Neuroethics & Law Blog

Self Presentation (Bruni)

Since my guest blogging stint is coming to an end, it is perhaps a bit late for a presentation.

Anyway, my name is Tommaso Bruni. I am a PhD student at the State University of Milan (Italy) and at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). My interests mainly lie in bioethics and neuroethics.

I work more on the 'neuroscience of ethics' than on the 'ethics of neuroscience', to follow the distinction drawn by the classical 2002 paper by Adina Roskies.

As a matter of fact my PhD thesis deals with the impact of both experimental moral psychology and neuroscience of morality on meta-ethics and substantive ethics.

The aim of my research is to figure out to what extent empirical science, and in particular findings concerning moral psychology, can influence ethical theorizing.

Moreover, I am working in a cognitive neuroscience lab, so as to get some lab skills and a direct contact with the science I reflect on.

Moral dilemmas and fMRI (Bruni)

The fMRI studies by J.D. Greene and co-workers (2001, 2004) have been widely discussed in the last decade. Greene draws two conclusions from his experiments.

The first conclusion is a descriptive model for moral psychology, the so-called dual-process model. According to this model there would be two non-domain specific systems that produce moral judgments in the human brain. The first system is slow, flexible, and conscious: It is chiefly connected to reasoning. The second system is fast, automatic, and unconscious. It produces moral intuitions (i.e. strong and immediate moral judgments) that allow for a swift, albeit rough, evaluation of the eliciting situation. This system is intertwined with moral emotions and can be seen as emotionally-driven.

The second conclusion Greene draws from his experiments is normative. According to his views, there is a mapping between these two systems and two of the three most prominent normative ethical theories in the current philosophical debate: utilitarianism and deontology.

The hot (fast, automatic, unconscious, and emotive) system generates deontology, i.e. an ethical system that is based on a series of right and duties, that must be respected no matter the consequences, at least prima facie.

On the contrary, the cold system generates utilitarianism, i.e. an ethical system in which outcomes, their desirability and their likelihood to occur must be computed before a moral decision is taken. On the basis of this, Greene claims that deontology is unreliable, because it draws on automatic responses that are very likely to generate bad outcomes, being inaccurate and insensitive to the fine details of the context. Following a metaphor Greene uses in a recent Edge talk (here), deontology looks like the point-and-shoot mode of a camera: quick, dirty, and unreliable.

In a recent article, Oxford philosopher Guy Kahane and his coworkers challenge these views on experimental grounds. They have set up an fMRI experiment to look for the neural correlates of intuitive moral judgments (judgments that come natural to most people in the sampled population) and counter-intuitive moral judgments (judgments that are not compelling to most people).

They examined dilemmas in which a deontological response was intuitive (e.g. the famous Footbridge version of the trolley problem) and others in which an utilitarian response was intuitive (e.g. would you break a promise to stop a whole town from being destroyed by a nuclear blast? Most people would answer yes, thereby following utilitarianism).

The key findings of Kahane and colleagues are these: (1) the association (established by Greene et al 2001, 2004) between deontological judgments and automatic processes on the one hand, and utilitarian judgments and controlled processing on the other hand, is not replicated; (2) the BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) activation varies when judgments with the same content (e.g. either utilitarian or deontological) are pronounced in response to different dilemmas. Judgments having the same content do not produce a stable BOLD activation.

According to Kahane and coworkers, the utilitarian / deontological distinction is not particularly explanatory when BOLD signals are taken into account. At variance with that, it is the intuitiveness or counter-intuitiveness of a judgment that correlates in a reliable way with BOLD patterns. Intuitive judgments match with activation of a consistent network of brain regions, and counter-intuitive judgments do so with a distinct network as well. These findings (if accurate) seem to undermine Greene’s dual-process hypothesis, as least in the very general form in which it was spelled out in the controversial essay “The secret joke of Kant’s soul” (“the terms deontology and consequentialism refer to psychological natural kinds").

