Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making

Moral decision-making refers to the behavior of compliance with (or in violation of) moral norms, which often involves the tradeoff between personal profits and the welfare of others. With the significant progress in various neuroscience techniques, substantial evidence has been collected concerning the neurobiological basis of human morality in the past two decades. However, it remains largely unknown the neural mechanisms underlying how we make (im)moral decisions which are contingent on social contexts. This article provides a panoramic view of the latest advance in the neuroscience of moral decision-making, particularly the neurocomputational substrates of how we trade our own interests against various moral costs, how we react to the other's behavior given the consequence and the intention behind the behavior, and how we infer the other's moral character and learn for the other's interest.