Moral Tribes Rupam Mahmood Summary

My thoughts on Moral Tribes
Rupam Mahmood

Moral Tribes is a great book to understand our moral landscape and calamities. The facts given here regarding the evolutionary biology of morality are quite inspiring and illuminating. However, it would take a leap of faith to arrive at the same conclusions regarding our moral solution as the author did. Let me first briefly mention some of the key messages of this book.

According to the book, there are two main moral calamities: me vs us and us vs them. Often a greedy behavior may lead to an undesirable and destructive outcomes, which may happen at an individual level as well as a group or tribal level. An example is the tragedy of the commons, where if all the involved parties behave greedily in favor of their “me”, they all face an undesirable outcome for all. These are situations where the best outcome can be achieved only through cooperation. The author noted that our ingrained moral responses evolved to avoid our me vs us quandaries and automatically favor “us” through cooperation over greedy “me.” However, this also makes us tribal, which appears to be a problem when tribes face a confrontational situation, and cooperation at the tribal level becomes necessary. This is when we face the us vs them problem.

However, our slow thinking machinery in our brain is well capable of analyzing such situations and avoid tribal conflicts. If our objective is to avoid wars and violence, we possess enough planning and reasoning capabilities to figure out a cooperative and non-confrontational solution to achieve that objective. The author then started looking for a universal moral objective that can help us all avoid our moral calamities. After a lengthy sequence of arguments and discussion, the author arrived at the conclusion that utilitarianism is the answer to that