The disagreement between these fMRI experiments may be caused by different sets of stimuli (distinct sets of moral dilemmas were used). Furthermore, it should be noted that Greene modified the criterion he avails himself of to differentiate utilitarian and deontological dilemmas after 2007. It is difficult to say who, between Greene and Kahane, is right. The only certainty is that even mere empirical findings in the neuroimaging of moral decision-making are controversial. When one then passes to the interpretation of the results or crosses the boundary between description and normativity, it is quite clear that the level of disagreement cannot but increase. Further empirical research on these topics is deeply needed and, at least at the current state of the art, sweeping conclusions about the consequences of neuroscience and experimental moral psychology for substantive ethics should be avoided, since theories are still underdetermined by the data and moral dilemmas about killing and saving human beings do not represent the whole domain of normative theories. 

References

Greene JD et al. 2001. A fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293: 2105-2108

Greene JD et al. 2004. The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron 44: 389-400

Greene JD. 2007. The secret joke of Kant’s soul. In: Sinnott-Armstrong W (Ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 3. Cambridge (Mass): The MIT Press.

Kahane G et al. 2011. The neural basis of intuitive and counterintuitive moral judgment. Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Advance Access, March 18th 2011

The Experiential Gap Between Tort and Criminal Law (Kolber)

Tort law pays quite a bit of attention to bad experiences.  Pain and suffering are taken seriously, both in terms of actual doctrine (we are instructed to compensate individual plaintiffs for the amount of pain and suffering they experience) and our justifications of doctrine (to provide corrective justice one must compensate for tortiously caused pain and suffering and to appropriately deter bad behavior, we need to consider the experiential harms those behaviors are likely to cause).  

Granted, it is difficult to identify physiological markers of current or past experiences like pain and suffering, so it is not surprising that tort law often resorts to rough proxy measurements (by considering, for example, whether plaintiffs were in a zone of danger or had physical manifestations of distress).  These inexact proxies for bad experiences reduce the likelihood that litigants will invent or exaggerate their symptoms.  But at least in tort contexts, the law purports to care about individualized measurements of harm.  If a person is falsely imprisoned, he can sue for the amount of harm that he experienced.  There is no general formula that converts objective measurements, like the number of hours falsely imprisoned and the dimensions of confinement, into amounts of compensation (see here at 1574).

Though we frequently fail to recognize it, experiences also matter in criminal contexts.  Technologies better able to assess experience can help us decide when a crime occurred, how blameworthy the perpetrator was, and how much punishment he should receive.  If we can measure the harm of, say, false imprisonment to individual tort plaintiffs (who have incentives to lie), then we can calculate the severity of confinement experienced by particular prisoners.  Moreover, we usually say that criminal defendants are entitled to more process than tort plaintiffs, not less.  While we presumably don’t want to spend the money to make such assessments of prisoners, we should not pretend that rough subjective assessments are impossible: they just cost more than we are willing to spend.

(Adapted from this article, pp.647-48 (UPDATED) and originally posted here).

-AJK

Ahh, But is There a Placebo Effect?

BoingBoing on research suggesting that a corked bat (against the rules in Major League Baseball) provides little or no advantage to baseball players and may actually reduce their performance.

New Company Markets Brain-Based Pain Assessment (Kolber)

Reposting from Prawfs:

I have written here and here about the pursuit of more objective methods of measuring experiences like pain.  While research is moving along quite rapidly, neuroscientists are not yet doing the sorts of experiments we really need to know how well these techniques will work.  For example, the best experiments for forensic purposes would have researchers blinded to subjects' background determine, say, which individual subjects are chronic back pain sufferers and which are not based only on brain imaging and associated number crunching.  Most experiments are not designed to be so crisp and clean.  Moreover, rarely do neuroscientists test how well subjects can develop countermeasures to try to fool whatever measurement technique is being investigated. 

Private enterprise, however, has no plans to wait until scientists perfect methods of brain-based pain assessment.  In fact, a recently-formed company, Chronic Pain Diagnostics, is already marketing a method of brain-based pain assessment associated with this patent.  And there has been at least one worker's compensation case where an injured employee seriously explored hiring experts to provide brain-based evidence of pain (though the case settled).  It's just a matter of time before courts and administrative agencies have to evaluate the merits of these new forms of evidence.

