Joshua Greene Quote: "Utilitarianism is inherently pragmatic - in fact, ..."

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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
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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)

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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

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

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Activist

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.