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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).
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This paper considers the practical question of why people do not behave in the way they ought to behave. This question is a practical one, reaching both into the normative and descriptive domains of morality. That is, it concerns moral norms as well as empirical facts. We argue that two main problems usually keep us form acting and judging in a mor...
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... Norms are, by definition, widely considered standards of appropriate behavior. However, it has remained unclear how individuals' perception of norms translates into their actions [68]. While some studies have found that individuals' perceptions of prescriptive norms reliably correlate with group behavior [29], others suggest that prescriptions alone do not guarantee prosocial actions, and that participants comply with a norm only if they believe others also do so [22]. ...
Prosocial behaviors play a pivotal role for human societies, shaping critical domains such as healthcare, education, taxation, and welfare. Despite the ubiquity of norms that prescribe prosocial actions, individuals do not adhere to them consistently but often behave selfishly, thereby harming the collective good. Interventions to promote prosociality would therefore be beneficial but are often ineffective because we lack a thorough understanding of the various motives that govern prosocial behavior across different contexts. Here we present a computational and experimental framework to identify motives behind individual prosocial choices and to characterize how these vary across contexts with changing social norms. Using a series of experiments in which 575 participants either judge the normative appropriateness of different prosocial actions or choose between prosocial and selfish actions themselves, we first show that while most individuals are consistent in their judgements about behavior appropriateness, the actual prosocial behavior varies strongly across people. We used computational decision models to quantify the conflicting motives underlying the prosocial judgements and decisions, combined with a clustering approach to characterize different types of individuals whose judgements and choices reflect different motivational profiles. We identified four such types: Unconditionally selfish participants never behave prosocially, Cost-sensitive participants behave selfishly when prosocial actions are costly, Efficiency-sensitive participants choose actions that maximize total wealth, and Harm-sensitive participants prioritize avoiding harming others. When these four types of participants were exposed to different social environments where norms were judged or followed more or less by the group, they responded in fundamentally different ways to this change in others’ behavior. Our approach helps us better understand the origins of heterogeneity in prosocial judgments and behaviors and may have implications for policy making and the design of behavioral interventions.
... Metaethics is mainly involved in discussing moral psychology (Dubljevic & Racine, 2017;Heinzelmann et al., 2012;Kudlek, 2019), In sum, two salient conclusions emerged from the discussion about the foundations of MBE. First, the majority of the reviewed articles converge on the importance of not framing MBE as an isolated process but that it be integrated either with other types of bioenhancement or already existing practices such as therapy, rehabilitation, and education. ...
Should we implement biomedical interventions like psychopharmaceuticals or brain stimulation that aim to improve morality in society? Since 2008, moral bioenhancement (MBE) has received considerable attention in bioethics, generating wide scholarly disagreement. However, reviews on the subject are few and either outdated or not structured in method. This paper addresses this gap by providing a scoping review of the last 15 years of debate on MBE (from 2008 to 2022). To enhance clarity, we map the debate into three key areas: the conceptual foundations of MBE (foundational questions), the practical feasibility of MBE (practical questions), and the normative legitimacy of MBE (normative questions). Beyond identifying specific research gaps within these domains, our analysis reveals a general lack of empirical evidence either supporting or opposing MBE, as well as a shift in the literature from a universal interpretation of MBE to a more pragmatic one, targeting specific groups.
... In making ethical decisions, there are three most prominent contemporary theories which underlie the decision; consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics (Tobler et al., 2008). There is no clear, simple, and universally accepted definition for any the three theories (Heinzelmann et al., 2012), however this research tries to give a brief account on how these concepts are understood. ...
People make decisions throughout their day and most of decision making do not require much thought, however, when situations are more complicated, it is easy to feel hesitant. This hesitation creates two terms in decision making; moral and ethical. In teachers’ situation, their obligations and personal beliefs can, and sometimes do, conflict while deciding something. Hence, this study aims to seek for the tendency whether EFL teachers in Indonesia use ethical or moral guidance in making decision in dilemmatic situations and also to reveal their reasons in making those decisions. This study also investigates the relation between age and service time or experience as a teacher affecting their tendency in making decision. Mixed methods in the form of open-ended questionnaires with clustered-random sampling for selecting the 30 participants are used in this study. The findings show that ethical decision is the most used type of decision with duty-based ethical decision as the prominent reasoning. It was also found that, while insignificant, female participants made more ethical decisions than man. It was also revealed that the longer the experience one possesses, the more ethical decision will be made
... However, nudges have yet to be fully explored in the context of inducing overall moral development or moral reasoning. To date, there exists just a handful of theoretical commentary and empirical research (Desai & Kouchaki, 2017;Engelen et al., 2018;Heinzelmann et al., 2012). The gap is unfortunate because there exists a theoretical fit in using nudge principles to design and implement an intervention to activate and spur moral reasoning. ...