Lie Detection and the Technological Look-Back Principle (Kolber)

This week, I will be reprinting some posts I wrote during my last guest stint at Prawfsblawg.com.  Here is the first:

Over the last decade, neuroscientists have made significant strides toward using various brain imaging techniques to determine when a subject is lying.    The research is still at early stage, however, and has principally involved rather artificial experimental settings (e.g., college students instructed to lie about the suit of a playing card).  If you ask most neuroscientists, they will say that we are quite far from having an all-purpose technique that can provide admissible evidence in court.  Indeed, a couple of courts have already refused to admit brain imaging evidence of credibility/deception (see Wilson, Semrau).

In my view, the test of whether we should admit some technology in court depends on whether, by introducing the technology, we achieve better outcomes overall.  That's a very difficult determination to make.  It depends on the quality of the science, the ability of judges and jurors to interpret the science, financial costs associated with the technology, various risks of abuse, and so on.  And there is a fair question about what legal standard judges should use to achieve our overarching goal.  But surely, as Fred Schauer points out, the technology need not be perfect to be helpful in real world forensic settings.

Even if we are still a long way away from developing reliable lie detectors, there is a substantial probability that we will have reasonably good lie detectors within the next thirty years.  Those prospects should arguably change our behavior even today.  For in thirty years, we can surely ask you about your conduct over the course of your lifetime: Have you ever cheated on your taxes?  Have you ever cheated on your spouse?  Did you bury the body by the river? 

Under what I describe here (at p.603-04--UPDATED) as the technological "look-back principle," we should already consider the privacy protections we are likely have in the future in order to decide how to behave today.  (At least until we develop good means of forgetting what we already know!)

Of course, not all of our privacy interests are amenable to legal regulation.  Nothing will stop your lover from testing your fidelity in a brain scanner as a condition of continuing the relationship.  Many campaigning politicians already disclose their tax returns, even when they have no legal obligation to do so.  Perhaps, someday, politicians will agree to be scanned while they answer questions like: Have you ever knowingly misreported campaign funds?  Have you ever accepted a bribe?  Did you bury the body by the river?  No doubt many criminal offenders were surprised by the look-back potential of DNA.  Perhaps we'll all be taken by surprise, someday, by the look-back potential of lie detectors.

Close your eyes and you’ll see the moral truth! (Bruni)

In a recent paper Caruso and Gino have examined the effects of closing one’s eyes on moral judgment.

The authors show that keeping one’s eyes open or closed morally matters, at least from a descriptive perspective.

Participants were confronted with two moral scenarios: One described a morally good action, another described a morally wrong action. Relative to open eyes subjects, subjects whose eyes were kept closed gave more polarized moral judgments. Morally wrong actions were judged more unethical and morally good actions were considered more ethical than in open-eyes controls. Furthermore, participants with closed eyes reported to be less likely to behave immorally and more likely to behave morally than controls. Keeping one’s eyes closed both increases the average offer in a Dictator Game (a measure which normally correlates with pro-sociality) and is associated with enhanced mental simulation, that is creating mental representations that imitate events or objects in the mind. The higher the amount of mental simulation, the more unethical morally wrong actions were deemed to be by the participants.

Therefore it could be conjectured that closing one’s eyes exerts an effect on moral judgments through mental simulation. In turn mental simulation would be connected with amplified emotional responses. This conjecture seems to be buttressed by the result of a final experiment: Instructing open eyes subject to mentally simulate has the same effect on moral evaluation than keeping one’s eyes shut.

From the moral and social standpoint, it is interesting to notice that closing one’s eyes may be seen as a cheap and non-biomedical form of moral enhancement.

The authors suggest that, by closing her eyes when deliberating and evaluating, a moral agent could be less likely to perform morally wrong actions, since people would “simulate the decision they are facing more extensively and experience its emotional components more vividly”.

