Watching How the Brain Works as It Weighs a Moral Dilemma. Different moral dilemmas engage different parts of the brain, according to the first study watching brain processes as subjects conisder such problems.

Dr. Jonathan Cohen of Princeton, a psychologist and expert on brain imaging who worked on the study, says it begins to provide tools to understand why people with different cultural backgrounds can arrive at different conclusions about moral dilemmas, like taking a life for some greater good. If people’s gut-level emotions are organized differently as a result of their backgrounds, he said, they may reason differently about what is right or wrong.

Experts say the findings may be useful to philosophers as well. While moral philosophy deals with ethics and logic rather than emotion and biology, Dr. Stephen Stich, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers, says that in the real world people have feelings about life- and-death issues. Knowing how their brains behave as they wrestle with difficult issues like abortion and euthanasia may be more useful than most philosophers realize, Dr. Stich said. New York Times