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Since Greene, like other neo-evolutionists, can’t prove his
case by observation, he draws on other resources, from
neuroscientific data about the parts of our brain that are
engaged when we consider moral dilemmas or have an
instant revulsion against a scenario, to designed experiments eliciting reactions that the participants then review
and explain. Add to this his extensive knowledge of ethical
theories from Aristotle to John Rawls, and you have a serious
explorer of our ethical geography.
To simplify, Greene’s thesis is that while “In everyday life
we’re much better off listening to our moral instincts,”
or, as he puts it, operating in a sort of auto-focus mode,
when it comes to subjects where different groups seem
to have incompatible moral instincts, we need to shift
into manual mode, using reason to assess the validity of
our intuitions. (Greene acknowledges his debt to Daniel
Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.) He notes that we are
skilled at rationalizing our preferred morality by such devices
as “biased fairness”–it’s unfair for some people to free ride
on the hard work of others, says the conservative, but it’s
unfair that a wealthy person should pay a lower tax rate
on capital gains and other investments than a worker pays
on wages, says the liberal. He argues that the appeal to
rights “function as an intellectual free pass, a trump card
that renders evidence irrelevant,” because “whatever you and
your fellow tribes-people feel, you can always posit the existence of a right that corresponds to your feelings.” Greene
borrows the psychological term “cognitively impenetrable”
to describe the imperviousness of these rights assertions
to rational analysis.
“
Greene has
drawn a
revealing
picture of
the moral
quandaries we, )