ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a critical assessment of Marc Hauser's claim that the source of morality resides in a faculty of the human brain. By accepting the explanatory tool of Noam Chomsky's language faculty, Hauser also necessarily adopts the shortcomings of this theory. It argues that Hauser's moral faculty fails as a meta-ethical position because Chomsky's language faculty fails as a linguistic position. Morality is neither pure nature nor pure nurture; it is not simply an elaborate and codified version of the biological predispositions. Morality did not appear because it evolvedonce a threshold of complexity was crossed new constraints automatically appeared. Discovering morality anew entails reflection on intersubjective experiences. According to Chomsky, the faculty operates through principles of universal grammar (UG) that are necessarily unconscious. Since Hauser believes this diversity/similarity feature of human cultures to be empirically evident, he cannot locate "the whole" of morality either in the human mind or in any particular culture.
