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Zusatztext 44608315 Informationen zum Autor Joshua Greene Klappentext "Surprising and remarkable…Toggling between big ideas! technical details! and his personal intellectual journey! Greene writes a thesis suitable to both airplane reading and PhD seminars."-The Boston Globe Our brains were designed for tribal life! for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world's tribes into a shared space! resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks! the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming! and we wonder where! if at all! we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience! psychology! and philosophy! Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera! with point-and-shoot automatic settings ("portrait!" "landscape") as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions-efficient! automated programs honed by evolution! culture! and personal experience. The brain's manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning! which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals! turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals! turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight-sometimes with bombs! sometimes with words-often with life-and-death stakes. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field! Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better. Introduction The Tragedy of Commonsense Morality To the east of a deep, dark forest, a tribe of herders raises sheep on a common pasture. Here the rule is simple: Each family gets the same number of sheep. Families send representatives to a council of elders, which governs the commons. Over the years, the council has made difficult decisions. One family, for example, took to breeding exceptionally large sheep, thus appropriating more of the commons for itself. After some heated debate, the council put a stop to this. Another family was caught poisoning its neighbors’ sheep. For this the family was severely punished. Some said too severely. Others said not enough. Despite these challenges, the Eastern tribe has survived, and its families have prospered, some more than others. To the west of the forest is another tribe whose herders also share a common pasture. There, however, the size of a family’s flock is determined by the family’s size. Here, too, there is a council of elders, which has made difficult decisions. One particularly fertile family had twelve children, far more than the rest. Some complained that they were taking up too much of the commons. A different family fell ill, losing five of their six children in one year. Some thought it unfair to compound their tragedy by reducing their wealth by more than half. Despite these challenges, the Western tribe has survived, and its families have prospered, some more than others. To the north of the forest is yet another tribe. Here there is no common pasture. Each family has its own plot of land, surrounded by a fence. These plots vary greatly in size and fertility. This is partly because some Northern herders are wiser and more industrious than others. Many such herders have expanded their lands, using their surpluses to buy land from their less prosperous neighbors. Some Northern herders are less prosperous than others simply because they are unlucky, having lost their flock, or their children, to disease, despite their best efforts. Still other herders are exceptionally lucky, possessing large, fertile plots of land, not because they are especially wise o...
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Joshua Greene
