Judging Accidental Harm: Due Care and Foreseeability of Side Effects

Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment predict that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ unintended actions that resulted in negative side effects. Whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her action were manipulated orthogonally in the scenarios. We found that careless agents were condemned more than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been prevented. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in non-paradigmatic cases where the agents’ primary intention was to bring about the outcome although not knowing that such outcome was actually negative for others. Here participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without caring, suggesting that the absence of negligence was taken as evidence of the presence of a negative intention in the agents. Together, these findings highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes in all those cases in which negligence can be attributed.