Joshua GreeneIn science, Joshua David Greene (1974-) is an American moral philosopher and neuroscientist whose research is focused on the interplay between emotion and reasoning in moral judgment, noted for his 2008 to present work the neuroscience of morality, touching on topics such as the nature of evil, themed on a synthesis of a utilitarianism, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience based probing into morality theory. Greene's work may be similar, to some extent, to Sam Harris, an associate of his, and his moral landscape theory.

US BioEthics | Angels & Souls
In 2014, Greene was one of the experts on the 17th meeting of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, during which time “angels” were discussed and “soul” was employed six time, all amid fundamental discussion of morality and neuroscience; some excerpts of which are as follows:

“In other words, I don't know whether you are speaking now as a scientist or as a philosopher about people's intuitions about choosing. I mean, most people in the United States, if you ask them on a public poll, you'll get intuitions about whether there's angels in the universe, you know, all kinds of things. So are you saying scientifically speaking people's intuitions about choosing requires the incompatibalist's view or is there a division there scientifically speaking about what people's intuitions are?”
— Amy Gutmann (2014), comment

“But whether you have a full-blown metaphysical view of human nature where we're bodies and souls joined somehow, everybody agrees that there's a body.”
— Joshua Green (2014), comment

“I think that whether or not you think, when it comes to the proximate causes of behavior, just brains, or whether you think that we are brains that are in some sense being animated by minds or souls that are distinct from brains, brains are still what most immediately cause behavior.”
— Joshua Green (2014), comment

“There are lots of studies like this. There are some that go the other way. It's a little complicated. I myself did a study about whether souls are required for free will. I had about 280 subjects.”
— Alfred Mele (2014), comment

Compare Lawrence Krauss (2015) on god talk amid in scientific meetings. [13]

Values | Freedom and security
On paradoxical or rather inverse relation between freedom and security, in regards to "values", and which value to value most, Greene has the following to say: [3]

“I didn’t understand value premises (‘freedom’, ‘security’), because it seemed to me that, no matter what your most favored value is, there could always be other considerations that take precedence. Sure, freedom is important, but is it everything? Sure, security is important, but is it everything? How can there be one preeminent value?”

The issue queried here, to note, was firmly addressed by American physical chemist Frederick Rossini, in his 1971 “Chemical Thermodynamics in the Real World”, who pointed out that the precarious balance between freedom and security, in a given social system (e.g. America), is a balance between entropy and enthalpy, respectively, or in his own words: [11]

“The final state of equilibrium is a compromise between the ‘freedom’ term, ΔS°/R, and the ‘security’ term, a – ΔH°/RT. To repeat, the final state of equilibrium, then, is a compromise between two more or less opposing factors: greater freedom or greater entropy, as measure by ΔS°/R; and greater security or lesser energy, as measured by – ΔH°/RT.”

Greene continues:

“Then I discovered utilitarianism, the philosophy pioneered by Jeremy Bentham and John Mill. Utilitarianism is a great idea with an awful name. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy.”

Here, Green would be keen to also discover the Lagrangian-Hamiltonian differential based version of utilitarianism espoused by Francis Edgeworth (1881), in regards to minimas and maximas of happiness, in his “utilitarian calculus”, as he calls it, being that Lagrangian-Hamiltonian differential based models of the energetics of dynamic systems was subsumed, via the combined work of Clausius (1865), Gibbs (1876), Lewis (1923), al a chemical thermodynamics, into the free energy differential versions of freedom and security comprised models of social system happiness, such as outlined by Rossini (1971) above. [12] The glimpse of this modern discernment, however, requires a great deal of learning on the part of the reader, a rather detailed understanding of chemical thermodynamics, on one hand, and deep humanities philosophical understanding, on the other.