Even though it is not obvious that different substantive ethical theories agree on the fact that some effects on decision-making are indeed positive and not negative, this suggestion underlines an interesting point: Instead of discussing the use of drugs and/or sophisticated forms of direct intervention on the brain, the current debate on moral enhancement should perhaps devote more attention to little behavioral ‘tricks’.These costless contrivances were already known by the Stoics of old, who invited rulers to count up to ten before taking a decision. Relatively cheap behavioral research could tell us more about the effects of simple actions on decision making and significant changes in moral behavior could be perhaps achieved if we merged this behavioral knowledge into existing forms of moral education. The same holds for designing institutions in such a way that the agents’ biases are exploited to maximize social utility, e.g. by imposing default settings that produce desirable social consequences, as in the case of opt-out policies for organ donation. High technology can be fascinating, but low technology techniques may sometimes be underestimated and unexploited.

Eugene M. Caruso, Francesca Gino. 2010. Blind ethics: Closing one’s eyes polarizes moral judgments and discourages dishonest behavior. Cognition 118: 280–285 doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.008

Justice is what the judge ate for breakfast (Bruni)

In a very interesting and disturbing article Shai Danziger and coworkers have examined the rejection rates in parole decisions in Israel. Israeli judges decide about paroling in 6 minutes on average and take two food breaks while working: one snack at 10 AM and lunch at about 1.30 PM. Their working time is therefore divided in three periods. Danziger and colleagues show that the probability of getting a positive parole decision are much higher than usual if the case is examined by the judge when her mind is ‘fresh’, i.e. immediately after the break at the beginning of a period. Cases that are legally similar are often decided in a dissimilar way, since the moment of the day in which they are presented in front of the judge exerts a major influence. As the judge herself decides when to take the break and she is ignorant of the details of the upcoming cases, the effect cannot be driven by some partiality of the judge relative to the characteristics of the prisoners. The authors interpret the results in terms of depletion of mental resources: taking complex decisions several times leads to adherence to the status quo, that in this case is rejection. Nonetheless the authors are admittedly unable to rule out competing explanations, such as those based on mood (maybe the break enhances the judge’s mood). Furthermore, no measure of judges’ mental resources was carried out and there is hence no way to track their variation over time. In spite of these admitted shortcomings, the results do indeed show that judicial decisions are not taken in the way legal formalism describes. This ‘food bias’, together with the adoption of unconscious heuristics (see e.g. Gigerenzer G. 2007. Moral Intuition = Fast and Frugal Heuristics, in Sinnott-Armstrong W (ed). Moral Psychology vol. 2 Cambridge (Mass): MIT Press, p.12), shows that judges often rule without sufficient reflection, in a way that is not compatible with the idealized picture of the law legal formalism envisions. It would be interesting to investigate the neural correlate of this bias, but it would be difficult to convince judges to rule parole cases inside a noisy MRI scanner.

Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso. 2011. Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. PNAS early edition. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018033108

Vincent on Responsibility and Mental Capacities

Recently posted to SSRN:

"Capacitarianism, Responsibility and Restored Mental Capacities" 
TECHNOLOGIES ON THE STAND: LEGAL AND ETHICAL QUESTIONS IN NEUROSCIENCE AND ROBOTICS, pp. 41-62, Bibi van den, ed., The Netherlands, 2011

NICOLE A. VINCENT, Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University
The capacitarian idea that responsibility tracks mental capacity underlies much of our thinking about responsibility. For instance, mental capacity assessments inform whether someone is a fully responsible person, what responsibilities they can be expected to observe, their degree of responsibility for what they did, and whether they can be expected to take responsibility and be held responsible in the sense of standing trial, being answerable, paying compensation and being punished. But what happens when mental capacity is restored through direct brain interventions? Specifically, can direct brain interventions aimed at mental capacity restoration help us to assess the responsibility of someone who becomes mentally ill subsequent to committing their crime or to hold them responsible, to expect them to take responsibility for what they did, to make them fully responsible and maybe even less irresponsible? I will argue that initially capacitarianism seems to strike difficulties in cases that involve direct brain interventions of this sort, or put another way, that responsibility does not seem to track restored mental capacities. However, I will also argue that most of these difficulties can be overcome once we take into account some of the other things that responsibility also hinges upon. In particular, I will argue that historical and normative considerations can explain why responsibility does not seem to track restored mental capacities, and thus why this is not something that undermines capacitarianism.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