This experiment tested the use of a nudge-based texting intervention on the moral reasoning development of preservice teachers. The intervention sent cellphone text messages of moral scenarios in one of two forms over the course of 42 days (6 weeks). Results showed no significant interaction between group assignment and time across all four indices of moral reasoning development. Findings present initial evidence that nudge-based text messages do not affect moral reasoning development of preservice teachers. Discussion reviews implications with design and use of a nudge-based approach to support moral reasoning development among teachers.
... The case of the German Aviation Security Act bears many similarities to the trolley problem, a prototypical moral dilemma that has been discussed in both the psychological and philosophical literatures (Foot 1983;Thomson 1985;Heinzelmann et al. 2012). The standard version of the trolley problem is a hypothetical moral dilemma in which a runaway trolley is approaching a group of five people on the track. ...
In two studies, emotion emphasis effects on moral judgment are demonstrated. The studies indicate that emphasizing negative consequences in trolley-type dilemmas with emotional language produces more utilitarian responses if such emphasis is on the consequences of the deontological option, and more deontological responses if it is on the consequences of the utilitarian option. This effect was moderated by action-phase related mindsets. Individuals in an implemental mindset were less susceptible to the emotion emphasis effect than individuals in a deliberative mindset (Studies 1, 2). By also using an eye-tracking task in Study 2, we demonstrated that our implemental mindset participants’ visual attention was more focused—in particular on goal-directed means—than that of the deliberative mindset participants.
... Concepts of morality have advanced over the past decade (e.g., Heinzelmann et al. 2012;Iyer et al. 2012;Metz 2007;Sachdeva et al. 2011;Suhler and Churchland 2011;Ugazio et al. 2014;Vauclair et al. 2014), with some previous definitions of morality limited to concerns at an individual level regarding justice and fairness, and others pointing to the "big three" of community, autonomy, and divinity (Graham et al. 2011;Shweder et al. 1997). For example, Haidt and Kesebir (2010) proposed an expanded approach, which defined morals according to their role, incorporating previous frameworks while also explaining morality beyond the obligations of the individual: "Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible" (p. ...
Since 2010, scholars have made major contributions to cross-cultural research, especially regarding similarities and differences across world regions and countries in people’s values, beliefs, and morality. This paper accumulates and analyzes extant multi-national and quantitative studies of these facets of global culture. The paper begins with a summary of the modern history of cross-cultural research, then systematically reviews major empirical studies published since 2010, and next analyzes extant approaches to interpret how the constructs of belief, morality, and values have been theorized and operationalized. The analysis reveals that the field of cross-cultural studies remains dominated by Western approaches, especially studies developed and deployed from the United States and Western Europe. While numerous surveys have been translated and employed for data collection in countries beyond the U.S. and Western Europe, several countries remain under-studied, and the field lacks approaches that were developed within the countries of interest. The paper concludes by outlining future directions for the study of cross-cultural research. To progress from the colonialist past embedded within cross-cultural research, in which scholars from the U.S. and Western Europe export research tools to other world regions, the field needs to expand to include studies locally developed and deployed within more countries and world regions.
... They may turn to international law, natural law or folk-ethical considerations, such as the golden rule "not doing to others what you would not have them do to you" [104]. In practice, the associated dilemma may increase depending on the awareness of the consequences of actions [105] and individual consciousness regarding altruistic (or egoistic) standards. Kohlberg's model [106] helps to structure the dilemma and emphasises the function of a human-rights-based approach in governance. ...
Sound governance arrangement in socio-ecological systems (human niche) combines different means of sense-making. The sustainability of human niche-building depends on the governability of the social-ecological systems (SES) forming the niche. Experiences from small-scale marine fisheries and seabed mining illustrate how ethical frameworks, civic participation and formalised guidance combine in the context of a “blue economy”. Three lines of inquiries contextualise these experiences driving research questions, such as “what is the function of ethics for governability?” First, complex-adaptive SES are featured to emphasise the sense-making feedback loop in SES. Actors are part of this feedback loop and can use different means of sense-making to guide their actions. Second, the “Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries” and geoethical thinking are featured to highlight the relevance of actor-centric concepts. Third, Kohlberg’s model of “stages of moral adequacy” and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are used to show how to strengthen actor-centric virtue-ethics. Combining these lines of inquiry leads to the conclusion that ethical frameworks, civic participation and formalised guidance, when put in a mutual context, support governability and multi-actor/level policy-making. Further research could explore how creativity can strengthen civic participation, a feature only sketched here.