Magic moment | Magic formula | Magic corner hypocrisy
A saliently noticeable issue with Greene’s treatise is his usage on some near two-dozen pages of the term “magic” (17+) and a “magic corner” (11+) that we should believe in and attempt to get into in regards to competing morality systems, then towards the end of the book he begins to denounce belief in magic, in regards to the point when God supposedly puts souls into people (see also: Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon Laplace anecdote on souls of infants), as something not to believe, at which point he becomes a hypocrite on this term usage; below are conflicting usage examples:

“Does God attach the soul when the head of sperm makes contact with the zona pellucida? Or does ensoulment occur when the sperm hits the cell membrane? Is it enough for all of the sperm’s genetic material to enter the egg cell? Or does God wait until the male pronucleus and the female pronucleus have fused? All the way fused, or partway? Whatever it is that makes people worth of moral consideration, these things don’t all appear in one magic moment. Without a magic moment to believe in, pro-choicers simply have to draw the line somewhere, while acknowledging that the line they’ve drawn is somewhat arbitrary.” (pg. 326)

“In the beginning, there was primordial soup. Cooperative molecules formed larger molecules, some of which could make copies of themselves and surround themselves with protective films. Cooperative cells merged to form complex cells, and then cooperative clusters of cells. Life grew increasingly complex, finding again and again the magic corner in which individual sacrifice buys collective success, from bees to bonobos.” (pg. 347)

“There’s no magic formula, no bright line between the extremes of perfectionism and unbridled gluttony … just an ill-defined Goldilocks zone between the two extremes.” (pgs. 256-57)

Here, in short, according to Greene, there is no “magic formula” for morality, but we should believe in “magic corners” and “Goldilocks zones”, but not in “magic moments”? While, indeed, Greene may argue that one usage is but metaphor while the other is considered real (e.g. to Christians, say in regards to stem-cell research funding), the argument, nevertheless is hypocritical. “Historians”, or in this case "moral psychologists", as Morris Zucker (1945) advised, “will have to learn to be as precise in the employment of their terms as the mathematician and the physicist.”

Also, to note, Greene’s zona pellucida ensoulment query, brings to mind dialogue post #144, between Libb Thims and Mirza Beg, on 28 Jul 2014, in which Thims probes Beg, a soul believer, with the question as to which second in synthesis time of his reaction existence he came “alive”, as follows:

“Beg, said another way, if you prefer not to digress on yourself, in what year did Goethe, in your view, come “alive”? Possible answers, from you, might include: the hour his parents, Johann Caspar Goethe (1710-1782) and Catherina Elizabeth Goethe (1731-1808), had intercourse (sex), calculated to have occurred at noon on 21 Dec 1748, see Goethe timeline sketch: (Ѻ), a process which leads to the five-step mechanism by which the interaction of the sperm and the egg to form zygote generally proceeds (Ѻ), or the hour at which he emerged from the birth canal, which he says occurred at noon on 28 Aug 1749, and took his first breath, or the year he reached the age of one, which occurred on 28 Aug 1750, being that some cultures don’t recognize infants as people until they reach the age of one, or some other hour or day, e.g. when the brain begins to form (week three), when blastocyst that will be the baby splits to form the placenta and the embryo (week four), when the heart begins to beat (week five), when the embryo begins to move in the womb (week eight), when embryo turns into fetus and begins breathing-like movements (week nine), when the fetus begins to have eye movement (fourteen weeks), when fetus begins to feel pain and suck their thumb (twenty weeks), when fetus begins to dream as evidenced by REM (week twenty-six), or possibly some time before inception, e.g. the second when his father first fell in love, at first sight, with his mother, light (electromagnetic field in 400-700 nm range) being the trigger to surpassing the activation energy barrier to this reaction, which would have occurred on or about the year 1746-47 (pair married on 20 Aug 1748), or alternatively, as Francis Crick intuits, one is never alive at any point in one’s reaction existence?”

This, in short, is but a variant of Greene’s query about which second in development “ensoulment” occurred, both “soul” and “life” being religio-mythology terms, which is why a given start second is not able to be found, because both soul and life are concepts not recognized by physics and chemistry (Charles Sherrington, 1938), i.e. they are defunct semi-scientific concepts, like ether and caloric, i.e. they do not exist, though they were once believed to exist, but not viable theories as the modern physical sciences understand things.

Metamorality
Greene calls his overarching theory “metamorality” which he defines as follows: [3]

“Metamorality is a higher level moral system that adjudicates [settles judicially] among competing tribal moralities [e.g. French atheists vs Pakistani Muslims], just as a tribe’s morality adjudicates among competing individuals.”

