86 The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Decision Making

ABSTRACT This article reviews recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of moral judgment and behavior. This field is conceived, not as the study of a distinct set of neural func-tions, but as an attempt to understand how the brain’s core neural systems coordinate to solve problems that we define, for nonneuroscientific reasons, as “moral. ” These systems enable the representation of value, cognitive control, the imagination of distal events, and the representation of mental states. Research examines the brains of morally patho-logical individuals, the responses of healthy brains to proto-typically immoral actions, and the brain’s responses to more complex moral problems such as philosophical and economic dilemmas. Cognitive neuroscience aims to understand the mind in physical terms. This endeavor assumes that the mind can be understood in physical terms, and, insofar as it is successful, validates that assumption. Against this philosophical backdrop, the cognitive neuroscience of moral judgment takes on special significance. Moral judgment is, for many, the quintessential operation of the mind beyond the body, the earthly signature of the soul (Greene, 2011). (In many religious traditions it is, after all, the quality of a soul’s moral judgment that determines where it ends up.) Thus, the prospect of understanding moral judgment in physical terms is especially alluring, or unsettling, depending on your point of view. In this brief review I provide a progress report on our attempts to understand how the human brain makes moral judgments and decisions. The paradox of the “moral brain” The fundamental problem with the “moral brain ” is that it threatens to take over the entire brain, and thus cease to be a meaningful neuroscientific topic. This is not because morality is meaningless, but rather because neuroscience is centrally concerned with physical mechanisms, and it’s increasingly clear that morality has few, if any, neural mechanisms of its own (Green