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In recent decades moral identity has been examined as a possible explanatory construct for the question of what motivates moral behaviour. Moral identity is defined as the extent to which a person considers moral concerns to be central and important to their subjective sense of who they are. The developmental nature of this construct, however, remains poorly understood. In the present thesis, a critical review of the current developmental model is undertaken, and an alternative model is proposed, in which moral identity first emerges during middle childhood, not in early childhood and well before adolescence. Three studies are presented which examine the proposition that moral identity first emerges during middle childhood, and furthermore, that the capacity to experience, recognise and attribute moral shame also develops during this period as a consequence of an emerging moral identity. In Study One, middle childhood aged participants were found to be more likely to attribute shame to protagonists under moral identity failure story conditions than their younger counterparts. In Study Two, under conditions of unobserved moral identity failure, older participants tended to attribute guilt or shame while younger participants tended to attribute fear or happiness to protagonists. In Study Three, middle childhood aged participants were more likely to attribute shame under conditions entailing either moral or physical identity failure while younger participants were more likely to attribute other emotions. Taken together, results from the three studies lend support to the two major hypotheses of the present thesis, namely that moral identity first begins to emerge during middle childhood (i.e. around 8yrs) and that a liability to shame - and therefore the capacity to experience, recognise and attribute shame - also develops during this period as a consequence of an emerging moral identity. Implications of this research and directions for future research are discussed.

Dewey’s conception of moral cognition as a natural problem-solving process of imaginative deliberation is . naturalistic insofar as it treats moral agents as embodied social animals operating in the natural world, without possessing anything like an eternal soul, transcendent ego, pure reason, or other disembodied mental faculty. Dewey’s view is social-psychological because it sees morality as arising from social embeddedness and interactions with others within communities of interdependent persons. It is reconstructive in that it regards moral appraisal and deliberation as part of an ongoing process of attempting to transform developing experience for the better. It is fallibilist in recognizing that there is no all-encompassing or transcendent standpoint from which to make moral judgments. Finally, Dewey sees moral deliberation neither as rule following nor as mere emotional response but rather as imaginative exploration of how people might reduce conflict and deepen and enrich meaning within situations rife with conflict and tension.

Episodic simulation, the ability to imagine the self in a specific time and place, can be used to imagine future prosocial events. Recent work on episodic simulation indicates that imagining scenes of helping a person in need increases one's own intent to help. This work, however, leaves open the question of underlying mechanisms. While research on imagination points to the sensory quality of the imagined event as critical to the effect, research on moral cognition suggests that self-referential processing—imagining oneself versus another person—may be a key feature. Across three experiments, we investigated the role of self-referential processing and sensory quality on enhancing prosocial intentions via episodic simulation. The findings suggest that we are willing to help others, in part, because we can vividly imagine ourselves—or someone else—doing so.

Modern technological means allow for meaningful interaction across arbitrary distances, while human morality evolved in environments in which individuals needed to be spatially close in order to interact. We investigate how people integrate knowledge about modern technology with their ancestral moral dispositions to help relieve nearby suffering. Our first study establishes that spatial proximity between an agent's means of helping and the victims increases people's judgement of helping obligations, even if the agent is constantly far personally. We then report and meta-analyse 20 experiments elucidating the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect, which include inferences of increased efficaciousness and personal involvement. Implications of our findings for the scientific understanding of ancestral moral dispositions in modern environments are discussed, as well as suggestions for how these insights might be exploited to increase charitable giving. Our meta-analysis provides a practical example ...

Behavioral and neurological studies have revealed that emotions influence moral cognition. Although moral stimuli are emotionally charged, the time course of interactions between emotions and moral judgments remains unknown. In the present study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of the interaction between emotional processes and moral cognition. The results revealed that when making moral judgments, the time course of the event-related potential (ERP) waveform was significantly different between high emotional arousal and low emotional arousal contexts. Different stages of processing were distinguished, showing distinctive interactions between emotional processes and moral reasoning. The precise time course of moral intuition and moral reasoning sheds new light on theoretical models of moral psychology. Specifically, the N1 component (interpreted as representing moral intuition) did not appear to be influenced by emotional arousal. However, the N2 component and late positive potential were strongly affected by emotional arousal; the slow wave was influenced by both emotional arousal and morality, suggesting distinct moral processing at different emotional arousal levels.

