Joshua Greene > Quotes

“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 Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“The problem of cooperation, then, is the problem of getting collective interest to triumph over individual interest, when possible. The problem of cooperation is the central problem of social existence. Why”
― Joshua Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Reason is the champion of the emotional underdog, enabling what Hume called “calm passions” to win out over “violent passions.” Reasoning frees us from the tyranny of our immediate impulses by allowing us to serve values that are not automatically activated by what’s in front of us. And yet, at the same time, reason cannot produce good decisions without some kind of emotional input, however indirect.”
― Joshua Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In this chapter, we’ve considered six psychological tendencies that exacerbate intertribal conflict. First, human tribes are tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Second, tribes have genuine disagreements about how societies should be organized, emphasizing, to different extents, the rights of individuals versus the greater good of the group. Tribal values also differ along other dimensions, such as the role of honor in prescribing responses to threats. Third, tribes have distinctive moral commitments, typically religious ones, whereby moral authority is vested in local individuals, texts, traditions, and deities that other groups don’t recognize as authoritative. Fourth, tribes, like the individuals within them, are prone to biased fairness, allowing group-level self-interest to distort their sense of justice. Fifth, tribal beliefs are easily biased. Biased beliefs arise from simple self-interest, but also from more complex social dynamics. Once a belief becomes a cultural identity badge, it can perpetuate itself, even as it undermines the tribe’s interests. Finally, the way we process information about social events can cause us to underestimate the harm we cause others, leading to the escalation of conflict.”
― Joshua Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“familial love is more than just a warm and fuzzy thing. It’s a strategic biological device, a piece of moral machinery that enables genetically related individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“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. How”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Second, if the idea of friendship as a cooperation device seems strange, that may be because of the unusually good times in which we live. In the feast-and-famine world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, having friends who were willing to have you over for dinner wasn’t just a nicety but a matter of life and death. The world of our ancestors was also a lot more violent. In our world, few friends can say that they’ve saved one another’s lives, but that might not have been true in the past.”
― Joshua Greene, 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 Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In sum, our brains are wired for tribalism. We intuitively divide the world into Us and Them, and favor Us over Them. We begin as infants, using linguistic cues, which historically have been reliable markers of group membership. In the modern world, we discriminate based on race (among other things), but race is not a deep, innate psychological category. Rather, it’s just one among many possible markers for group membership.”
― Joshua Greene, 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). That such issues are moral issues is surely not arbitrary. Sex and death are the gas pedals and brakes of tribal growth. (Gay sex and abortion, for example, are both alternatives to reproduction.)”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Biologically speaking, our brains were designed for within-group cooperation and between-group competition. Cooperation between groups is thwarted by tribalism (group-level selfishness), disagreements over the proper terms of cooperation (individualism or collectivism?), commitments to local “proper nouns” (leaders, gods, holy books), a biased sense of fairness, and a biased perception of the facts.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“it seems that embarrassment was designed to play precisely this kind of signaling role, restoring one’s social standing by signaling a genuine desire to behave differently in the future. This”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“We can be inspired by leaders we’ve never met and devoted to organizations with no fixed membership, such as nations, churches, corporations, and schools. Jonathan Haidt has argued that this capacity for devotion to leaders, organizations, and more abstract ideals might have evolved to facilitate cooperation in large groups, just as romantic love evolved to facilitate cooperative parenting. This capacity may depend on our ability to experience awe—to be moved by, and devoted to, things larger than ourselves and our familiar social circles. WATCHFUL”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Thus, at the age of six months, long before they can walk or talk, human infants are making value judgments about actions and agents, reaching out to individuals who show signs of being cooperative (caring about others) and passing over individuals who do the opposite.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“It may seem strange to conceive of friendship as principally about cooperation rather than, say, hanging out and having fun, but appearances can be misleading. First, nature’s purposes need not be revealed in our experience. Sex, for example, is primarily about making babies, but that’s not necessarily what motivates people to do the deed. Likewise, friendship may ultimately be about things that are far from our minds when we’re being friendly. Indeed, if you’re constantly thinking about the material advantages of your friendship, that’s a sign that you’re not really a friend.”
― Joshua Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“As long as people’s starting points are asymmetrical, people will be tempted, unconsciously if not consciously, to tailor their conceptions of fairness to suit their interests.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Just as visual illusions reveal the structure of visual cognition, bizarre moral dilemmas reveal the structure of moral cognition. They are moral
illusions—revealing for the manner in which they mislead us.”
― Joshua Greene, 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 Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them