Interview with Professor Joshua Greene

From The Project on Law & Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS):

Here is an outstanding interview of Joshua Greene by Harvard Law Student Jeff Pote. The interview, titled “On Moral Judgment and Normative Questions” lasts just over 58 minutes. It was conducted as part of the Law and Mind Science Seminar at Harvard.

Bio:

Joshua D. Greene is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He received his A.B. at Harvard University in 1997 where he was advised by Derek Parfit. He received his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton University in 2002 having written a dissertation on the foundation of ethics advised by David Lewis and Gilbert Harman. From 2002 to 2006, when he began at Harvard, he studied as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton in the Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Laboratory under Jonathan Cohen. He is currently the Director of the Moral Cognition Lab.

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Table of contents:

• 00:00 — Title Frame
• 00:23 — Introduction
• 00:54 — How did your professional interests develop?
• 04:58 — What are the questions that interest you?
• 06:07 — What research projects are you currently working on?
• 08:32 — Could you describe the original experiment that supported a dual-process view of moral judgment?
• 13:13 — Has further research supported the dual-process view of moral judgment?
• 16:43 — Could you explain how this, or any, psychological understanding could bear on normative questions of law and policy?
• 24:39 — Could you provide an example of a situation where we should not rely on “blunt intuition?”
• 30:42 — Can you see other places where psychological research illuminates normative questions of law or policy?
• 37:40 — Do any of our moral judgments represent an objective moral reality (or moral facts)?
• 44:38 — Could you provide an example of a “moral objectivist” solution that you find unpersuasive?
• 49:33 — What is the problem of “free will” and what is its relevance for legal responsibility and punishment?
• 56:26 — How will this emerging scientific understanding of the human animal affect law and moral philosophy?

Duration: 58:04

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For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Joshua Greene To Speak at Harvard Law School,” “2010 Law and Mind Sciences Conference,”  “The Interior Situation of Honesty (and Dishonesty),” “Moral Psychology Primer,” “Law & the Brain,” “Pinker on the Situation of Morality,” “The Science of Morality,” and “Your Brain and Morality.”