This is an ambitious book. In 400 pages, Joshua Greene attempts both philosophically and scientifically to demonstrate that utilitarianism is an adequate ‘meta-morality’ for adjudicating among the conflicting moralities of diverse cultural communities.
Greene methodically builds his case in several prolonged steps. First, he demonstrates that our brains are wired for dividing people into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and that this creates biases in our moral thinking. Next he shows that the moral brain is a dual-process system that can work both at a fast, gut-level mode (which works well for intragroup cooperation but generates ingroup-preferential bias) and at a slow, analytical mode (which can overcome this bias). He argues on the basis of abundant neuroscientific research on ethical reasoning that our fast, instinctive mode is biologically adapted for intragroup, but not intergroup, cooperation. On this basis he concludes that moral intuition is an adequate guide within intracommunal ethical settings resembling those prevalent in our evolutionary past, whereas deliberative moral reasoning is needed for resolving conflicts arising between group moralities, where instinctive thinking hinders us with self-preferential bias.
Greene claims that a ‘deep’ version of utilitarianism (‘deep pragmatism’) is better suited than other conceivable moral philosophies to fill the adjudicating role when different communal moralities come into conflict. He supports this claim with the philosophical argument that ‘maximizing happiness’ is a goal that all moralities can accept and with empirical evidence that utilitarian thinking is the ‘native philosophy’ of rational human thought—more rational than the standard rights-oriented alternative (p. 194). To support the latter point, he uses evidence from brain studies to attempt to establish that utilitarian reasoning occurs when people think deliberatively, whereas Kantian rights-based reasoning is associated with the types of automatic, emotion-based judgments people make when they have little opportunity to think. Greene closes by presenting meticulous defenses and applications of his philosophy, which are bound to sharpen people’s views of utilitarianism even if only to hone their critiques of it.
Space permits me to evaluate only a few aspects of the book that are especially salient to readers of this journal. At the top of its positive ledger is the way in which Greene skillfully marshals evidence from studies in the field of empirical moral psychology to distinguish between consciously and intuitively derived moral judgments (Chapters 2 through 5 offer an excellent introduction to recent studies in this field, among the most ingenious of which are Greene’s own). Typically these studies present subjects with moral dilemmas that are cleverly designed to isolate subtle distinctions in judgment criteria. Such distinctions allow for empirical observations of differences in judgment arising from varying conditions of emotional and cognitive capacity manipulated experimentally by the researcher. As a result we are able to know what types of moral judgments correspond either to instinctive emotional responses or to deliberate logical ratiocination. Surely this must be counted as a major advance in the study of moral psychology.
My main criticism of the book is its lack of moral depth and imagination. This problem shows up in several ways. One is that Greene frames intercommunal morality as a zero-sum game. He has an important insight in pointing out that today’s globalized challenges require solutions that can be justified across diverse moral communities. The problem for Greene is that the structure of his own viewpoint does not offer the capacity for the type of intercommunal cooperation he hopes for. To be specific, he does not demonstrate a developmental or transcendental perspective that might allow him to envision an integration of moralities rather than merely a compromise among them. And so he advocates a moral whole that is less than the sum of its parts.
The moral imagination deficit also undermines Greene’s empirical support for utilitarianism, in that the link between his data and the utilitarian philosophical edifice he builds upon it is more tenuous than he supposes. The fact that people override emotional responses with utilitarian ones when given more opportunity to think does not establish that they would not override utilitarian judgments with rights-based or spiritually based judgments given enough time and support to reflect on the problem in its full depth. Moreover, the more profound objections to utilitarianism are ignored by the thought experiments Greene administers, which can only distinguish between Kantian and utilitarian choices. In this and other ways, his methods do not provide the conditions by which his philosophical conclusions might be falsified.
Greene positions himself as a neutral arbiter who stands above the conflicting moralities of competing ‘moral tribes’. In truth he often oversimplifies their moralities through the lens of his own tribal perspective. For example, he concludes that Ron Paul defines his ‘Us’ community more narrowly than liberals simply because Paul has argued that parties other than government should be responsible for covering the emergency medical costs of an uninsured person. Similarly, Greene simply takes for granted that only secular truth can be expressed universalistically, never religious truth. In these and other instances, the broad moral tent he attempts to erect is only wide enough to accommodate simplified caricatures of views which are, quite evidently, not his own. In this way Greene himself illustrates the pernicious phenomenon of self-preferential pseudo-neutrality that he calls ‘biased fairness’ (p. 83).
He thus falls short of a truly integrative witness that would allow him to appreciate the various competing moral perspectives in their full depth. This lack of altitude deprives Greene of a superordinate moral point of view comprehensive enough to fulfill his goal of a universal moral philosophy. Instead he is able to discern only an intercommunal least common denominator, a pragmatist utilitarian idiom in which human existence is likened to a game of happiness maximization and the relationships between communities are conceived as a quid pro quo exchange aimed at optimizing each side’s utility account.
The problem with such a solution is that communities would recognize it as a narrower meaning than that which is already available from their own heritage. Wisdom traditions around the world know the futility of framing life as a calculated pursuit of happiness maximization. From the inescapability of suffering they have learned that the meaning of life is not the increase of happiness, but the growth of meaning. For this reason communities will only willingly accept a shared meta-morality if it allows them to expand meaning, not if it obliges them to trade meaning for pragmatic ends. For it is not pragmatism that gives unity to human moral consciousness, but the universal desire for the expansion of meaning. Requiring meaning to be traded off—rather than providing a way for it to grow—is the mark of a non-integrative moral solution.
Although Greene aspires to a ‘meta-morality’ that can ‘encompass’ tribal moralities (p. 161), his book does not consider morality developmentally. This might explain its lack of depth in imagining the potential of moral thinking to generate a context in which the truths of diverse human communities might be integrated. What I would offer here, if I were asked, is the idea that morality is the expression of an evolving self-awareness. Morality expresses consciousness; consciousness grows; and growth points toward something ultimate. That thing is not maximal happiness. It is wholeness. Hence growth, not pragmatism, is the source of the integration Greene desires.
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA USA
Email: [email protected]
© 2015, Andrew Scott Conning
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.1012365