How Can We Make Moral Judgment?

How can one make moral judgement? The answers to this question constitute two different voices in philosophical history. Kantian ethics insist that the logical starting point of moral judgement is the hypothesis of rational human beings. Categorical Imperatives is the only yardstick for reference. Utilitarianism argue that moral judgement derive from concerning for the feelings of others, human welfare has become the focus of moral judgment. As a director of Moral Cognition lab at Harvard University, Joshua D. Greene claims that armchair philosophers do not really know what it actually mean when ordinary people make moral judgement in daily life, He cites empirical evidence from psychology and cognitive science to demonstrate that deontological moral judgments are actually motivated by people’s emotion, and that consequentialism moral judgment is the result of rational moral reasoning, which is absolutely contrary to the traditional view, especially for Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. Faced with challenge posed by Greene, I will first have a scrutiny into Greene’s empirical study in this thesis, and then attempt to criticize his study from two distinctive dimension:descriptive and normative, This will indicates that Green’s criticism of Kant’s ethics is untenable.