Reddit reviews Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

I recommend the book "Moral Tribes" by Joshua Greene, as he goes over the competing motivations in the brain which might be the cause of this difference.

https://smile.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/0143126059/

Short version from my own memory, he thinks it's due to the analytic vs emotional aspects of the mind competing for advantage. A simpler version to consider is one where you are standing on a bridge above a train track with another person much larger than yourself, and 100 yards down the line are 5 people who will be killed. You somehow know with 100% correctness that pushing the other person onto the track would stop the train and save the 5 people, but would kill the person you pushed. Ostensibly it's the same situation; do you let five people die, or take an action to kill one person instead?

Most people say they would flip the lever and kill the one person instead of the five, but most people (except for some with specific types of brain damage) would not push the person off the bridge. The key difference between the two examples seems to be the active and personal participation of the person being asked in the second case, and how it triggers a more significant emotional reaction in the brain.

When flipping a switch to reroute the train, the analytical mind considers the pros and cons, sees that the net benefit supports pushing the level, so they agree to do it (most of the time). There is emotional involvement, but it is at a distance.

When being faced with personally pushing someone into the path of an oncoming train, emotion is much stronger, and swamps out the logical decision making process. You're not pushing a metal rod from a dispassionate distance, you are actively choosing to manhandle a person into harm's way. When asked, people will even say that pushing the man is the logical thing to do, but they still wouldn't do it. IIRC, the most common reason given was "It's wrong."

>> The problems of morality and meaning are atheism's bitter pills to swallow.
>Meh, not really.
Are you telling me that you don't mind at all that you have no real way of convincing others they should share your core values if they do not, or that everything we have ever known or valued is destined to end as the universe goes cold? Bollocks. Those are hard truths we might be forced to accept, but nobody likes them.

> Morality is a subjective social construct based on biological altruism[1] , which is observed in high abundance in nature- and not just with high intelligence species, but simpler ones as well.

Perhaps you would be interested in looking up moral psychology: Our inbuilt sense of morality is much more nuanced than you seem to think. The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes are great popular level books on the topic.

Explaining why we have the moral impulses we have is the easy part. The real problem of morality I care about is about is that of proscriptive morality: I want to live in a society that is actively promoting the flourishing of all people using evidence based policies. How can I convince people like Roger Ailes and the Koch brothers that they should stop actively thwarting those goals? With no proscriptive morality I'm left with appealing to their own self interest, and while that might get me somewhere with some billionaires, with those people in particular it's just not, because their death defying ideologies contradict mine.

I agree with you that we have a great chance to instantiate many of our largely shared values in the near future, but I'd be lying if I wouldn't still love to be able to shut down Fox News because God said so and then go on to live forever, or at least have my accomplishments live forever... For the great majority of us, our lives have at most an effect about 3 generations into the future before they are washed out by the rest of the influences of the culture around us. Them's some uncomfortable facts.

You're still going to find more constructive ways to disagree. Give it a chance.