Figure 1.

Brain regions implicated in moral judgment and decision-making. (A) Cortical regions. Note that the posterior cingulate cortex and the angular gyrus (temporoparietal junction) have also been implicated in moral judgments (shown in Figure 2). aPFC, anterior prefrontal cortex; aTL, anterior temporal lobe; DLPFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; lOFC, lateral orbitofrontal cortex; STS, superior temporal sulcus; vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Adapted with permission from Moll et al. (2005). (B,C) Example for striatal involvement in moral decision-making. The task employed moral dilemmas. In each trial, subjects rated how morally acceptable it was to save a group of individuals from death with a known probability rather than a single individual with certainty. Across trials, group size, and probability varied. Group size and probability should be multiplied to compute the expected number of lives saved. (B) Regions in ventral striatum previously identified by Knutson et al. (2005) as processing reward value. (C) In the regions shown in (B), individual neural sensitivity (contrast estimates of activation increases) correlated with behavioral sensitivity (beta estimates in rating) to the expected number of lives saved. Adapted with permission from Shenhav and Greene (2010). This finding is in line with the notion that moral functions can be underpinned by neural mechanisms that have originally evolved for different functions, such as reward processing (Tobler et al., 2008).