... There is no consensus in regards to what constitutes a moral or immoral act (Heinzelmann, Ugazio, & Tobler, 2012). Yet morality is almost ubiquitous. ...
... To recapitulate, individual, collective and institutional agents effectively face choices how to justify operations at high sea, whether they turn to international law, natural law or folk-ethical considerations, such as the golden rule 'not doing to others what you would not have them do to you' (Finnis 2016). In practice, this dilemma may tighten depending on the awareness of the consequences of actions (Heinzelmann et al. 2012) and individual consciousness regarding altruistic (or egoistic) standards. ...
Sound governance arrangement in socio-ecological systems (human niche) use ethical frameworks, civic participation and formalized guidance. To explore this hypothesis, experiences from marine small-scale fisheries and seabed mining drive the research question ’what is the function of ethics for governability?’ Subsequently, this essay discusses generic features of complex-adaptive socio-ecological systems, the commonalities of the 'Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries' and Geoethics, Kohlberg’s model of ‘stages of moral adequacy’ when applied to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and the function of creativity to enable effective civic participation. Combining these lines of inquiries leads to the conclusion that ethical frameworks, civic participation and formalized guidance mutually support governability, multi-actor/level policy-making, and the sustainability of human niche-building.
... At the neural level, both value-based reinforcement learning and prosocial behaviors engage overlapping neural systems with moral judgment. Decades of neuroimaging research have identified multiple brain regions associated with moral judgment, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior cingulate cortex, superior temporal cortex, temporal poles, temporoparietal junction, striatum, amygdala, and insula [16][17][18] . Furthermore, recent studies have provided evidence that subjective value, in both moral and non-moral contexts, is represented in a domain-general manner, in ventral striatum (VS) and vmPFC [19][20][21][22] . ...
... Resting neural activity. Controlling for variables showing significant group differences (i.e., Openness and Neuroticism), the post-con group showed increased CBF in bilateral VS, mainly located in the nucleus accumbens extending to putamen and caudate (peak x, y, z coordinates = [− 16,8,8]; [16,6,8]), vmPFC extending to subgenual ACC (vmPFC/sgACC; peak x, y, z coordinates = [10, 24, −8]), and inferior frontal gyrus adjacent to anterior insula (IFG/AIS; peak x, y, z coordinates = [−40, 10, 20]) compared to the pre-con + con group. All these clusters survived at whole brain cluster-level family-wise error (FWE) correction at p < 0.01. ...
... Resting neural activity. Controlling for variables showing significant group differences (i.e., Openness and Neuroticism), the post-con group showed increased CBF in bilateral VS, mainly located in the nucleus accumbens extending to putamen and caudate (peak x, y, z coordinates = [− 16,8,8]; [16,6,8]), vmPFC extending to subgenual ACC (vmPFC/sgACC; peak x, y, z coordinates = [10, 24, −8]), and inferior frontal gyrus adjacent to anterior insula (IFG/AIS; peak x, y, z coordinates = [−40, 10, 20]) compared to the pre-con + con group. All these clusters survived at whole brain cluster-level family-wise error (FWE) correction at p < 0.01. ...
People vary considerably in moral reasoning. According to Kohlberg’s theory, individuals who reach the highest level of post-conventional moral reasoning judge moral issues based on deeper principles and shared ideals rather than self-interest or adherence to laws and rules. Recent research has suggested the involvement of the brain’s frontostriatal reward system in moral judgments and prosocial behaviors. However, it remains unknown whether moral reasoning level is associated with differences in reward system function. Here, we combined arterial spin labeling perfusion and blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging and measured frontostriatal reward system activity both at rest and during a sequential risky decision making task in a sample of 64 participants at different levels of moral reasoning. Compared to individuals at the pre-conventional and conventional level of moral reasoning, post-conventional individuals showed increased resting cerebral blood flow in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Cerebral blood flow in these brain regions correlated with the degree of post-conventional thinking across groups. Post-conventional individuals also showed greater task-induced activation in the ventral striatum during risky decision making. These findings suggest that high-level post-conventional moral reasoning is associated with increased activity in the brain’s frontostriatal system, regardless of task-dependent or task-independent states.