(add discussion)

Morality | Ongoing debates
The aim of Greene’s moral psychology theory, as he says, is to develop a clearer understanding of the subject so to better progress on the following tenuous moral issues common to US debate: [3]

“Ongoing debates over taxes, healthcare, immigration, affirmative action, abortion, end-of-life issues, stem cell research, capital punishment, gay rights, the teaching of evolution in public schools, animal rights, environmental regulation, and the regulation of the financial industry.”

(add discussion)

Hallway study
See main: Hallway study; See also: Sidewalk study
Green, citing several notable "studies", devotes several pages to the so-called “hallway study”, a two part experiment conducted by American psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett in the 1990s on male University of Michigan students, both northern and southern students. [10]

In the first experiment, students were brought into their lab with the overt purpose to fill out some questionnaire, after which they were instructed to take their form to a table at the end of a long, narrow hallway, along the way passing a man—a confederate of the experiment—standing in the hallway working in a file cabinet. After dropping of the completed form on the table, upon return down the hallway, the man would slam the file cabinet drawer shut, bump into the student’s shoulder, and call the student an “a**hole”. On average, southern students responded to the incident with more anger and less amusement than northern students, as assessed by independent observers positioned in the hallway, and secondly, according to saliva samples collected before and after the experiment, southerners exhibited greater increases in their levels of both cortisol, a stress, anxiety and arousal hormone, and testosterone.

In the second part of the experiment, Cohen and Nisbett arranged for an experimental game of chicken, in which, after being insulted (or not), the students encountered a second confederate, a six-foot-three-inch, 250-pound man walking quickly down the hall, in which the middle point of was lined with tables and thus too narrow for both to pass, meaning someone had to give way. The experiment found, via experimental measurement of the distance at which the subjects gave way to the big man, that the insulted southerners, on average, gave way to the approaching confederate when he was 37-inches away, whereas the non-insulted southerners gave way, on average, at 108-inches. The insult had no effect on the northerner’s chicken point; the non-insulted northerners typically gave way at about 75-inches. These results are summarized below:


Chicken point
(insulted)
Chicken point
(non-insulted)
Southerners
37-inches108-inches
Northerners
75-inches75-inches

Experimenters found, also, that the non-insulted southerners were more polite than the northerners. Greene correlates this data the premise that different "herders", as he calls them, will spend more or less "time and energy" defending and or standing their "ground" (territory, volume, or personal space).

Suppositions
Greene, based on a combination of moral psychology polling studies and scenarios and anatomical neuropsychology findings, posits a number of suppositions based on polling, some being on target, e.g. “if the soul is out of a job, well some people, obviously, would think that’s terrible, but the worst thing we could find out is that we don’t have souls [see: soulless bag of chemicals]. But, it could also be a wonderful thing”, some off target. The following, based on the Nichols-Knobe determinism study, seems to have missed the dartboard:

“Our taste for justice is a useful illusion.”

Here, we may cite the punishment and justice in a deterministic universe views of Zeno of Citium and the slave stealing parable, for a more on target handling of the issue.

Beg analysis
The following a “Beg analysis” of Greene's Moral Tribes, i.e. a dissection and look at the overtly, albeit unconsciously aware, physical science and or physicochemical terms and terminology employed by Green in his treatise— the “Beg effect”, i.e. physical terminology usage and meaning gone awry in argument, surfacing in Greene’s treatise significantly on pages 261-63, wherein he ventures into assertions about physical “distance”, personal “force”, our “reactions”, and our “movements”, etc. according to which he asserts that distance plays no role in what is moral or amoral among people, wherein noticeable discussion of the difficulties his assertions become apparent. The following, accordingly, is a work-in-progress Beg analysis of Greene’s Moral Tribes:

Term
#
Usage
Note





Force (F) 21+ (Ѻ) “Prosperous Northerners often make charitable donations to help such people. Nevertheless, they object to being forced to help the foolish …” (pg. 67) Noticeable in Greene’s section "The Duty to Help" (pg. 261-63), is the Coriolis work transmission principle:

