Two recent meta-analyses have been conducted on brain areas consistently showing increased activation in moral decisionmaking studies. Bzdok et al. (2012) performed an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) analysis of morality, empathy and ToM and
found overlap in activation for ToM and morality. Experiments were only included in the ‘moral cognition’ domain, which they defined as a ‘‘reflection of the social appropriateness of people’s actions” (p. 789) if the task required participants to make judgements of other people’s actions. It is, therefore, not surprising that
there was overlap with ToM brain activation, as moral evaluation tasks require thinking in the third person to evaluate the actions of others, which may include inferring others’ intentions to judge the permissibility of their actions. It remains to be investigated whether such an overlap with ToM regions would occur for moral
response decision tasks. Sevinc and Spreng’s (2014) recent systematic
review of brain processes underlying moral cognition found activation in the default mode network. They compared brain activity for active vs. passive judgements and found that active judgements showed more activity in the temporoparietal junction
(TPJ), angular gyrus, and temporal pole compared to passive viewing.
Within the active domain however, they did not distinguish between moral response decision judgements and moral evaluation judgements, so it still remains to be investigated whether brain activity differs between these two types of moral decisions.