The functional brain architecture of human morality

Human morality provides the foundation for many of the pillars of society, informing political legislation and guiding legal decisions while also governing everyday social interactions. In the past decade, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience have made tremendous progress in the effort to understand the neural basis of human morality. The emerging insights from this research point toward a model in which automatic processing in parallel neural circuits, many of which are associated with social emotions, evaluate the actions and intentions of others. Through various mechanisms of competition, only a subset of these circuits ultimately causes a decision or an action. This activity is experienced consciously as a subjective moral sense of right or wrong, and an interpretive process offers post hoc explanations designed to link the social stimulus with the subjective moral response using whatever explicit information is available.