Harming Kin to Save Strangers: Further Evidence for Abnormally Utilitarian Moral Judgments after Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage

摘要

The ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) has been implicated as a criticalnneural substrate mediating the influence of emotion onnmoral reasoning. It has been shown that the vmPFC is especiallynimportant for making moral judgments about “high-conflict”nmoral dilemmas involving direct personal actions, that is, scenariosnthat pit compelling utilitarian considerations of aggregatenwelfare against the highly emotionally aversive act of directlyncausing harm to others [Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R.,nTranel,D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. Damage to the prefrontalncortex increases utilitarian moral judgments. Nature, 446,n908–911, 2007]. The current study was designed to elucidatenfurther the role of the vmPFC in high-conflict moral judgments,nincluding those that involve indirect personal actions, such asnindirectly causing harm to oneʼs kin to save a group of strangers.nWe found that patients with vmPFC lesions were more likely thannbrain-damaged and healthy comparison participants to endorsenutilitarian outcomes on high-conflict dilemmas regardless ofnwhether the dilemmas (1) entailed direct versus indirect personalnharms and (2) were presented from the Self versus Othernperspective. In addition, all groups were more likely to endorsenutilitarian outcomes in the Other perspective as compared withnthe Self perspective. These results provide important extensionsnof previous work, and the findings align with the proposal thatnthe vmPFC is critical for reasoning about moral dilemmas innwhich anticipating the social-emotional consequences of an actionn(e.g., guilt or remorse) is crucial for normal moral judgmentsn[Greene, J. D. Why are VMPFC patients more utilitarian?: A dualprocessntheory of moral judgment explains. Trends in CognitivenSciences, 11, 322–323, 2007; Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R.,nTranel,D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. Damage to the prefrontalncortex increases utilitarian moral judgments. Nature, 446,n908–911, 2007].