The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in moral cognition: A value-centric hypothesis

ABSTRACT

Trends in moral psychology largely support the role that emotion plays in moral cognition with human lesion studies offering the most compelling evidence to date. Specifically, data from ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) patients on moral judgment tasks has suggested the necessity of having intact emotion to behave in morally appropriate ways. However, patients with vmPFC damage also have deficits in a variety of complex judgment and decision-making tasks, regardless of whether emotion is involved. This paper argues that a basic information processing perspective of vmPFC functionality is a better interpretation of vmPFC patient deficits, specifically with the vmPFC being necessary for value assessment rather than being specific to emotion.

KEYWORDS:

• Ventromedial prefrontal cortex
• moral judgment
• moral cognition
• intention/outcome
• emotion
• value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.