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The Neurobiology of Moral Cognition: Relation to Theory of Mind, Empathy, and Mind-Wandering

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Handbook of Neuroethics

Abstract

A sense of morality forms the fabric of human societies. There is an ongoing debate whether the cognitive and emotional sources of moral decisions might be closely related to theory of mind, an abstract–cognitive capacity, and empathy, an automatic–affective capacity. That is, moral decisions are believed to imply representation of other individuals’ thoughts and emotional states, respectively. Moreover, it has been noticed that neural activation patterns during moral cognition are very similar to the brain areas engaged during mind-wandering, i.e., neural correlates of an endogenously controlled state in the absence of a specific mental task.

Investigation of the neural substrates underlying moral cognition was greatly facilitated by the advent of neuroimaging techniques. This growing number of observation on brain activation patterns during the aforementioned tasks now provides rich substrates for a quantitative integration of the current literature. Such large-scale integration, identifying brain areas consistently engaged by moral, social, empathic, and unconstrained cognition, then provides a quantitative basis for the comparison of their neuronal implementation. This chapter thus quantitatively assesses and reviews the neurobiological relationship between the moral network and the neural networks subserving theory of mind, empathy, and unconstrained cognition.

In conclusion, the neural network subserving moral decisions probably reflects functional integration of distributed heterogeneous networks, is dissociable into cognitive and affective components, as well as highly similar to the brain’s default activity pattern.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Neurowissenschaften und Medizin (INM-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, D-52425, Jülich, Germany

    Danilo Bzdok & Simon B. Eickhoff

  2. Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, MTI II, Wendlingweg 2, D-52074, Aachen, Germany

    Dominik Groß

Authors
  1. Danilo Bzdok
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  2. Dominik Groß
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  3. Simon B. Eickhoff
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Correspondence to Simon B. Eickhoff .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Jens Clausen

  2. The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Neil Levy

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Bzdok, D., Groß, D., Eickhoff, S.B. (2015). The Neurobiology of Moral Cognition: Relation to Theory of Mind, Empathy, and Mind-Wandering. In: Clausen, J., Levy, N. (eds) Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4707-4_161

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