This article studies the moral metaphor system focusing on a subsystem consisting of five pairs of MORAL and IMMORAL metaphors whose source concepts represent some contrastive categories in our visual experience: WHITE and BLACK, LIGHT and DARK, CLEAR and MURKY, CLEAN and DIRTY, PURE and IMPURE. The study examines whether these moral metaphors are manifested in Chinese and English, looking for linguistic evidence in both languages. It is found that the studied moral metaphors are applicable in both languages at varying degrees. This finding suggests that these metaphors may range from being widespread to being universal. The study then further analyzes them regarding whether they are primary or complex metaphors and whether they are equal in status, applying a decompositional approach to metaphor analysis. The result suggests that the moral metaphors under study are complex rather than primary metaphors, and that they are actually not equal in status, some depending on others in meaning making in our mora...

In this article, I use infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness as a test case to identify the extents and limits of infants' sociomoral cognition and behavior. Infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness is in some ways commensurate with this understanding in older children and adults; infants expect fair distributions of resources and evaluate others based on their adherence to or violation of fairness norms. Yet these sensitivities also differ in important ways, including that infants do not spontaneously punish unfair individuals. I address questions about the role of experience in infants' development of sociomoral cognition and behavior, and whether infants' moral cognition and behavior are differentiated appropriately (from their social knowledge and behavior) and integrated (across subaspects of morality). I suggest two approaches to move the field forward: investigating processes that contribute to developing sociomoral cognition and behavior, and considering infants' successes and failures in this domain.

Despite sharing conceptual overlap, morality and self-control research have led largely separate lives. In this article, we highlight neglected connections between these major areas of psychology. To this end, we first note their conceptual similarities and differences. We then show how morality research, typically emphasizing aspects of moral cognition and emotion, may benefit from incorporating motivational concepts from self-control research. Similarly, self-control research may benefit from a better understanding of the moral nature of many self-control domains. We place special focus on various components of self-control and on the ways in which self-control goals may come to be seen as moral issues (i.e., moralized).

It is not clear how a moral demand alone can motivate an agent to exclude those who fail to act as the demand states. A more plausible hypothesis for the evolution of human moral cognition is based on seeing moral demands as subjective, but inherently conjunctive. This subjectivist-conjunctive proposal can still account for the apparent externalization of moral demands.

Very few articles have analyzed how cognitive science as a field has changed over the last six decades. We explore how Cognition changed over the last four decades using Topic Models. Topic Models assume that every word in every document is generated by one of a limited number of topics. Words that are likely to co-occur are likely to be generated by a single topic. We find a number of significant historical trends: the rise of moral cognition, eyetracking methods, and action, the fall of sentence processing, and the stability of development. We introduce the notion of framing topics, which frame content, rather than present the content itself. These framing topics suggest that over time Cognition turned from abstract theorizing to more experimental approaches.

O presente Artigo propõe-se revisar, criticamente, os principais paradigmas teóricos referentes ao campo do Desenvolvimento Moral, salientando o que cada um desses paradigmas tem contribuído para os Estudos, realizados nessa área, bem como suas limitações. A principal discussão, travada ao longo do texto, é a crítica ao que aqui é chamado de Monologismo – perspectiva epistemológica concentrada em entender o sujeito, tomando-o em sua individualidade e abordando-o, a partir de estruturas internas, subjacentes aos próprios sujeitos. Em oposição às posições monológicas, valorizam-se as contribuições advindas das teorias socioculturais, e salienta-se a função que a linguagem tem sobre processos de construção do conhecimento, sobretudo o papel que a argumentação tem acerca da constituição da consciência moral.

