ABSTRACT
Making a moral judgment is fundamentally a neurosemiotically mediated action. For an action to be considered right or wrong, a particular meaning must be associated with that action. Construing this meaning depends on a variety of cultural and contextual factors as well as on the interaction of extended neural networks alongside genetic and hormonal factors. In this chapter, I address the links between moral cognition and neurosemiotics, reviewing their biological (neural, genetic, and hormonal) bases. I also highlight the importance of implementing a multilevel approach to the study of moral cognition, integrating semiotics, psychology, and biology. Such an approach promises a deeper understanding of the complex domain of moral cognition and the underlying biological mechanisms that help us to extract meaning from our social interactions, through which we form judgments about morality.
