Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene

(Penguin, $30)

Joshua Greene may have identified the most difficult challenge facing humanity today, said Adam Waytz in The Boston Globe. The young Harvard psychology professor, who “revolutionized the study of morality” once before, has now used his first book to argue that if we humans are to survive and thrive in an ever-more-crowded world, we must first transcend our individual gut sense of what’s right and wrong. To Greene, instinctive morality discourages us from working for the common good because it’s rooted in tribal allegiances: Our quick moral decisions tend to build harmony within a small group but take no account of outsiders. But he doesn’t stop at naming a root cause of our collective failures and ongoing strife. “A big problem requires a big solution,” and Greene believes he has one.

“There is a politics-shaped hole” in the fix he winds up recommending, said John Whitfield in Nature. Though Greene “makes a persuasive case” for the benefits of utilitarianism—a commitment to pursuing the greatest happiness for the greatest number—he seems to forget that people tend to rally around leaders who speak to their tribal interests, not their inner angels. But at least he’s based his recommendation on research. A decade ago, he helped make the so-called trolley dilemma a familiar concept outside academia when he presented it to study subjects wearing brain-imaging sensors. His finding: When emotions enter moral decision making, people don’t make the same choice they’d make when being rational—sacrificing one stranger’s life to a runaway trolley in order to save the lives of five others.

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But Greene might be misreading the main cause of human conflict, said Robert Wright in The Atlantic. He suggests that tribal morality leads to collisions in value systems, but in many of the world’s trouble spots, the warring parties clash not on values but on facts. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance, the two sides “don’t generally posit different ethical principles of land ownership”; they disagree about how many Arabs were living in Israel in 1948 and who started the fighting. Because each side better remembers its grievances than its sins, together they can’t agree where justice lies. “I’m fine with a bit of messianism” coming from Harvard’s faculty, but Greene’s work here gets us only partway to salvation. Saying that utilitarianism can be a cure for problems caused by older, often faith-based worldviews is just another way of saying “the other guys are the problem.”