"Altering Moral Judgments with Magnetism" (Davenport)

"Research of the last couple decades has shown that injuries to a part of the brain called the right
temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, can change a patient’s moral judgments. When these patients are asked to answer morally challenging questions that weigh the life of one person against others, they consistently make utilitarian decisions without feeling the least bit uneasy. Their moral judgments about life and death, so vexing to most of us, become clinical and routine.

Researchers have recently found that they can induce a similar effect using magnetism (transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS) to disrupt RTPJ activity. When participants were exposed to magnetic “bursts” from a TMS device, their judgments about what is morally permissible significantly changed. For example, they were more likely to say that intending to harm another was morally permissible if the other person luckily avoided becoming a victim; they considered the intention of the first person to be irrelevant.  The effect was only temporary, but the implications are massive. Most of us consider moral judgment a higher order thought process, but this research shows that it can be tweaked by a weak magnetic field in a matter of minutes." - One of David DiSalvo's Five Big Developments in Neuroscience to Watch, via.  

Full article: Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments by Liane Young, Joan Albert Camprodon, Marc Hauser, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Rebecca Saxe, here. 

Image: my neurons.

A Biomarker for Consciousness (Bruni)

Boly and colleagues have recently published on Science a paper reporting an event-related potentials (ERP) experiment on vegetative state (VS) patients, minimally conscious state (MSC) patients, and healthy controls. The subjects were given an auditory oddball paradigm. The corresponding ERP patterns were modeled through Dynamic Causal Modeling in order to uncover the effective neural connectivity underlying ERP responses. A model featuring forward and backwards connections between frontal and temporal cortexes was then selected as the best explanatory by means of Bayesian procedures. This model explained very well the electrophysiological activations of healthy subjects and MCs patients. The only effect of being a VS patient relative to the other two groups was the lack of top-down connection between the Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) and the Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG). On the contrary, the connection from STG to IFG was present in all of the three groups. Therefore, the presence or absence of the feedback connection from IFG to STG could be used as a biomarker of consciousness. An established biomarker could make the now notoriously difficult diagnosis of MCS and VS easier. This would in turn make medical decisions about end-of-life issues simpler. In particular a reliable biomarker of consciousness would help tackle objections to withdrawal of treatment. If it is possible to identify MCS and VS patients in a reliable way, then the risk of withdrawing life support to a MCS patient significantly decreases. Therefore, it would become difficult to kill by mistake through withdrawal of life support patients that are in MCS. Furthermore, a biomarker for consciousness can be relevant in legal context too, when compensations for severe brain damage caused by negligence or by criminal acts must be attributed. If validated, this biomarker will become another piece of neuro-evidence that will enter federal courts if able to cope with Daubert standards. It will take time before this and similar experiments find their way into clinical practice and courtrooms, but biomarkers research for mental conditions is proceeding at a fast rate and practical applications are likely to appear in a not-so-remote future.R

Reference
Boly M, Garrido M I, Gosseries O, Bruno M-A, Boveroux P, Schnakers C, Massimini M, Litvak V, Laureys S, and Friston K. 2011. Preserved Feedforward But Impaired Top-Down Processes In The Vegetative State. Science 332: 858-862
DOI: 10.1126/science.1202043

Risk Assessment and "The Limits of Neurolaw" (Davenport)

"In my view, neuroscience does not offer us anything new that cannot be responsibly incorporated into existing substantive criminal law doctrine," says Steven K. Erickson in a new paper that largely questions fellow law professor, Adam Lamparello's effort in promoting neuroscience to aide in predicting future conduct or dangerousness of offenders, thereby supporting civil commitment terms (after prison terms) for offenders with neurobiological impairments which may cause them to re-offend.

