This is where I think the camera analogy is very useful. If you think of emotions being like the automatic settings and you think of manual mode as being like reasoning, you can ask of a photographer, "What's better: the automatic settings or the manual mode?" And what the photographer will say is "different things are good for different circumstances" -- that if you are in a standard kind of photographic situation, the kind that the manufacturer of your camera could anticipate, then go ahead and use your automatic landscape setting or whatever. But if you're facing a fundamentally new kind of photographic challenge, then you are probably going to have to put your camera in manual mode.
I was extremely impressed by Greene -- he seems like the second coming of Haidt -- and I look forward to following his career (including his book The Moral Brain and How to Use It that comes out next year).
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Here is a seven minute video of Greene talking about his research, including the camera metaphor:
(The site the video comes from is interesting itself. It's called Defining Wisdom and it's a project from the University of Chicago.)