W = Fd \,

namely that the component of force acting on a material entity multiplied by the distance of space traveled by the entity equals the work done by the force, amid which Greene seems to argue that "mere physical distance", in regards to morally obligatory questions, such as helping a drowning child in a pond directly in front of you versus helping a starving child in hurricane ridden country, really doesn't matter, that "people who are insensitive to distance are morally abnormal". among other snippets of blurry assertion.
Distance (d) 9+ (Ѻ) “Our sense of moral obligation is heavily influenced by mere physical distance. Should physical distance matter? …. People who are insensitive to distance are morally abnormal.” (pg. 261)
Work (W)51+(Ѻ)
Reaction 14+ (Ѻ) “… conducted a series of experiments examining our reactions to identifiable, as opposed to statistical victims.” (pg. 263)
Gut reaction

 (Ѻ)

Movement13+ (Ѻ) “The harder question, from a biological point of view, is why we sometimes are moved by the plight of nearby strangers.” (pg. 262) The so-called “biological point of view” is a baseless point of view, being that hypothetical “life force”, the root of the term “biology” (Theodore Roose, 1797) has been found to be something that does not exist (see: defunct theory of life), as per the work of the Helmholtz school.
Move
7+ (Ѻ)

Power13+ (Ѻ)

Powerful
6+ (Ѻ)

Bond

 “Ants, for example, confer benefits on their genetic relatives, but, so far as we can tell, ants are not motivated by tender feelings. Among humans, of course, caring behavior is motivated by feelings, including powerful emotional bonds that connect us to our close relatives.” (pg. 31) The assertion that ants don’t have feelings—and by implication powerful bonds—whereas humans do, seems to contradict Greene’s earlier (pg. 20) statement that ants and humans have evolved or formed from “molecules joining together” by the “same principle”, molecular joining implying chemical “bonding”, thus insinuating some type of two natures argument, i.e. that ants and humans are of different natures, in regards to bonds, power, movements, actuated by "feelings", which derive from the senses, which, as James Maxwell (1847) correctly says, derive from force: [7]

“The only thing which can be directly perceived by the senses is force, to which may be reduced light, heat, electricity, sound and all the other things which can be perceived by the senses.”

Green, in the context of the above distance argument, goes on to cite a number of psychological donation studies, wherein donation scenarios are varied, after which he concludes with the following:

“So is there really a moral difference between the nearby drowning child and the faraway children who need food and medicine? These cases certainly feel different, but we now know that our intuitive sense of moral obligation is at least somewhat unreliable, sensitive to things that don’t really matter, such as mere physical distance and whether we know, in a trivially minimal way, whom we are helping.” (pg. 264)

The difficulties in this paragraph are immense. Firstly, not only has Green failed to define what exactly a “moral” is—namely something that, if not obliged, brings about the arrival of Mor, i.e. the Greco-Roman goddess of death, in religio-mythology colloquial speak, or dereaction, reaction end, or being existence cessation, in physicochemical neutral upgrade terminology. Secondly, Greene dismissal of physical “distance” as a meaningless factor in the equation, goes against the grain of the various social gravity or social gravitation theories, i.e. social electromagnetation theories in a modern sense, or that the “work” done by someone making a so-called moral action, the human movement here supersedes the principle of transmission of work, in respect to the distance factor. Thirdly, Greene equates the death or rather dereaction of two children in “different” systems as being equivalent, in regards to the level of responsibility of the world's total human population; this assertion, however, fails in the face of the fact that each system or country will have a certain level of “stability” and or “instability” associated with its molecular structure, each being a possible transformation reaction path, e.g. synthesis (coming together), analysis (coming apart), social combustion, etc. the so-called “nature” of each defined by thermodynamics, each system, if connected, mediated via Lipmann coupling free energy factors. Hence, one’s so-called moral intuitive sense will inherently “feel” different by each person in each respective (social) system, being that different “forces” will be acting on each respective person, through the senses, as Maxwell says, in alignment with the distinct direction of the transformation process of that given respective social system. Therefore, without prolonged digression, to state matter-of-factly, per vicarious statistical hypothetical moral scenario Q&A studies, that one’s intuitions, in regards to the deeper so-called moral choices people are forced to make, are “somewhat unreliable” is rather spurious and unfounded—though, to note, digression on the tricks or so-called misleadings of “intuitions” in general, e.g. questions about whether the earth is flat, the sun goes around the earth, or doing certain math problems, etc., is a rather involved subject. But, to clarify, citation to the Muller-Lyer illusion, is but fodder to the jump to the conclusion that moral intuitions are baseless, akin to optical illusions, and therefore they should be abandoned in favor of everyone becoming Goldilocks utilitarians.
Crying baby scenario (Greene)
The crying baby scenario study as seen in the 2008 National Geographic documentary, the “Science of Evil”, showing Greene and Jonathan Cohen, director of Princeton’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind & Behavior, whom Green started working with in 1999, watching brain activity as a women is show the question on a video screen while being imaged, the village scenario shown in the documentary being that of an African village. [1]

