Joshua Greene Quote: "When you share your moral common sense with ..."

Choose a background or upload your own photo, then download a shareable quote image.

Upload background image Your file stays in the browser; nothing is sent to the server.

Quote

When you share your moral common sense with people in your locality, that helps you to form a community. But those gut reactions differ between groups, making it harder to get along with other groups.
Joshua Greene / Psychologist
Common Sense
Community
People
Copy Quote

Only Text Quote

When you share your moral common sense with people in your locality, that helps you to form a community. But those gut reactions differ between groups, making it harder to get along with other groups.
⇛ Joshua Greene (Psychologist)

Copy Quote Text

Utilitarianism is inherently pragmatic - in fact, I prefer to call it "deep pragmatism." Humans have real limitations, obligations, and frailties, so the best policy is to set reasonable goals, given your limitations. Just try to be a little less tribalistic.

Joshua Greene Psychologist

When there is a conflict, which group's sense of right and wrong should prevail? If a morality is a system that allows individuals to form a group and to get along with each other, then the challenge is to devise a system that allows different groups to get along - what I call a meta-morality.

Joshua Greene Psychologist

Since functional brain imaging first emerged, we have learned that there aren't very many brain regions uniquely responsible for specific tasks; most complex tasks engage many if not all of the brain's major networks. So it is fairly hard to make general psychological inferences just from brain data.

Joshua Greene Psychologist

We now have a better biological and psychological understanding of our moral thinking. The idea that we should do what maximizes happiness sounds very reasonable, but it often conflicts with our gut reactions. Philosophers have spent the last century or so finding examples where our intuition runs counter to this idea and have taken these as signals that something is wrong with this philosophy. But when you look at the psychology behind those examples, they become less compelling. An alternative is that our gut reactions are not always reliable.

Joshua Greene Psychologist

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.

Helen Rowland Journalist

The problem with common sense is, it isn't.