Reddit reviews Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
We found 3 Reddit comments about Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
We have one of if not the freest healthcare market in the developed world. The systems that are much further from free market health care are the ones that are 1/2 the cost with better outcomes. When you can only fathom applying more of what doesn't work, you're stuck in an ideological bind.
"Watching politics" is about the least accurate way of understanding why people act the way they do. You might try reading moral and political psychology where they actually study why people believe and push for the things they do with scientific methods. I highly recommend picking up a book like The Righteous Mind or Moral Tribes if you want to begin to understand current political realities more deeply.
Only if they want to not suffer the consequences of not being good.
Society and moral behavior is a delicate balance of cooperation and competition. Cooperate 100% and you're a doormat, compete 100% and the rest of society will exile/kill you.
Millions of years of evolution as a social ape has instilled a basic set of morals into us which has helped our species survive through the ages. That's what "basic" morality is, and it even shows up different on brain scans than more "advanced", culture-trained morality.
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605
From a (critical) review:
>Utilitarianism, he contends, is not refuted by footbridge-type intuitions that conflict with it, because those intuitions are best understood not as perceptions of intrinsic wrongness, but as gut reactions that have evolved to serve social peace by preventing interpersonal violence. Similar debunking explanations can be given for other commonsense moral intuitions, such as the obligation to favor members of one’s own group over strangers, or the stronger obligation one feels to rescue an identified individual who is drowning in front of you than to contribute to saving the lives of greater numbers of anonymous victims far away. According to Greene, it is understandable in light of evolutionary psychology that we have these intuitions, and for the most part it does no harm to let our conduct be guided by them, but they are not perceptions of moral truth, and they do not discredit the utilitarian response when it tells us to do something different.
>While we cannot get rid of our automatic settings, Greene says we should try to transcend them—and if we do, we cannot expect the universal principles that we adopt to “feel right.” Utilitarianism has counterintuitive consequences, but we arrive at it by recognizing that happiness matters to everyone, and that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, even though subjectively we are each especially important to ourselves. This is an example of what he calls “kicking away the ladder,” or forming moral values that are opposed to the evolutionary forces that originally gave rise to morality.
Don't choose a side. If you say to yourself "I am an X" your brain will find itself completely compelled to irrationally defend X, wasting precious brain cycles that could be better spent on other things.
Read a book on moral psychology if you want to give up political tribalism. Here are some suggestions:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605