Abstract
Recently, Joshua Greene has argued that we need a metamorality to solve moral problems for which evolution has not prepared us. The metamorality that he proposes is a utilitarian account that he calls deep pragmatism. Deep pragmatism is supposed to arbitrate when the values espoused by different groups clash. To date, no systematic appraisal of this argument for a metamorality exists. We reconstruct Greene’s case for deep pragmatism as a metamorality and consider three lines of objection to it. We argue that, in the end, only one of these objections seriously threatens Greene’s position. Greene has to commit to the nonexistence of moral truth in order for his argument for the need of a metamorality to get off the ground. This, however, leads to a tension in his overall argument for deep pragmatism: ultimately, it casts his rejection of antiutilitarian moral intuitions into doubt.
Highlights
Empirical findings are increasingly brought to bear on long-standing philosophical claims and theories [1, 2].H
Without moral truth, and without claims 4 and 10 and the Argument for the Necessity of Metamorality (ANM) and Argument for Shared Values (ASV) that reply upon them in turn, Greene is left without claims 22 and 24 of his argument for deep pragmatism; he loses, respectively, both the necessity for metamorality and the argument that metamorality should be based on shared values
The metamorality that Greene builds in Moral Tribes and that he calls deep pragmatism is worthy of systematic attention and critique, neither of which it has far received
Summary
Empirical findings are increasingly brought to bear on long-standing philosophical claims and theories [1, 2]. One negative argument that Greene has maintained, in tandem with his dual-process model, is that deontological moral judgments are primarily driven by knee-jerk emotional responses and ought to be mistrusted [10] This line of research, and Greene’s dual-process model especially, has received much critical attention in the literature [11,12,13,14]. Much less attention has been devoted, on the other hand, to the positive argument that Greene makes to complement his dualprocess model, which he develops at length in his monograph Moral Tribes [15] He argues for the need of a metamorality that he calls deep pragmatism, which is meant to arbitrate when the values of different groups clash—analogous to the way morality serves to temper selfish impulses within tribes. We argue that Greene’s case for the unreliability of antiutilitarian intuitions is untenable, and we consider some ways out of this bind
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