ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a broad survey of the universal categories and rules that people use when making moral judgments. It explores the framework for determining exactly which of useful features are useful or unfortunate. The job of moral psychology is to discover how people understand the categories of wrong and acceptable, and how they sort actions into these categories. Tolerance is a good attitude to have about social conventions, but it's a disastrous policy to have about moral beliefs. It's important to keep in mind how a person's empirical beliefs about how the world works can dramatically change her moral judgments. The study of moral grammar investigates the categories and rules used by speakers to move from perceptions of actions to judgments about permissibility or impermissibility. Despite the fact that the biblical Jesus claims that both punishment and revenge are impermissible, most Christians have historically ignored this teaching in their own moral judgments.