Surprisingly, Erickson allows that neuroanatomical attributes impact behavior (which is interesting given "The idea that behavior is determined by physical causes is hard to reconcile with the intuitive notions of free will and moral agency on which our legal systems are based" via), even highlighting a few of congintive neuroscience's basic principles: "...all human experiences are reducible, machines such as fMRI can reveal human thought, and predictions about human behavior can be made from the knowledge gained through reduction and technology." But he calls out Professor Lamparello for confusing the relevancy and purpose of raising neuroscience's place in the law when dealing with neurologically impaired offenders, calling it "unwise and unnecessary" since "substantive criminal law in most jurisdictions already affords such agents a plea of non-responsibility that is harmonious with the principles of deterrence and deserved punishment". Erickson ties his argument neatly in a bow with, "Propensities are not destinies, and we are free to act against our urges, whatever biological liabilities may encumber us". Although I agree with many of Erickson's points, this last one is certainly a red flag for researchers.

*The exact paper(s) of which this paper critiques is not mentioned. From a quick search, I'm left to guess Erickson is responding to the paper(s) below.

Erickson, Steven K., The Limits of Neurolaw (June 4, 2011). Houston Journal of Health Law and Policy, Vol. 11, 2012. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1857971

Lamparello, Adam, Cognitive Neuroscience and Involuntary Confinement: The Model Statute (January 18, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1743179

Lamparello, Adam, Using Cognitive Neuroscience as a Method by Which to Involuntarily Confine Violent Offenders after Completion of Their Sentence (January 18, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1742940

Lamparello, Adam, Why Wait Until the Crime Happens? Providing for the Involuntary Commitment of Dangerous Individuals Without Requiring a Showing of Mental Illness (January 18, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1742933

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

The neurodevelopment of morality (Bruni)

Jean Decety from the University of Chicago and his coworkers have recently published on Cerebral Cortex an article that studies the development of morality using a variety of techniques, including fMRI, eye-tracking, and explicit questionnaires.

One novelty of this experiment is the age distribution of the large experimental sample: Contrary to most studies, who mostly make use of freshmen, Decety and colleagues studied kids aged 4 as well as 37-year-old adults. No explicit task was required from the subjects. They were simply shown visual stimuli in which persons or objects were damaged, either intentionally or accidentally. After the scanning session the subjects were shown the stimuli again and had to rate their empathic concern for the victim, personal distress, understanding of the perpetrator’s mind (‘how mean was the person who did this?’), moral evaluation, and desire to punish the perpetrator.

To my knowledge this is the first paper addressing in a systematic way the neural correlates of moral development across age classes. Factors such as intention and target of the damage conserve their effect across all age classes. Even though moral evaluation and correlated brain activity is remarkably similar in kids and adults, there are differences too. In particular the amygdala and the anterior insula – two notably emotive parts of the brain – are more active in young subjects, giving way to higher prefrontal cortex activations in older subjects. Older people tend to be less aroused and empathic than children when objects are damaged or accidental harm is caused: The strength of the ‘intention’ and ‘target’ factors thus increases with age. Another interesting finding is that the amygdala and the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) integrate more from the point of view of functional connectivity as the years go by. This leads to a better regulation of the amygdala by the VMPFC cortex. Finally, Decety et al find a correlation between the OrbitoFrontal Cortex and the right hippocampus and the extent to which subjects want to punish the perpetrator.

The overall picture is that moral development is initially driven by structures that mediate emotional saliency, such as the amygdala and the insula. Then prefrontal structures gradually mature and integrate with amygdala and insula, leading to a heightened sensitivity to both intention and the severity of consequences. Prefrontal cortexes allow to better regulate the activity of emotional regions and to integrate their outputs together. In fact adults are less likely than children to want to punish people who broke objects or who caused accidental harms. The data confirm that emotional structures in the human brain are paramount for moral development, but also underline a better capability in adults to control the drive to punish if the action harms objects or is accidental, thanks to mature prefrontal areas.

Decety J, Michalska K J, and Kinzler K D. 2011. The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity: a neurodevelopmental study. Cerebral Cortex: e-published ahed of print, May 26 2011.