Moral judgment and the brain: A functional approach to the question of emotion and cognition in moral judgment integrating psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology

Abstract

Moral judgment can be defined as the evaluation of actions with respect to social norms and values established in a society (such as not stealing or being an honest citizen). For our purposes, we use the term moral judgment as an inclusive description of all judgments and decision-making processes about those things that ought to be done and those that ought not to be done, particularly in the social context of interactions with other people and do not distinguish between moral and socio-conventional judgments. In the literature (Turiel, 1983; Smetana, 1993; Blair, 1995; Nucci, 2001) this distinction is used to differentiate cases where harm is caused to a person (= moral transgressions) from cases where only socio-conventional norms are violated (=∈conventional transgressions) without necessarily causing harm (e.g., spitting in a glass of wine at a dinner party).