Learning to make moral judgements based on considerations beyond self-interest is a fundamental aspect of moral development. A deficit in such learning is associated with poor socialization and criminal behaviour. The neural systems required for the acquisition and maturation of moral competency are not well understood. Here we show in a unique sample of neurological patients that focal lesions...

Decision making is a dynamic process. Alternatives compete over time, and this competition plays out in sensorimotor processes. This is true not just for perceptual decisions or simple categorisation tasks, but also for moral decisions, which are the outcome of a complex interplay of intuition, emotion and reasoning. In this experiment, we first establish a descriptive and causal link between g...

BACKGROUND As stigma is a socially constructed concept, it would follow that stigma related to sexual behaviours and sexually transmitted infections would carry with it many of the gender-based morals that are entrenched in social constructs of sexuality. In many societies, women tend to be judged more harshly with respect to sexual morals, and would therefore have a different experience of sti...

Evolution has since the publication of The origin of species (1859) been a source of inspiration, and a bone of contention, not only for biology but also for philosophy and the sciences of man. The moral consequences of Darwinism have been a concern for ethicists since Herbert Spencer elevated the survival of the fittest to a norm underwriting cultural and societal progress—hard for the individ...

INTRODUCTION Human moral decision-making has long been a topic of philosophical debate, and, more recently, a topic for empirical investigation. Central to this investigation is the extent to which emotional processes underlie our decisions about moral right and wrong. Neuroscience offers a unique perspective on this question by addressing whether brain regions associated with emotional process...