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Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements

Abstract

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12,13,14, produce an abnormally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements.

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Figure 1: Lesion overlap of VMPC patients.
Figure 2: Moral judgements for each scenario type.
Figure 3: Moral judgements on individual personal moral scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Damasio for making available neuroanatomical analyses of lesion patients and for preparing Fig. 1. We thank all participants for their participation in the experiments and R. Saxe for comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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Correspondence to Ralph Adolphs.

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Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R. et al. Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature 446, 908–911 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05631

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