Moral cognition and its neural constituents

Abstract

Identifying the neural mechanisms of moral cognition is especially difficult. In part, this is because moral cognition taps multiple cognitive sub-processes, being a highly distributed, whole-brain affair. The assumptions required to make progress in identifying the neural constituents of moral cognition might simplify morally salient stimuli to the point that they no longer activate the requisite neural architectures, but the right experiments can overcome this difficulty. The current evidence allows us to draw a tentative conclusion: the moral psychology required by virtue theory is the most neurobiologically plausible.