Crying baby scenario
One of Greene’s most-discussed studies is the so-called “crying baby scenario”, a study done at Princeton, in the period 1999 to 2007, wherein subjects, while inside of an MRI, were asked what they would do if they were in the following difficult situation:

“Enemy soldiers have taken over your village and will kill any civilians they find. You are hiding in the cellar of a house with a group of townspeople, and you hear the soldiers enter the house. Your baby starts to cry, and the only way to quite him is to hold your hands over his mouth and, eventually, smother him. But if the baby keeps crying, the soldiers will discover your group and kill everyone, the baby, included. What should you do?”

Half of the subjects, as the study found, said they would murder their own child. [8] People who say yes, were found to have more activity in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, i.e. the cognitive control area). Those who say no, show more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior singular cortex. [1]

This morally ambiguous finding, to note, brings to mind Goethe’s famous 1771 thesis 55, cited by Thims in his 2013 university lectures (Ѻ), of his series of 56 theses on the “Positions of the Rights”, submitted for his law degree, namely the query: “should the woman who kills her newly born child suffer the death penalty?”.

Green had the following to say about his findings: [8]

“A moral judgment is ultimately a balance of several different considerations—the initial, primal reaction; empathy; cultural or religious norm; and individual reasoning. Sometimes these will be inline and make the decision an easy one, but often they will conflict.”

(add discussion)

Personal force | Moral force
Greene, in a few pages, discusses the possibility of the existence of an independent “moral force”, such as follows:

“According to the utilitarians, the distinction between doing and allowing is morally irrelevant, or at least has no independent moral force. A harm is a harm is a harm, we say, and there is no fundamental distinction between the harms that we actively cause and harms that we merely allow to happen. Given our values and our circumstances, does it make sense to draw a moral distinction between what we do and what we allow to happen?”

The only other thinker to outline a “moral force” theory or logic, of sorts, to note, was Prussian warfare theorist Carl Clausewitz. [4]

Greene also distinguishes what he refers to as a “personal force” as follows:

“Personal force may play a role in action plans as well. The events in an action plan are arranged not just in a temporal sequence but in a causal sequence. Each event causes the next, as we go from the body movement to the goal. There is evidence that we represent causes in terms of forces. When you see one billiard ball knock into another, all that you pick up with your retinas is balls in a series of location, lie the frames of movie. Nevertheless, we intuit, apparently correctly, the delivery of a force from one ball to another. Thus, the kinds of forces represented in an action plan—personal force verses other kinds—may affect the extent to which one feels as if one is personally causing harm.”

This personal force distinction, to note, may be equivalent to the "internal force" model in the internal force / external force dichotomy.

In this rather humorous “there is evidence”, i.e. that we “represent causes in terms of forces”, statement, Greene cities three authors, the first and foremost of which being American cognitive scientist Leonard Talmy and his highly-cited “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition”, the abstract of which is as follows: [5]