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side-effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition. Postprint

Research on sex differences in empathy has revealed mixed findings. Whereas experimental and neuropsychological measures show no consistent sex effect, self-report data consistently indicates greater empathy in women. However, available results mainly come from separate populations with relatively small samples, which may inflate effect sizes and hinder comparability between both empirical corpora. To elucidate the issue, we conducted two large-scale studies. First, we examined whether sex differences emerge in a large population-based sample (n = 10,802) when empathy is measured with an experimental empathy-for-pain paradigm. Moreover, we investigated the relationship between empathy and moral judgment. In the second study, a subsample (n = 334) completed a self-report empathy questionnaire. Results showed some sex differences in the experimental paradigm, but with minuscule effect sizes. Conversely, women did portray themselves as more empathic through self-reports. In addition, utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas were less frequent in women, although these differences also had small effect sizes. These findings suggest that sex differences in empathy are highly driven by the assessment measure. In particular, self-reports may induce biases leading individuals to assume gender-role stereotypes. Awareness of the role of measurement instruments in this field may hone our understanding of the links between empathy, sex differences, and gender roles. Fil: Báez Buitrago, Sandra Jimena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad de los Andes; Colombia Fil: Flichtentrei, Daniel. IntraMed; Argentina Fil: Prats, María. IntraMed; Argentina Fil: Mastandueno, Ricardo. IntraMed; Argentina Fil: García, Adolfo Martín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Educación Elemental y Especial; Argentina Fil: Cetkovich, Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina Fil: Ibáñez Barassi, Agustín Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Adolfo Ibañez; Chile. Australian Research Council ; Australia

Gratitude is a complex emotional feeling associated with universally desirable positive effects in personal, social, and physiological domains. Why or how gratitude achieves these functional outcomes is not clear. Toward the goal of identifying its' underlying physiological processes, we recently investigated the neural correlates of gratitude. In our study, participants were exposed to gratitude-inducing stimuli, and rated each according to how much gratitude it provoked. As expected, self-reported gratitude intensity correlated with brain activity in distinct regions of the medial pre-frontal cortex associated with social reward and moral cognition. Here we draw from our data and existing literature to offer a theoretical foundation for the physiological correlates of gratitude. We propose that mu-opioid signaling (1) accompanies the mental experience of gratitude, and (2) may account for the positive effects of gratitude on social relationships, subjective wellbeing, and physiological health.

In social hierarchies, moral stigma spreads down more than up. Across four vignette studies, exposure to the immoral behaviors of higher (vs. lower) ranking group members led online participants to report greater moral suspicion toward other group members ( moral spillover). A higher ranking organization member’s deceptive practices were perceived as more prototypical, resulting in more negative moral impressions of the organization (Study 1). This more negative moral impression led people to rate ambiguous behavior by another organization member as more suspicious—even when the prior transgression was purely self-serving (Study 2). These effects generalized across several types of moral transgressions (Study 3). Finally, a higher ranking organization member’s unethical behavior led other organization members to receive more negative job-hiring recommendations (Study 4). Thus, a higher ranking group member’s ethical violations result in greater moral spillover, affecting not only other group members’ moral reputations but their career prospects as well.

This article argues that the key elements of the prima facie case of harmful battery may form critical building blocks of moral cognition in both humans and nonhuman animals. By contrast, at least some of the rules and representations presupposed by familiar justifications to battery appear to be uniquely human. The article also argues that many famous thought experiments in ethics and many influential experiments in moral psychology rely on harmful battery scenarios without acknowledging this fact or considering its theoretical or empirical implications. The unifying factor in all these studies is goal-directed harmful contact, inflicted without consent or justification.

