Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong is a 2006 book

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

 by Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser

Marc Hauser

Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior and animal cognition who taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. In August 2010, a committee of Harvard faculty found Hauser solely responsible for eight counts of unspecified scientific...

 in which he develops an empirical

Empirical

The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....

ly grounded theory to explain morality

Morality

Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...

 as a universal grammar

Universal grammar

Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...

. He draws evidence from evolutionary biology, moral and political philosophy

Political philosophy

Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...

, primatology

Primatology

Primatology is the scientific study of primates. It is a diverse discipline and researchers can be found in academic departments of anatomy, anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, veterinary sciences and zoology, as well as in animal sanctuaries, biomedical research facilities, museums and zoos...

, linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, and anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

.

Hauser uses artificial moral dilemmas as a research strategy. The reason is that people already have moral judgments of real world cases such as abortion and euthanasia, so there is no intuition left. In artificial moral dilemmas intuition plays an important role. A second advantage of artificial cases is that they can be subtly modified to observe the effects on moral judgments on people. There is an internet version of the test called the Moral Sense Test which is aimed at a worldwide public.