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How the Mind Matters for Morality

Attributing minds to people and reasoning about the contents of those minds are crucial components of moral judgment and social interaction. This article provides a review of recent work seeking to illuminate the psychological and neurobiological processes that guide human moral cognition. First, we review the role of social cognitive processes in moral judgment, including the role of mental state reasoning or theory of mind (ToM)—reasoning about people's beliefs, intentions, and motivations. Second, we explore how social cognitive processes such as ToM are deployed for different kinds of moral judgments, supporting the proposal that distinct moral norms are associated with distinct adaptive functions. Third, we examine not only how people represent others' beliefs and intentions but also how people's own moral beliefs influence their actual behavior. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how understanding the psychological and neural processes that guide human moral cognition can contribute to bioethics more broadly.