ABSTRACT
In 1957, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, “The central task to which contemporary moral philosophers have addressed themselves is that of listing the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances”. Paul Taylor published a long paper whose goal was to elaborate and defend an account of what it is for a norm to be a moral norm for a group of people. A group of developmental psychologists who had been influenced by some of the philosophical literature aimed at defining morality began developing and defending their own definition. The use of empirical methods to explore traditional questions in moral theory is very much in its infancy, and there is a great deal yet to be learned. Joshua Greene et al. administered functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to participants while they made judgments about how people should behave when confronting a number of moral dilemmas.
