Moral Minds is a big book with a big idea. Marc Hauser proposes that humans possess a moral faculty which '... enables each individual to unconsciously and automatically evaluate a limitless variety of actions in terms of principles that dictate what is permissible, obligatory, or forbidden' (p. 36). According to Hauser, the outputs of these faculties vary, but they do so in systematic ways. Drawing an analogy to Chomsky's well-known position in linguistics, Hauser argues that there is a universal moral grammar, which is educated by experience, '... pruning the range of possible moral systems down to one distinctive moral signature' (p. 422). The universal moral grammar is a set of abstract moral principles, concretized versions of which will appear in different guises in different traditions and cultures. Hauser does not attempt to list its contents, but he does provide examples.
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