The capacity to distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions is a crucial aspect of moral competence. Therefore, the processes shaping intentionality attribution, as well as their dysfunction, are object of intense inquiry. The 'Knobe effect' refers to the intriguing finding that people are more likely to judge as intentional actions leading to negative as opposed to positive side effects, which has been attributed to the emotional response elicited by negative (vs. positive) outcomes. Whether and how emotion drives the Knobe effect, however, is currently debated. Here, individuals with low (LA) and high (HA) levels of alexithymia, a personality trait characterized by difficulties in emotional processing, judged the intentionality of actions with side effects that varied in valence (positive/negative) and salience (low/high), while their subjective emotional response and skin conductance level were assessed. LA individuals attributed more intentionality to actions leading to negative (vs. positive) side effects, and to high (vs. low) salience side effects, and this related to their subjective emotional response to negative side effects. In the context of a generally reduced physiological activation to emotional stimuli, HA (compared to LA) individuals attributed less intentionality to actions leading to negative side effects, especially those with low salience, showing a reduced Knobe effect, which was accompanied by a reduced subjective emotional response to negative side effects. These results confirm the crucial role of emotion on intentionality attribution. Moreover, they contribute to qualifying the emotional processing difficulties associated with alexithymia, and their impact on moral cognition.

In moral psychology, typically used dilemmas contrast options where deontology and utilitarianism demand mutually exclusive actions. However, these dilemmas are usually unrealistic thought experiments, with implausibly few options and implausible statements about the consequences of these options. The present research examines whether variations in dilemma plausibility influence moral judgments. This influence might result from two psychological factors—cost–benefit calculations and reactance-type processes. Both can be predicted to cause more deontological judgments for implausible compared to plausible moral dilemmas. In two experiments (total N = 417), dilemmas were modified to create a plausible and an implausible version without altering the actions and their alleged consequences. We observed that low (compared to high) plausibility within dilemmas increased deontological judgments. Consequently, varying plausibility constitutes a potential confound when examining moral cognition by comparing different dilemma versions. We suggest using only plausible dilemmas to examine moral judgments.

Los procesos neuropsicológicos subyacentes al juicio moral son objeto de novedosas investigaciones en el ámbito de la cognición social. El objetivo de este estudio es adaptar a la población española la batería de dilemas morales de Moore. Esta batería plantea una serie de dilemas morales entre una elección utilitarista (asumir una conducta emocionalmente aversiva en favor de un beneficio mayor) y otra no-utilitarista. Participaron 154 estudiantes universitarios que completaron la versión española del instrumento. Investigamos tres tipos de dilemas: morales-personales (el propio sujeto realiza la acción aversiva, incrementando la carga emocional), morales-impersonales (la acción es indirecta, reduciendo la carga emocional), y no-morales. Las variables dependientes fueron: la proporción de respuestas afirmativas -que refleja elecciones utilitaristas, y la dificultad percibida para llevar a cabo el juicio. Los resultados mostraron buenas propiedades psicométricas y validez discriminativa en función del tipo de dilema; los dilemas morales-personales generaron menor número de elecciones utilitaristas y juicios de mayor dificultad. En conclusión, la adaptación española del cuestionario permite medir de manera fiable el juicio moral, discriminando distintos patrones de elección en función de la carga emocional, postulándose como un instrumento potencialmente útil en la evaluación de poblaciones con problemas de toma de decisiones sociales y afectivas. The cognitive and emotional neuropsychological processes underlying moral judgments are the focus of groundbreaking research in understanding moral cognition. The aim of this study is to adapt to Spanish the moral dilemmas battery of Moore. This battery presents a set of moral dilemmas from a utilitarian choice (assuming an emotionally aversive behaviour for a higher benefit) and a non-utilitarian choice. The study involved 154 university students who were given the Spanish version of Moore's battery. We researching three types of dilemmas: moral-personal (oneself performs the aversive action, increasing the emotional charge), impersonal-moral (the action is carried out indirectly, decreasing the emotional charge) and non-moral. The dependent variables were the proportion of affirmative answers, which reflect utilitarian choices, and the perceived difficulty to produce the judgments. The results showed good psychometric properties and significant differences in the proportion of affirmative answers and the difficulty depending on the type of dilemma, the moral-personal dilemmas generated fewer utilitarian choices and judgments with more difficulty. In conclusion, the Spanish version of Moore's battery allows measuring reliably the moral judgments, discriminating between different patterns of choice depending on the emotional charge, so it is postulated as a potentially useful instrument for assessing populations with impaired decision-making related to emotional processing.