“‘Force dynamics’ refers to a previously neglected semantic category—how entities interact with respect to force. This category includes such concepts as: the exertion of force, resistance to such exertion and the overcoming of such resistance, blockage of a force and the removal of such blockage, and so forth. Force dynamics is a generalization over the traditional linguistic notion of ‘causative’: it analyzes ‘causing’ into finer primitives and sets it naturally within a framework that also includes ‘letting’, ‘hindering’, ‘helping’, and still further notions. Force dynamics, moreover, appears to be the semantic category that uniquely characterizes the grammatical category of modals, in both their basic and epistemic usages. In addition, on the basis of force dynamic parameters, numerous lexical items fall into systematic semantic patterns, and there exhibit parallelisms between physical and psychosocial reference. Further, from research on the relation of semantic structure to general cognitive structure, it appears that the concepts of force interaction that are encoded within language closely parallel concepts that appear both in early science and in naive physics and psychology. Overall, force dynamics thus emerges as a fundamental notional system that structures conceptual material pertaining to force interaction in a common way across a linguistic range: the physical, psychological, social, inferential, discourse, and mental-model domains of reference and conception.”

along with Phillip Wolff (2007) and Steven Pinker (2007), who in turn each cite Talmy and his so-called force dynamics theory; Wolff, e.g. abstracts Talmy’s theory of force dynamics as something that characterizes causation as a pattern of forces and a position vector. [6]

Other
In 2008, Green's moral neuroscience work was featured National Geographic's “Science of Evil” documentary, wherein he commented how neuroscience findings are seeming to point to the conclusion that the "soul" might be out of a job, i.e. scientists are beginning to find that "we don’t have souls"; in full: [1]

“What happens if we look at the brain and after a while it becomes clear that all of human behavior is ultimately just a product of neurons firing at each other and ultimately controlling muscles that ultimately constitute our behavior? Is that good is that bad? If the soul is out of a job, well some people, obviously, would think that’s terrible, but the worst thing we could find out is that we don’t have souls. But, it could also be a wonderful thing, and the thought is that belief in souls could do a lot of damage. Perhaps the most extreme example is take the events of 9/11. People who committed those highjacks believed their bodies were going to die, but that their souls were going on to live a very pleasant existence. Could they have been brought to do that if it were not for their belief that their souls were participating in a higher purpose?”

In 2014, Greene was one part of the 17th annual meeting of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which on day one, was focused on the “ethics of neuroscience”, i.e. on the “ethics of doing neuroscience research”, then secondly, day two, in which Greene was the opening speaker, on the “potential impact of neuroscience research on our understanding of ethics and moral decision making”, i.e. “how if at all does neuroscience change, alter, revolutionize possibly, some people have claimed, our understanding of ethics”, specifically the “possibility of neuroscience changing the way we think about issues of right and wrong”. The following is a noted opening statement by Greene made at the meeting: [2]
Moral Tribes (2013)
Green’s 2013 Moral Tribes, wherein he outlines the field of “moral neuroscience”, which he helped to pioneer over the last decade, via asking people morally tricky questions while inside an MRI machine. [3]

“The brain is a mechanistic system, everything that determines our behavior is ultimately a physical process, if that's true, and I think people have speculated about this since antiquity and more so during the enlightenment, but now it's increasingly clear that everything that affects your behavior is ultimately just one neuron making another neuron fire. It's one physical process going all the way back in time back to before you were born.”

(add discussion)

Difficulties on theory
To note a few salient issues in Greene’s Moral Tribes, firstly is his use of the word “magic”, employed 17+ times, in terms such as “magic corner”, which he implies exists, and “magic formula”, which he says does not exist. On the latter, Green states: [3]

“There’s no magic formula, no bright line between the extremes of perfectionism—ideal utilitarian—and unbridled gluttony … there’s just an ill-defined Goldilocks zone between two extremes.”

(add discussion)

Other
Greene cites the work American ethicist and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in some 15+ pages, whose semi-popular 2012 The Righteous Mind posits the notion that morality is something evolved to deal with issues of cooperation. [9]

Education
Greene completed his AB in philosophy with a thesis on “Moral Psychology and Moral Progress” in 1997 at Harvard and his PhD in 2002 with in psychology with a dissertation on “The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What to Do About It” at Princeton, in 2008 was doing MRI-based research in the neuroscience of morality, specifically querying men and women about trolley problem (Philippa Foot, 1967) like queries while being imaged, and presently is the a social science professor director of the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard where he also is an associate professor of psychology.

