12 Joshua Greene – The New Science of Morality

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2013

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's an old distinction: Science tells us what the world is like, but it can never tell us how we ought to behave in such a world. That's the realm of morality, and here we consult ethicists or perhaps priests—but something other than just data.It's pretty tough to keep science hemmed in, though; and in the past decade a group of researchers have begun to transform how we think about morality. They've put our sense of right and wrong in lab, and even in the fMRI machine. And while their findings may or may not ultimately tell you what you ought to do, they dramatically illuminate how we make such decisions...and, perhaps, fundamentally redefine what morality is in the first place.Harvard's Joshua Greene, a leader in this new wave of research and author of the new book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, is our guest on this week’s show.Subscribe:itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Friday, December 13th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.
0:05.7	I'm Chris Mooney.
0:06.6	And I'm Indrae Viscontes.
0:08.1	Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.
0:14.0	We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.
0:17.6	You can find us online at climatedesk.org.
0:20.7	You can follow us on Twitter at Inquiring Show and on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast.
0:32.2	So let me tell you a little about our show today.
0:34.9	There are a lot of voices in this world going around telling us how we ought to live, telling us what it's good to do, what's right and what's wrong.
0:43.4	Of course, many of these voices are religious, but they're also ethicists, and there's even,
0:47.0	you know, your high school football coach who thinks he needs to impart life lessons to you,
0:50.7	right? So there's all these views about what's moral. But what there isn't
0:55.3	is a lot of understanding of where this whole phenomenon of morality came from in humans, how it
1:00.1	evolved, and what it actually helps us do, because, you know, I hope our listeners won't be
1:05.5	too scandalized if I say that morality came from the ground up, not necessarily from on high.
1:10.1	So the good news is there's now
1:11.9	a research movement of foot to study morality scientifically as it is practiced by humans, as it is
1:17.8	felt. And this research is pretty dramatically redefining our sense of what is right and wrong,
1:23.9	simply by showing things like right and wrong varies depending upon where you live.
1:29.8	And also, they're just basic natural moral tendencies, for instance, a tendency to be cooperative,
1:35.2	especially within a small group of people. So our guest this week is one leader in this research.
1:40.1	He's Harvard's Joshua Green, and he has a new book out entitled Moral Tribes, Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.
	...

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