The Limbic Brain, Moral Distress and Ethical Decision‐Making in Nursing Practice

ABSTRACT Nursing practice unfolds at the intersection of the body's regulatory systems and the emotional and social realities of care. The paper examines how the limbic brain mediates between the body's internal environment, interoception, allostatic regulation and autonomic arousal, and the external social world shaped by hierarchy, norms, power and institutional pressures. It also explores how this mediating role influences moral perception and clinical decision‐making. Drawing on Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis and contemporary work on affective neuroscience, I analyse the strengths and limitations of the claim that emotion is not opposed to reason but an essential element of it. I integrate the complementary neurocognitive perspectives of predictive processing, interoceptive inference and the neural architecture of moral emotion, with nursing ethics literature on moral distress, to show how affective states can both guide and distort clinical judgement, particularly under chronic threat. To ground this analysis, I draw on Foucault's genealogy of discipline and visibility, Morgan's account of modern suffering and Arnault's exploration of redemption. Emotion