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.
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Acknowledgements
I thank P. M. Churchland and P. S. Churchland for their close reading of the manuscript and invaluable advice about its structure and content. In addition, J. Greene's sceptical remarks were extremely helpful. J. Moll also provided useful preprints of his team's work in this area.
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Casebeer, W. Moral cognition and its neural constituents. Nat Rev Neurosci 4, 840–846 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1223
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1223
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