Why are VMPFC patients more utilitarian? A dual-process theory of moral judgment explains

Koenigs, Young and colleagues [1] recently tested patients with emotion-related damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) using moral dilemmas used in previous neuroimaging studies [2,3]. These patients made unusually utilitarian judgments (endorsing harmful actions that promote the greater good). My collaborators and I have proposed a dual-process theory of moral judgment [2,3] that we claim predicts this result. In a Research Focus article published in this issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Moll and de Oliveira-Souza [4] challenge this interpretation.