Tragedy of the commons, metamorality, and metaethics

greene's non-cognitivist naturalism and the incoherence objection

Abstract

This article analyzes Joshua Greene’s moral theory in Moral Tribes (2018) and points to an apparent inconsistency in his thesis. Greene adopts a naturalistic non-cognitivist view of morality, according to which morality is a by-product of psychological and evolutionary mechanisms of cooperation. From this perspective, morality is understood as an adaptive instrument, rooted in emotions and non-autonomous cognitive processes, which serves to regulate conflicts within and between different “moral tribes”. However, his normative project of metamorality seems to contradict the naturalistic non-cognitivist character of the descriptive part of his work. Thus, the aim is to clarify this inconsistency expressed in the intersection of Greene’s following theses: (i) the adoption of a naturalistic moral epistemology, which maintains that moral judgments do not express objective truths, and (ii) the premise that deep moral disagreements are morally problematic and require a solution, which Greene proposes in the form of an objective moral principle: impartiality. It is argued that, although Greene’s descriptive theory is well grounded and consistent with his metaethical position, the normative part of his thesis yields to the moral cognitivist temptation of morally evaluating a natural state of affairs as objectively true.