Separating Agency From Deeds in Immoral Neurological Patients: A Potential Challenge to the ADC Model

摘要

Dubljevi? and Racine (2014) present an interesting and comprehensive attempt to explain moral judgments using the agency-deeds-consequences (ADC) model, highlighting the need for impartiality to particular moral theories when designing experimental moral dilemmas, the consideration of virtue ethics in addition to deontological and utilitarian variables, and the importance of unconscious cognitive processing and heuristics in shaping moral intuitions. However, in neurological patients with deficits in moral decision making, such as those with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage or behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), the effects of agency and deeds on moral intuitions are not independent of one and other, as suggested by the authors. In these patients, neither intentions of agents nor moral rules regarding certain harm deeds influence moral intuitions. This reflects a more general inconsistency of the agency criteria in their argument, which incorporates judgments of an agent's character and moral "goodness" over time in addition to the agent's current intentions at the time of an immoral action, which may influence moral intuitions differently. Specifically, psychological and patient data demonstrate that intentions are central to moral judgments about deeds, distinct from the influence of agent virtues or action consequences.