Literature in Revie
by Richard Barbieri, Ph.D.
Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and
the Gap Between Us and Them
Joshua Greene
Penguin Press (2013)
I
n Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the intellectual Mr.
Ramsay spends several pages thinking about his achievements: “If thought…like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six
letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of
difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly
and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He
reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever
reached Q.” But, try as he might, Mr. Ramsay cannot reach R.
Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes shows a splendid mind pushing toward R, or even Z, but not quite getting there. Still,
the quest is a worthy one, and readers who engage with
Greene will probably add at least a few letters to their
ethical vocabulary.
Z is, as Greene puts it, “a metamorality, a higher-level moral system that adjudicates among
competing tribal moralities.” A tall order, since Greene believes our moral values derive from
cooperative tendencies dating back to early hominids, and even non-human species: “Cooperative tendencies cannot evolve (biologically) unless they confer a competitive advantage
on cooperators.” The term “tribes” is central to his case, which distinguishes between the “Me
vs. Us” instincts that, for example, cause us to share, to empathize, and to be repulsed by
cruelty, and the “Us vs. Them” instincts that extend cooperation only to an immediate circle
or a narrowly defined group. Tribal morals, in which he includes a wide range of taboos, religious mandates, and simple preferences for a mode of living (e.g. more individualistic versus
more cooperative), lead to the intransigent, and sometimes violent, consequences we see in
debates over abortion, territorial conflict, global warming, and health care.
Page 12 Winter 2014
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