Joshua Greene

And the goal from an evolutionary point of view is for you and the members of that group to survive and spread your genes, right?

It's not about making the world better in some objective sense.

So the thought is that we can understand what we react to and what we don't.

And from at least a certain detached perspective, we can say, you know, it seems like we might overreact to certain types of harms.

Like let's say physician-assisted suicide.

Mm-hmm.

where someone is in miserable shape and they're never going to recover and they're just in a lot of pain and they feel like their life has no dignity and they feel like it's time to go, right?

And interestingly, recently it was revealed that Daniel Kahneman, the father of sort of heuristics and biases and behavioral decision-making,

chose to go to Switzerland to end his life.

And I think it's not an accident that someone who studies decision-making would make that kind of choice because he understands his, what he'd call system one sort of intuitions and his system two reasoning, and is generally a system two kind of guy.

And then perhaps, I think even more importantly,

The fact that we are not moved by the suffering of people on the other side of the world in the same way that we're moved by someone who's drowning right in front of us, we should view that as under alarming.

And then of course, there are things like

racism and tribalism more generally, and speciesism, where we don't care as much about people who we think of as different from us, as not part of our us, right?

Or we don't trust them as much, or we're ready to believe lies about them much more easily, right?

And this is related to my main project these days, which is about bridging divides.

But I think understanding where our moral feelings come from can give us insight.

But to me, you can't understand the origins of all of this and the way they work and think, oh, we should just follow our intuitions.

They're always right.

It's a direct line to the moral truth.