Imagine that I present the following research proposal.
I am going to bring in people off of the street and pay them some small amount of money to participate in an experiment.
In this experiment, I am going to show them pictures of planets and asteroids and ask them, "What is the average surface temperature of that object?" And I am going to record their answers.
What makes this project interesting is that I am going to vary the temperature in the room, or the background music, or introduce some type of odor, and I am going to measure how their answer is affected by these variables.
For example, one hypthesis that I might test is that there will be a direct relationship between the answers that people give and the temperature in the room, or that music with a faster tempo will be associated with a higher estimate of the average surface temperature of the planet.
As another part of this research they perform brain scans on people while they conduct these tests. They want to see what parts of the brain light up when they are asked to report the surface temperature of a planet and see how changing the environment not only affects their answers but which parts of the brain are being used to provide those answers.
Here is the kicker: I am going to call myself an astronomer. I am going to report that I am involved in a detailed and important study of the planets that promises to yield important empircal findings relevant in the field of astronomy. Astronomy textbooks will have to be rewritten as a result of the scientific research I am going.
I suspect a few astronomers might protest, "Without commenting on how useful and important your findings are, you are not engaged in astronomy and you are not studying the planets. You are barking up the wrong academic tree if you want to call that research astronomy."
But I am going to ignore them. I'm not even going to try to offer a defense. I am simply going to continue on with my research and, whenever I report my findings, I am going to intruduce myself as an astronomer engaged in an emirical and scientific study of the planets and asteroids in our solar system.
Well, there are people who are doing this same thing when it comes to morality. They ask people to judge the morality of different actions and record the results. They measure how changes in the environment - from the presence of particular odors to the presence of chocolate - can affect their answers.
And they tell us that they are engaged in the scientific study of morality.
This is utter nonsense. These people are no more involved in the study of morality than the people in the first case were involved in the study of the planets.
If you want to study morality, you need to give me some way to answer the question of whether particular acts are really wrong or really right - not what people's guesses are under different types of conditions. If you are actually studying the planets then you are going to report the actual surface temperature. If you are actually studying morality then you are going to report on the actual rightness and wrongness of certain actions.
It's a simple argument to make. It is difficult to imagine a simpler argument. Yet, there is a group out there, made up mostly of scientists and atheists, who simply shut their ears to this argument because they are enraptured by the idea that they are engaged in the scientific study of morality itself.
With fingers in their ears, they shout, "La la la la. I can't hear you!"
Furthermore, in the same way that there is such a massive gap between how we determine the actual surface temperature of a planet and the effects of environmental influences on the guesses that people provide, we can expect a similar massive gap between how we determine the actual rightness or wrongness of an action and the environmental influences on the guesses that people provide.
We can expect the study of actual rightness and wrongness to be nothing at all like what these scientists are actually studying.
Of course, I am assuming that there is an actual rightness and wrongness to be studied. Actually, I deny that it is an "assumption". It is, instead, a rationally defensible fact. However, I do not need it to be the case that this is true to make my point.
If there is no actual rightness or wrongness to be reported, then any study of people's reports of rightness or wrongness is a study of optical illusions and self-deception. It is a study of how the brain causes people to adopt beliefs that have no correspondence with the real world - that are, in fact, false.
In this case, it may be interesting to study how our brain and senses deceive us into making these judgments, but when it comes to the actual rightness and wrongness of things, there is none.
Regardless of whether you believe that rightness and wrongness are real, there is still a huge gap between the study of the environmental influences on our reports of the rightness and wrongness of things, and its actual rightness and wrongness. One does not have to assume moral realism to make this distinction.
Furthermore, if there is no actual rightness and wrongness to study and report, then we still must recognize the fact that nature is giving us imaginary or illusionary justifications for killing, imprisoning, and otherwise harming each other. If there is no actual rightness or wrongness, then every exercise in "justice" is just another case like that of the mother who drowns her children to protect them from satan. We are killing, maiming, imprisoning, and otherwise harming each other for imaginary reasons - for reasons in the realm of "make-believe."
Or, rightness or wrongness are real.
But that's a different question. The question at issue here is whether people who measure the environmental influences on moral judgment are involved in the study of morality. The answer is to be found in the answer to the question, "Are people who study the environmental effects of guesses as to the surface temperature of a planet . . . are those people astronomers? Are they really studying the planets?"