Philosopher-turned-psychologist
Joshua Greene, who once though up the famous “trolley problem” and is now at Harvard, has a new book
out – Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and
the Gap Between Us and Them. In it he addresses a curious question: if we
are wired by evolution to have an aversion to harming others, why can’t we stop
fighting along tribal lines? Or can’t we?
In
fact, Greene thinks we can, as long as reason prevails, and the whole of
humanity opts for an emotionally dampened utilitarian outlook – similar to the
one educated Western individuals like him have adopted. And what are the odds
for this? Judging by Greene’s own experiments, in which even his WEIRD subjects
had a hard time turning off their emotional responses in more evocative
situations, not very high.
