Moral Reasoning: A Network Neuroscience Perspective

Through imagining possible actions and considering their consequences, we are able to reason about the morality of behavior – judging whether an action is morally right or wrong. Neuroscience research indicates that moral reasoning depends on a complex, broadly distributed network of brain regions that interact in a both cooperative and competitive manner. Understanding the underlying neurobiology that governs how these regions dynamically interact to produce patterns of behavior is therefore of interest to the field. Currently, prominent theories suggest that moral judgments (consequentialist or deontological) are the product of two distinct cognitive systems (i.e. a dual-process framework). Network neuroscience, an emerging field that measures and interprets brain activity through the framework of modern network science, is positioned to expand our understanding of this dual-process framework by examining how topological properties of networks influence consequentialist and deontological reasoning, and how these two processing systems interact in order to imagine hypothetical scenarios during complex deontological reasoning tasks. In this chapter, we review evidence from neuroscience that bears on our understanding of the dual-process moral reasoning framework and advance a network neuroscience perspective on the neurobiological substrates that underlie it.