Health : The Atlantic: The Tragedy of Common-Sense Morality and the Failings of Utilitarianism

Health : The Atlantic Health news and analysis on The Atlantic.

Manage your social media Best social media tool for image publishing to Facebook and Twitter. Look amazing and delight your followers. Get 40% off when you sign up today. From our sponsors

The Tragedy of Common-Sense Morality and the Failings of Utilitarianism Oct 24th 2013, 19:39, by Robert Wright (Shutterstock) Joshua Greene, the Harvard psychologist whose book Moral Tribes comes out next week, just experienced every author's dream: he got to talk back to someone who had reviewed his book. In this case, that someone was me. My review essay discussing Greene's book (and also Paul Bloom's forthcoming book Just Babies) appears in the November issue of The Atlantic. You can watch the whole conversation here on bloggingheads.tv, but below are two key excerpts. First, Greene pithily states one of his book's central arguments, the upshot of which is that unreflectively following our moral instincts gets us into particular trouble in international, inter-ethnic, and inter-religious disputes: Now for the core of our disagreement. Green argues that much of the conflict between "tribes"—religions, nations, ethnicities, etc.—would disappear if all of them abandoned traditional value systems and subscribed to utilitarianism, the idea that what's moral is what maximizes human happiness:

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions