Moral status of accidents

Abstract

No one is naive enough to expect that all moral beliefs are universal. Today, some countries legally beat and imprison homosexuals, and others recognize gay marriage; in some places, killing a bull is a sport, and, in others, it is an abomination; in some places, corporal punishment is the obligation of a responsible parent and, in others, grounds for forced removal. Indeed, the burden of proof seems to be on the other side: Is there anything universal about human moral cognition? In PNAS, Barrett et al. (1) test one candidate for a universal principle of human morality: that an action’s moral value depends not only on the action’s consequences but on the person’s intentions.