IS IT more morally acceptable to kill someone accidentally, or intend to kill them but fail? Most people would go for the first option - unless their brains are impaired in regions key to feeling emotion or divining the intentions of others.
This discovery is helping to unravel how we make moral judgements and has implications for people's fitness to serve as jurors or judges.
To probe emotion's role in moral decision-making, Liane Young and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned to nine people whose emotional responses were impaired due to damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Young presented these people with 24 moral dilemmas, each consisting of four different scenarios of varying acceptability. In one, for example, someone kills another by mistakenly adding poison to their coffee instead of sugar. In another scenario, a person tries but fails to kill another by deliberately poisoning their coffee. Participants ranked the moral acceptability of each scenario on a scale of 1 to 7.
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