Current knowledge in moral cognition can improve medical ethics

Physicians frequently face ethical dilemmas when caring for patients. To help them to cope with these, biomedical ethics aims to implement moral norms for particular problems and contexts. As a means of studying the cognitive and neurobiological features underlying the respect for these norms, moral cognitive neuroscience could help us to understand and improve ethical questioning. The article reviews recent developments in the field and presents neurobiological arguments to highlight why some moral rules are universally shared and why some ethical responses are very dependent on context.