08 Chapter 7.indd

Refl ecting on the signifi cance of his early research on the neuropsychology of moral judgment, Joshua Greene (2007) raises an important and increasingly pressing kind of question: “ Where does one draw the line between correcting the nearsightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely? ” and goes on to more directly wonder “ How far can the empirical debunking of human moral nature go? ” (p. 76). Th e gist of such questions can be fl eshed out in several ways; I attempt to distinguish diff erent approaches in the latter half of this chapter, and situate my own in the resulting landscape. Th e approach I favor foregrounds the relationship between empirical cognitive science and morality, 1 in order to more crisply express certain kinds of question. For example: Are their constraints on human morality that make it infl exible or resistant to transformation in certain ways? If so, what are those constraints, what imposes them, and why do they make morality rigid in whatever way they do? Are those constraints only knowable a priori, perhaps via conceptual analysis or refl ection on the essence of morality, or can cognitive science help to discover them, perhaps by revealing innate features of our moral psychology? On the other hand it could be the case that human morality is relatively unconstrained, and thus fairly malleable. Is it possible — do we have it within ourselves — to transcend the types of moral judgments that are so naturally made by minds like ours? Can cognitive science show us how to most eff ectively do so? One virtue of this way of framing the issues is that it invites us to consider an analogy between moral theorizing and scientifi c theorizing and the relationship