It seems that our capacity for complex, life-and-death decisions depends on brain structures that originally evolved for making more basic, self-interested decisions about things like obtaining calories. Many of the brain regions we find to be active in major moral decisions have been shown to perform similar functions when people and animals make commonplace decisions about ordinary goods such as money and food.It probably also supports, in general terms, the Lakoff/Johnson contention about the co-option of neural 'circuitry' for thinking analogically or metaphorically in general. I think it may also indicate that a single-purpose language may not exist neurologically, so much as a coming together of a number of capacities (of which the metaphorical re-use would be one.
Major moral decisions use general-purpose brain circuits to manage uncertainty:
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