Religion
Greene, whose first name, Joshua (or J- Shu), is derived from the Egyptian god Shu (see: Joshua 10:13), auto-describes himself as a "secular Jew" who seemingly doesn't believe in the existence of the soul. [3]


Quotes | Employed
The following are quotes employed by Greene:

“The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.”
— Henry Beecher (c.1865), second opening quote in Greene’s Moral Tribes

Quotes | By
The following are quotes by Greene:

“Most people are dualists. Intuitively, we think of ourselves not as physical devices, but as immaterial minds or souls housed in physical bodies. Most experimental psychologists and neuroscientists disagree, at least officially. The modern science of mind proceeds on the assumption that the mind is simply what the brain does. We don't talk much about this, however. We scientists take the mind's physical basis for granted. Among the general public, it's a touchy subject.”
— Joshua Greene (2011), “Social Neuroscience and the Soul’s Last Stand” [14]

References
1. Greene, Joshua. (2008). Interview in “Science of Evil”, (42:00-43:00), National Geographic documentary, 45-min (Netflix).
2. Greene, Joshua D. and Mele, Alfred R. (2014). “Transcript: Meeting 17, Opening Remarks and Session 6” (Ѻ) (moderator: Amy Gutmann), Jun 10, Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, Atlanta, Ga.
3. Greene, Joshua. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (soul, 5+pgs; moral force, pg. 241; hallway study, pgs. 76-78; value premises, pg. 106; metamorality, pg. 147; personal force, 11+ pgs, esp. pg. 247; magic, 17+, magic formula, pgs. 256-57; Nichols-Knobe determinism study, pg. 274; secular Jew, pg. 365; ongoing debates, pg. 99). Penguin.
4. Ghyczy, Tiha, Deteringer, Bolko, and Bassford, Christopher. (2002). Clausewitz on Strategy: Inspiration and Insight form a Master Strategist (§Moral Force, pgs. 161-64; moral force, in strategy, pgs. 111-14; moral force, in surprise attack, pgs. 143). Wiley.
5. (a) Talmy, Leonard. (1998). “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition” (abs) (pdf), Cognitive Science, 12(1):49-100.
(b) Leonard Talmy – Wikipedia.
6. (a) Wolff, Phillip. (2007). “Representing Causation”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(1):82.
(b) Pinker, Steven. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (force, 61+ pgs). Viking.
7. Mahon, Basil (2003). The Man Who Changed Everything – the Life of James Clerk Maxwell (senses quote, pg. 25). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
8. Thomas, Wayne M. (2008). The Sales Manager’s Success Manual (pgs. 27-28). Amacom.
9. Haidt, Jonathan. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage Books, 2013.
10. (a) Cohen, Dov and Nisbett, Richard E. (1994). “Self-Protection and the Culture of Honor: Explaining Southern Violence” (abs) (pdf), Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5):808.
(b) Nisbett, Richard E. and Cohen, Dov, (1996). Culture of Honor: the Psychology of Violence in the South. Westview Press.
(c) Greene, Joshua. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (hallway study, pgs. 76-78). Penguin.
11. Rossini, Frederick D. (1971). “Chemical Thermodynamics in the Real World” (abs), Priestley Medal Address, delivered Mar 29 at the national American Chemical Society meeting, Los Angeles, California; in: Chemical Engineering News, April 5, 49 (14): 50-53.
12. Edgeworth, Francis Y. (1881). Mathematical Psychics: an Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (end and means, pg. vii; social mechanics, pgs. 12-13). C. Kegan Paul & Co.
13. Kruass, Lawrence M. (2015). “All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists” (Ѻ), The New Yorker, Sep 8.
14. (a) Greene, Joshua D. (2011). “Social Neuroscience and the Soul’s Last Stand”, in: Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the underpinnings of the Social Mind (editors: A. Dodorov, S. Fiske, and D. Prentice) (pgs. 263-73). Oxford University Press.
(b) Musolino, Julien. (2015). The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows we Gain from Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs (foreword: Victor Stenger) (pg. 21). Prometheus.

External links
● Joshua D. Greene (faculty) – Harvard University.
● Joshua Greene (psychologist) – Wikipedia.
● Greene, Joshua D. – WorldCat Identities.

TDics icon ns