Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2011 Oct;23(10):3162-80. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00017. Epub 2011 Mar 31.
Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment of moral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged.
许多近期的研究都试图揭示道德判断的神经基础。然而，作为一个统一的类别，“道德判断”是否足够同质以进行科学研究，这一点仍不清楚。我们通过使用 fMRI 来检验这一假设，在三个道德领域（身体伤害、不诚实和性厌恶）内研究道德判断的神经相关性。我们发现，对于不同的道德领域，道德错误的判断由不同的神经系统来支持，而且这些差异比同一道德领域内的错误判断差异更为显著。不诚实、令人厌恶和有害的道德违背分别招募了与心理理论、情感处理和动作理解相关的大脑区域网络。与中性场景相比，背内侧前额叶皮质（dorsal medial pFC）是唯一被所有被判断为道德错误的场景激活的区域。然而，这个区域也被判断为不道德但不道德的不诚实和有害场景激活，表明该区域具有普遍的作用，既不是道德决策所特有的，也不能预测道德决策。这些结果表明，道德判断不是人类大脑中完全统一的能力，而是通过不同的神经系统来实现，具体取决于正在判断的违规类型。
