Moral Tribes

by Joshua Greene

I asked for this book for Christmas and was surprised when I actually got it. So of course it sat on my bookshelf for four months before I got around to actually reading. It was totally worth the wait.

This book is a mix of psychology and philosophy, which is weird because I normally think of those two things as being incompatible. Having majored in psychology and taken one or two courses in philosophy (all of which I enjoyed, by the way) it seemed to me that psychology was using science to find the answers that philosophy was looking for. I had a friend who started as a philosophy major, but after one psych class, felt disillusioned when it came to philosophy and so she converted to a psych major.

Apparently I was wrong about their inability to mix, as this book clearly shows. Greene, a social scientist, has also studied philosophy extensively. The book is really a pro-utilitarian book, explaining all the reasons why utilitarianism is the best solution available to all of our current problems. He is careful to make the distinction of "best solution available". He does not pretend that it is a cure-all, merely that it is the best tool currently at our disposal.

I tend to agree with him. I was only vaguely familiar with the notion of utilitarianism before reading this book. I had never heard the list of arguments against it (I just knew that there are people who oppose it), but the basic principle made sense to me: the greatest good for the greatest number of people. How can that not be a good thing?

It turns out that there are a number of hypothetical scenarios in which that's not such a good thing, but hypothetical is the key word there. Most of the arguments against utilitarianism involve situations that simply don't happen in real life, or don't happen in the way the scenario is set up. I won't get into all of the arguments, but suffice to say I'm sold on the pro-utilitarianism front.

Although Greene acknowledges the human tendency towards a self-serving bias (something I think most of us are aware of), I think he does a relatively good job of remaining objective in his arguments. On the other hand, his "deeply pragmatic" reasoning for supporting a number of political issues that I also happen to support aroused my suspicions. It seemed too good to be true. Although I like to think I know what's best, I have to admit that I'm not always right. I still have a hard time (sometimes) saying that my way is objectively better and that's exactly what Greene did. Some of his conclusions made me feel that I am right at least most of the time which, like I said, makes me suspicious.

Nevertheless, this book did exactly what I wanted it to when I added it to my to-read list: it opened up my mind. It helped me to better understand myself, as well as those with different viewpoints from my own. Thanks to this book, I now feel better equipped to have conversations with those sitting on the other side of the fence.