Moral Dilemma Judgment: A Neuroeconomic Approach

Abstract

Morals and ethics are important issues in human societies. Recently, the development of new techniques for studying the human brain has brought moral and ethical discussions to the realm of neuroscience investigations. Controversies still remain regarding the results of studies about morals and ethics and the understanding of the neurodynamics of dilemma judgment, which seems to depend on the nature of the studied dilemma (e.g., personal versus impersonal). Here, we proposed to understand the differences between personal and impersonal dilemmas in the context of losses modeled by neuroeconomic theory. The results show that the dilemma solution correlates nicely with the expected losses and is associated with three different patterns of brain activity that are clearly different for accepting or rejecting the proposed dilemma solution what may explain the neurodynamic differences in solving personal vs impersonal dilemma observed in the present investigation and also described in the literature.

Keywords: neuroeconomics, decision making, moral dilemmas, EEG, brain activity