and destroy the competition will survive better, reproduce more often, and thus populate the world with their ruthlessly selfish offspring. How, then, could morality evolve in a world that Tennyson famously described as “red in tooth and claw”? We now have an answer. Morality evolved as a solution to the problem of cooperation, as a way of averting the Tragedy of the Commons: Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“To borrow Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor, morality can climb the ladder of evolution and then kick it away. As”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The tribal differences that erupt into public controversy typically concern sex (e.g., gay marriage, gays in the military, the sex lives of public officials) and death at the margins of life (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide, the use of embryonic stem cells in research).”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Sex and death are the gas pedals and brakes of tribal growth. (Gay sex and abortion, for example, are both alternatives to reproduction.) What’s less clear is why different tribes hold different views about sex, life, and death, and why some tribes are more willing than others to impose their views on outsiders.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“to cooperate with strangers, we need some means of distinguishing the strangers with whom we can cooperate from those who might exploit us. In”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter and hormone that plays an important role in maternal care in many mammalian species. Genes that increase the human brain’s sensitivity to oxytocin are correlated with higher levels of empathy, and spraying oxytocin into people’s noses (from where it can enter the brain) makes people more likely to initiate cooperation in a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Our”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Suppose that Art is a real hothead. If Bud rats on him, Art will be so enraged that nothing will stop him from killing Bud, even if he has to wait ten years, and even if he has to chase Bud to the ends of the earth. If Bud knows of Art’s vengeful nature, then Bud has a strong incentive not to rat on him. Thus, by being vengeful, and being known for it, Art can be his own robotic hit man, incentivizing others to cooperate with him through his high-flying, credible threats. Of course, being vengeful can be very costly. Art could lose everything if he does, in fact, devote his life to exacting vengeance on Bud. Still, if all goes well, Art will never actually need to go after Bud, because people like Bud won’t dare cross him. Thus, the emotions that fuel vengeful behaviors are, or can be, a kind of rational irrationality. They serve our interests by publicly committing us to doing things that are not in our own interest. We”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Beyond the marketplace, nearly all human relationships involve give-and-take, and all such relationships break down when one or both parties do too much taking and not enough giving. In fact, the tension between individual and collective interest arises not only between us but within us. As noted above, complex cells have been cooperating for about a billion years. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for some of the cells in an animal’s body to start pulling for themselves instead of for the team, a phenomenon known as cancer.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Thus, there are times when a deep pragmatist should feel free to speak of rights—and not just legal rights but moral rights. These times, however, are rarer than we think. If we are truly interested in persuading our opponents with reason, then we should eschew the language of rights. This is, once again, because we have no non-question-begging (and non utilitarian) way of figuring out which rights really exist and which rights take precedence over others. But when it’s not worth arguing—either because the question has been settled or because our opponents can’t be reasoned with—then it’s time to stop arguing and rally the troops. It’s time to affirm our moral commitments, not with wonky estimates of probabilities but with words that stir our souls. But please do not take this as license to ignore everything else that I’ve said about “rights.” Most moral controversies are not simple cases of one tribe’s dominating another. In nearly all moral controversies, there are truly moral considerations on both sides.* There is something to be said for individualist systems that encourage people to take care of themselves. And there is something to be said for collective systems in which everyone gets the help they need. There is something to be said for not killing any human fetuses, and there is something to be said for letting people make their own tough bioethical choices. Here the solution is not for us to bludgeon one another with heartfelt assertions about rights, however tempting this may be. The solution is, once again, to put our automatic settings aside and shift into manual mode, seeking bargains brokered with the common currency.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Why couldn’t morality have evolved to promote cooperation in a more general way? Because universal cooperation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolution by natural selection. I”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Evolution is an inherently competitive process: The faster lion catches more prey than other lions, produces more offspring than other lions, and thus raises the proportion of fast lions in the next generation. This couldn’t happen if there were no competition for resources. If lion food existed in unlimited supply, the faster lions would have no advantage over the slower ones, and the next generation of lions would be, on average, no faster than the last generation. No competition, no evolution by natural selection.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The tribes of the new pastures are engaged in bitter, often bloody conflict, even though they are all, in their different ways, moral peoples. They fight not because they are fundamentally selfish but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be. These are not merely scholarly disagreements, although their scholars have those, too. Rather, each tribe’s philosophy is woven into its daily life. Each tribe has its own version of moral common sense. The tribes of the new pastures fight not because they are immoral but because they view life on the new pastures from very different moral perspectives. I call this the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality. The”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In the modern tragedy, the very same moral thinking that enables cooperation within groups undermines cooperation between groups. Within”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Morality is nature’s solution to the problem of cooperation within groups, enabling individuals with competing interests to live together and prosper. What”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Chiefs and kings and emperors have used their increasingly large carrots and sticks to enforce productive cooperation (and skim the proceeds off the top). According to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, this is a good thing. He praised the king for being a peace-keeping Leviathan, the earthly god who lifts us out of our natural state, in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Leviathans”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“What we in the modern world need, then, is something like morality but one level up. We”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Among believers, a supernatural authority is an ideal guarantor of cooperation, because supernatural beings can be omniscient and omnipotent, guaranteeing maximal rewards for cooperativeness and maximal punishments for uncooperativeness. As David Sloan Wilson has argued, religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The idea that respect for God and being a good cooperator are related is not new, of course. Believers have long been, and continue to be, wary of people who are not “God-fearing.” From”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Cooperation evolves only if individuals who are prone to cooperation outcompete individuals who are not (or who are less so). Thus, if morality is a set of adaptations for cooperation, we today are moral beings only because our morally minded ancestors outcompeted their less morally minded neighbors. And thus, insofar as morality is a biological adaptation, it evolved not only as a device for putting Us ahead of Me, but as a device for putting Us ahead of Them. (And”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“As moral beings, we may have values that are opposed to the forces that gave rise to morality. To”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Morality is more than what it evolved to be.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The people who hate Obamacare don’t hate it because they believe that it’s funded by forced purchases rather than forced taxes; what they hate is the forcing. Obamacare might not be socialism, but it’s certainly more collectivist than some people care for, restricting individual freedom in the name of the greater good. •”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“in humans gossip is a critical mechanism for social control—that is, for enforcing cooperation. Indeed,”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“As Paul prepared his hesitant answer, a chorus of voices from the crowd shouted, “Yeah! Let him die!” These are the Northern herders. Paul couldn’t quite bring himself to agree—or disagree. He said that neighbors, friends, and churches should take care of such a man, implying, but not explicitly stating, that the government should let him die if no one else is willing or able to pay. As you might expect the more Southerly herders disagree. (Note:”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“We come equipped with automated behavioral programs that motivate and stabilize cooperation within personal relationships and groups. These include capacities for empathy, vengefulness, honor, guilt, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation. These social impulses serve as counterweights to our selfish impulses.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

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