Joshua Greene – Author Biography
Early Life
Joshua Greene is an American psychologist and philosopher who became fascinated by a deceptively simple question: why do good people disagree so profoundly about right and wrong? He trained in philosophy at Harvard and earned his PhD in psychology from Princeton, where his dissertation used brain imaging to study moral judgment.
Career
Greene is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and director of the Moral Cognition Lab. His research on the trolley problem and moral dilemmas — showing how emotional and rational brain systems compete in moral choice — became landmark work in moral psychology. He distilled it for general readers in Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013), which argues that our moral machinery evolved for tribal cooperation and now misfires in a globalised world, and proposes a “metamorality” for resolving deep disagreements.
Major Works
Moral Tribes (2013) is his major book for general readers.
Writing Style and Themes
Greene writes lucid, example-driven science — thought experiments, brain scans, and evolutionary theory woven into an argument about how to live together. His recurring themes are the dual-process nature of moral judgment, tribalism as the central moral problem of the modern world, and the possibility of a shared moral framework built on reason.
Legacy
Greene is one of the founders of modern moral psychology and a leading voice in the effective altruism-adjacent conversation about global ethics. Moral Tribes is widely assigned in philosophy and psychology courses.
