Joshua Greene
Studies the judging brain: our refusals to sacrifice someone would come mainly from emotion.
Life
Joshua Greene (born 1974) is an American psychologist and philosopher, a professor at Harvard. Using brain imaging, he studies what happens in the brain when we judge moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem. He argues that our automatic emotional reactions and our slow reasoning do not always agree, and that we must learn to tell when to trust intuition and when to reason. He defends a form of utilitarianism in Moral Tribes (2013).
Main works
Article in Science (with Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley and Cohen): some moral judgments engage the brain's emotional regions more.
To settle conflicts between groups with different values we need a common currency of reasoning, which he finds in utilitarianism.
In his own words
« We can summarize utilitarianism thus: Happiness is what matters, and everyone's happiness counts the same. »
« When it's Me versus Us, think fast. When it's Us versus Them, think slow. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceWith Cohen, he argues that brain science makes our sense of ultimate responsibility harder to defend.
Greene & Cohen, "For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything" (2004)
For conflicts between groups, he argues we should reason by weighing everyone's well-being ("deep pragmatism").
Greene, Moral Tribes (2013)