:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Parable of the New Pastures
"The Parable of the New Pastures is fictional, but the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is real. It's the central tragedy of modern life, the deeper tragedy behind the moral problems that divide us." Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes[1]
Overview[edit | edit source]
The Parable of the New Pastures is a a parable by psychologist Joshua Greene at the beginning of his book Moral Tribes. Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them.
The story is about four herding tribes, each living on a different side of a mountain, separated from each other. Each tribe has to manage the challenges of living together in a society and sharing a common pasture. Each tribe has a different system of rules of how society should be organized and how their pasture land should be administered - from very collectivist and elders making many decisions, to very indiviualist. While in each tribal society, there are challenges and disagreements regarding the fairness of the system and decisions, the tribes survive and prosper more or less.
One summer, the forest separating the four tribes burns, opening a new fresh land for grazing, and all four tribes want to claim the land for themselves. However, each tribe has a different idea about how the new land should be administered and what the rules and customs of society should be, according to their traditional system. Members of tribes regard the rules and customs of other tribes inherently unfair and immoral, resulting in bloody fights, killling and destruction of resources.
Over their moral disagreements about what is right and wrong, herders of different tribes are not able to see that they do in fact share some common values (after all, they are humans):
"Despite their fighting, the herders of the new pastures are, in many ways, very similar. For the most part, they want the same things: healthy families, tasty and nutritious food, comfortable shelter, labor-saving tools, leisure time to spend with friends and family. ... even as they fight one another, their minds work in similar ways. What they perceive as unjust makes them angry and disgusted, and they are motivated to fight, both by self-interest and by a sense of justice. Herders fight not only for themselves but for their families, friends, and fellowtribe members."
"Despite their differences, the tribes of the new pastures share some core values. In no tribe is it permissible to be completely selfish, and in no tribe are members expected to be completely selfless."
"The tribes of the new pastures are engaged in bitter, often bloody conflict, even though they are all, in their different ways, moral peoples. They fight not because they are fundamentally selfish but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be."
"Each tribe has its own version of moral common sense. The tribes of the new pastures fight not because they are immoral but because they view life on the new pastures from very different moral perspectives. I call this the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality."
Analogy Map[edit | edit source]
| Parable of the New Pastures | Modern global society |
|---|---|
| Herding tribes on different sides of the hill | Cultures with different moral convictions of what is right and wrong |
| Burning of the forest separating them | Emergence of today's globalized world |
| Diagreements and fights between tribes | Cultures, subcultures, political groups arguing about how the global society should be structured and how the earth's resources should be used, each thinking they are right and the other groups are wrong |
Discussion[edit | edit source]
Quote Bank[edit | edit source]
Greene (2013)[1]:
"Two moral tragedies threaten human well-being. The original tragedy is the Tragedy of the Commons. This is a tragedy of selfishness, a failure of individuals to put Us ahead of Me. Morality is nature’s solution to this problem. The new tragedy, the modern tragedy, is the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality, the problem of life on the new pastures. Here morality is undoubtedly part of the solution, but it’s also part of the problem. In the modern tragedy, the very same moral thinking that enables cooperation within groups undermines cooperation between groups."
"Within each tribe, the herders of the new pastures are bound together by their moral ideals. But the tribes themselves are divided by their moral ideals."
"Morality did not evolve to promote universal cooperation. On the contrary, it evolved as a device for successful intergroup competition. In other words, morality evolved to avert the Tragedy of the Commons, but it did not evolve to avert the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality."
"What we in the modern world need, then, is something like morality but one level up. We need a kind of thinking that enables groups with conflicting moralities to live together and prosper. In other words, we need a metamorality . We need a moral system that can resolve disagreements among groups with different moral ideals, just as ordinary, first-order morality resolves disagreements among individuals with different selfish interests."