Moral dilemmas often pit harm to one person against the welfare of many. Here, we examined whether choosing to protect an individual in such a scenario reflects a single process or arises from multiple mechanisms. Combining computational modeling with neuroimaging, we show that concern for harming an individual separates into two distinct dimensions: minimizing maximum harm to an individual and setting a threshold for acceptable harm. These dimensions drove distinct patterns of moral choice and engaged separable neural regions. Our findings demonstrate that the moral concern about harming an individual is multidimensional, uncovering the neurocomputational mechanisms by which people weigh consideration for individuals against the welfare of the group.

What are the consequences of holding different intuitive moral theories? Do distinct moral theories shape how people represent and reason about moral problems—and do these effects extend beyond contexts directly tied to a theory’s content? Recent research suggests that individual differences in utilitarian tendencies fall along two dimensions: a permissive attitude toward harming others for greater good (instrumental harm) and an impartial concern for others’ welfare (impartial beneficence). We conceptualized these dimensions as distinct intuitive moral theories that frame different patterns of moral judgment and behavior.

A transformative experience is epistemically revelatory and life-changing. When faced with transformative decisions, the lack of relevant life experience means people cannot predict their future subjective values (‘what it will be like’), making it impossible to make rational decisions. Here, we provide empirical support for this decision-theoretic bind by showing that evaluability bias manifests in transformative decisions: even if individuals value information about subjective value, they may assign low importance to subjective value due to its inherent difficulty in evaluation.

Humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate relative to many other species. We review the neural mechanisms supporting human cooperation, focusing on the prefrontal cortex. Taking a comparative approach, we consider shared and unique aspects of cooperative behaviors in humans relative to nonhuman primates, as well as divergences in brain structure that might support uniquely human aspects of cooperation.