Sacred (or protected) values (SVs) constitute core beliefs that define primary reference groups. There is significant research on SVs at a behavioral level, but their neural underpinnings are just beginning to be discovered. In this paper, we highlight the current state of neuroimaging research concerning SVs. Given that SVs are considered to be strongly motivated by moral principles, we first provide an outline of the neural circuits that have been found to be involved in moral cognition. We then review various neuroimaging studies that have explored the notion of SVs. Specifically, we concentrate on neuroimaging studies dealing with intergroup bias and those that focus on social norms, since these are two basic dimensions of SVs that have been studied with neuroimaging techniques. Finally, we review two studies that have directly addressed SVs with neuroimaging techniques, and we offer suggestions for further avenues of study.

本研究の目的は青年を対象として、 規範意識、 道徳的認知 (道徳的認知)、 5つの行動基準の関連を検討することであった。 調査協力者は教職課程に在籍する大学生229名 (男性178名, 女性51名) であった。 調査内容は、 規範意識 8項目、 道徳的認知 (DIT)、 行動基準尺度 (「自分本位」, 「仲間的セケン」, 「地域的セケン」, 「他者配慮」, 「公共利益」) であった。 変数間の相関を算出した結果、 「自分本位」 は 「規範意識」 と負の相関があり、 「地域的セケン」、 「他者配慮」、 「公共利益」、 「道徳的認知 (道徳性)」 は 「規範意識」 と正の相関があった。 「規範意識」 を従属変数、 そのほかの変数を独立変数とした重回帰分析の結果、 「地域的セケン」、 「他者配慮」 が 「規範意識」 を予測していた。 以上の結果について議論した。, Recently, there has been a decrease in social norms in adolescents; this has led to several problems. Social norms are important research topic in the field of education, psychology, and business management, among others. This study was conducted to clarify the factors that predict social norms by focusing on moral cognition-Kohlberg- and the Standard for Public Space Scale (Egocentric, Peer-standards, Regional-standards, Care about Others, and Public Values). Regression analysis was performed to analyze the impacts of moral cognition and the five behavioral standards. The results revealed that "Regional-standards" and "Care about Others" significantly predicted social norms and that moral cognition did not predict social norms in adolescents. These results were discussed.

Parts of this thesis have been published or submitted for publication: Chapter 1 Terbeck, S., & Francis, K. B. (2017). We should if we could, but we can’t. Experimental problems with moral enhancement. In: M. Hauskeller (Ed). Moral enhancement. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2 Francis, K. B., Howard, C., Howard, I. S., Gummerum, M., Ganis, G., Anderson, G., & Terbeck, S. (2016). Virtual morality: Transitioning from moral judgment to moral action? PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0164374 Chapter 3 Francis, K. B., Terbeck, S., Briazu, R. A., Haines, A., Gummerum, M., Ganis, G., & Howard, I. S. (2017). Moral muscles: Simulating harm in virtual moral dilemmas. Under Review. Chapter 5 Francis, K. B., Gummerum, M., Ganis, G., Howard, I. S., & Terbeck, S., (2017). Virtual morality in the helping professions: Simulated action and resilience. Submitted., In the past, experiments on human morality have predominantly utilised theoretical moral dilemmas to shed light on the nature of moral judgment. However, little attention has been given to determining how these judgments might translate into moral actions. In this thesis, I utilised novel and state-of-the-art Virtual Reality environments and combined approaches from social psychology, experimental philosophy, computer science, robotics, and speculative design. Over the course of six experiments with more than 200 participants, simulated moral actions made in Virtual Reality were found to be dissociated from moral judgments made in conventional paradigms. The results suggest that moral judgment and action may be driven by distinct mechanisms. The association between personality traits and moral judgments versus actions, was also investigated. In two experiments, psychopathic and associated traits predicted moral actions and the power with which these were simulated, but failed to predict moral judgments. With research suggesting a mediating role for empathy in this relationship, two further experiments examined empathic and affective processing in moral judgment versus action. In the first of these, alcohol consumption successfully lowered affective empathy and arousal in virtual dilemmas, but moral judgment and action remained unaffected. In the second, an investigation of professionally trained paramedics and fire service incident commanders, revealed distinct differences in empathic and related personality traits, reduced emotional arousal, and less regret following moral action. Taken together, this research suggests that novel virtual technologies can provide insights into self-referent actions, which sit in contrast to judgments motivated by social norms. Ethically, incorporating Virtual Reality in investigations of morality of harm offers a balanced approach; protecting participant wellbeing while increasing the ecological validity of moral investigations. The roles of personality traits and associated emotional processes in moral judgment and action remain multifaceted and as such, I outline the necessity of considering both the characteristics of the decision-maker and the context in which the decision is undertaken, within an interactionist model of morality.

