At a recent conference on "ethics and nuclear weapons" a moral theologian established succinctly and precisely, on the basis of Catholic teachings, that nuclear weapons are immoral. Though he granted that it is often necessary to do evil in order to do good, and though he alluded to the historic teaching. that, in the course of a just- war, it may be necessary incidentally to cause the death of innocent persons, he did not find in these rules sufficient justification for the use of major nuclear weapons;
In this article I ask what recent moral psychology and neuroscience can and can't claim to have discovered about morality. I argue that the object of study of much recent work is not morality but a particular kind of individual moral judgment. But this is a small and peculiar sample of morality. There are many things that are moral yet not moral judgments. There are also many things that are moral judgments yet not of that particular kind. If moral things are various and diverse, then empirical research about one kind of individual moral judgment doesn't warrant theoretical conclusions about morality in general. If that kind of individual moral judgment is a peculiar and rare thing, then it is not obvious what it tells us about other moral things. What is more, it is not obvious what its theoretical importance is to begin with—that is, why we should care about it at all. In light of these arguments, I call for a pluralism of methods and objects of inquiry in the scientific investigation of morality, so that it transcends its problematic overemphasis on a particular kind of individual moral judgment.
