Joshua D. Greene | in “The Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective” | March 2015
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 religions 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.