Moral cognition, a central aspect of human social functioning, involves complex interactions between emotion and reasoning to tell right from wrong. In this chapter, we summarize the cognitive neuroscience literature on moral cognition and moral emotions, highlighting their close relationship with other social cognition domains. We consider neuroimaging research and behavioral/neuropsychological evidence of moral impairments in patients with psychiatric and neurological conditions. We also describe cognitive neuroscience models claiming that moral cognition processes are shaped by the encompassing social context. These views emphasize how cultural and context-dependent knowledge, as well as motivational states, can be integrated to explain complex aspects of human moral cognition. Finally, we address real-life social scenarios on which available studies could make a direct impact. More generally, we analyze the extent to which moral cognition research can help to understand human social behavior and complex social-moral circumstances. Fil: Báez Buitrago, Sandra Jimena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina Fil: García, Adolfo Martín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Educación Elemental y Especial; Argentina Fil: Santamaria Garcia, Hernando. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina

Scientific explanations of human higher capacities, traditionally denied to other animals, attract the attention of philosophers and other workers in the humanities. They are often viewed with suspicion and skepticism. Against this background, I critically examine the dual-process theory of moral judgment proposed by Greene and collaborators and the normative consequences drawn from that theory. I believe normative consequences are warranted, in principle, but I propose an alternative dual-process model of moral cognition that leads to a different normative consequence, which I dub “the fragmentation of value” (Nagel. Mortal questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1979). This alternative model abandons the neat overlap between the deontological/utilitarian and the intuitive/reflective divides. Instead, we have both utilitarian and deontological intuitions as equally fundamental and partially in tension. Cognitive control is sometimes engaged during a conflict between intuitions. When it is engaged, the result of control is not always utilitarian; sometimes it is deontological. I describe in some detail how this version is consistent with evidence reported by many studies and what could be done to find more evidence to support it.

A part of a symposium on John Mikhail's Elements of Moral Cognition.I start with an overview of the book, and the proceed to make some critical comments. These focus on Mikhail's analogy between moral and linguistic cognition. I suggest other analogies that may be just as telling (and that lead to other conclusions), I question the analogy between linguistic commitments are our deep moral ones, And I discuss the methodological worry about the relevance of Mikhail's empirical observations to what seem to be his normative conclusions.

Recently, a few transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) studies have shown that the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) plays a causal role in moral reasoning especially in cases of accidental harms or failed attempted harms. The profile of results across studies is however not entirely consistent: sometimes the stimulation affects predominantly failed attempted harms while sometimes the stimulation affects predominantly accidental harms. We argue that such discrepancy could reflect different functional contributions of the rTPJ in moral judgments and that the chosen design parameters or stimulation method may differentially bring to light one or the other functional role of the rTPJ. In the current study, we found that tDCS specifically affected accidental harms but not failed attempted harms. Low cathodal stimulation of the rTPJ led to a marginally significant increase in the severity of judgments of accidental harms (Experiment 1) while higher cathodal current intensity led to a highly significant decrease in the severity of judgments of accidental harms (Experiment 2). Our pattern of results in the context of our experimental design can best be explained by a causal role of the rTPJ in processing the mitigating circumstances which reduce a protagonist’s moral responsibility. We discuss these results in relation to the idea that the rTPJ may play multiple roles in moral cognition and in relation to methodological aspects related to the use of tDCS.