The good thing about holidays is getting time to read books. I' ll look
at all the museos, oratorios, cappellas and duomos in Italy provided I
can go back to my book when day is done. On this trip one book I read
was Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene, a young professor of psychology at
Harvard.
One of the hottest areas of psychology these days is moral
psychology - the science of moral cognition - which seeks to explain
why we have moral sentiments and what use they are to us. It' s pretty
coldly scientific and evolutionary, which may be disconcerting to
readers of a religious disposition.
According to Greene and his
confreres - another leading thinker in the area is Jonathan Haight,
author of The Righteous Mind, which I' ve written about before - humans
are fairly selfish individuals, but we are also highly social animals who
like to be part of groups.
Groups, however, require co-operative
behaviour, so we evolved moral attitudes to enable us to get along
together in groups.
Biologists (and economists) have long stressed the
importance of competition between us - survival of the fittest and all
that - but it s not hard to see that humans' domination of the planet
arises from our unmatched ability to co-operate with each other to
overcome problems.
So humans are about competition and
co-operation. Economists have schooled us to think of markets as all
about competition - between sellers, between buyers and between buyers
and sellers - but psychologists see markets as a prime example of human
co-operation.
Co-operation through markets allows us to use
specialisation - I produce what I' m good at, you do the same and we use
the medium of money to exchange the things we ve produced - to increase
our combined efficiency in production, leaving us all better off.
Studies
have shown that people' s performance in well-known psychology games
giving them a choice between selfish or altruistic responses can differ
markedly between cultures. Turns out that people from cultures with more
developed market systems tend to be less selfish and more co-operative.
So
to these scientists, morality is a set of psychological adaptations
that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of
co-operation within groups.
But why do we want to co-operate within groups? So our group can compete more effectively against other groups.
" Our
moral machinery evolved to strike a biologically advantageous balance
between selfishness (Me) and within-group co-operation (Us), without
concern for people who are more likely to be competitors than allies
(Them), " Greene says. This moral machinery includes our capacities
for empathy, vengefulness, honour, guilt, embarrassment and righteous
indignation, he adds.
The fact is that each of us belongs to a
whole host of groups: our family, neighbourhood, workplace, occupation,
nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sporting interest,
political party and more.
The groups we belong to are the tribes
we belong to. We feel a great loyalty to our groups, and greatly favour
their interests over those of rival groups. This group selfishness and
tendency to see the world as Us versus Them is tribalism.
So, much
of the conflict we see around us - both within our country and, as
we' ve become more conscious of in recent days, between countries and the
groups within them - arises from tribalism.
Much of the conflict
between tribes is simple self-interest - I favour my interests ahead of
yours, and see them much more clearly than I see yours - but there are
also genuine differences in values and disagreements about the proper
terms of co-operation. One major source of disagreement in political
life is between individual and collective responsibility.
Some
disagreement arises from tribes' differing allegiances to what Greene
calls " proper nouns" - gods, leaders, holy scriptures and holy places.
Obviously,
tribally based morality gets us only so far. What Greene seeks is a
"meta-morality" , which can help reduce conflict between tribes rather
than just within them. To this end he reaches back to an old idea now
out of favour with philosophers: utilitarianism.
(This is of
relevance to economists because, though they 've spent the past 80 years
trying to play it down, utilitarianism forms part of the bedrock on
which the conventional economic model is built.)
According to
Greene, utilitarianism answers two basic questions: what really matters
and who really matters. What matters most is the quality of our
experience. Economists call this " utility" and the rest of us call it
"happiness" .
Who matters most is all of us, equally - otherwise known
as the Golden Rule.
Thus Greene summarises utilitarianism as
" happiness is what matters and everyone' s happiness counts the same.
This doesn 't mean that everyone gets to be equally happy, but it does
means than no one' s happiness is inherently more valuable than anyone
else' s ."
He claims this meta-morality involves a moral system
that can acknowledge moral trade-offs and adjudicate among them, and can
do so in a way that makes sense to members of all tribes.
It s a
nice thought. Somehow I think it will be a while before we measure up to
that ideal. But it s always good to have a vision of what we should be
aiming for and how we can move towards it.
