Selective Debunking Arguments, Folk Psychology and Empirical Moral Psychology

Reflecting on the significance of his early research on the neuropsychology of moral judgment, Joshua Greene 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?” (2007, 76) The gist of such questions can be fleshed out in several ways; I attempt to distinguish different approaches in the latter half of this paper, and situate my own in the resulting landscape. The approach I favor foregrounds the relationship between empirical cognitive science and morality, in order to more crisply express certain kinds of question. For example: Are their constraints on human morality that make it inflexible 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 reflection 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 effectively do so?