ABSTRACT
Modern neuroscience reveals that typical brains generate moral intuitions that come to people in seemingly automatic ways and without much effort on their part. Elliot was a husband, father, and responsible employee of a business firm. Importantly, though, Patient Elliot scored quite well on a test designed to determine his moral reasoning abilities. The Standard Issue Moral Judgment test is designed to determine what level of moral reasoning a test-taker has obtained. The moral brain needs the emotional and social brain to work well. The results of the very sophisticated analysis revealed a consistent pattern of convergence between moral cognition and activation of the social brain. Neuroscientific studies have begun to explore the brains and moral decision making of psychopaths. Adult psychopaths tend to lack empathy and self-control and tend to confuse the breaking of moral standards with violating mere normative conventions.
