Research on third-party moral judgments highlights two mechanisms as central to moral judgments of accidental harms: the inference of intent and the perception of harm. However, little is known about how these mechanisms are recruited when people evaluate themselves for harm that they have accidentally caused. Here we explore how a person's perspective — as either actor or observer — influences their moral judgments of accidental harm. We use fMRI to investigate how brain regions involved in the inference of intent and the perception of harm differentially respond when participants either cause (first-person) or observe (third-person) accidental harm. First, we find that people judge their own accidental harms more harshly than they judge others' accidents, and hold themselves more responsible for the unintended harmful outcomes of their choices. Second, we find that regions responding to the first-hand experience of pain are also more sensitive to first-person harms relative to third-person harms, and brain-behavior relationships in a subset of these regions suggest that the tendency to judge oneself more harshly may be supported by a greater sensitivity to the victim's experience of harm. Third, though we find that first-person harms recruit regions for mental state inference to a lesser extent than third-person harms, this difference does not appear to account for the behavioral differences in moral judgment between first-person and third-person harms. The results of this experiment suggest that accidental harms are an important context for broadening our understanding of the relationship between agency, empathy, and moral judgments about the self.

对第三方道德判断的研究强调了两种机制，它们是对偶然伤害的道德判断的核心：意图的推断和对伤害的感知。但是，人们对因意外造成的伤害进行自我评估时如何利用这些机制知之甚少。在这里，我们探讨一个人（无论是演员还是观​​察者）的观点如何影响他们对意外伤害的道德判断。我们使用功能磁共振成像研究参与者意图造成（第一人称）或观察（第三人称）意外伤害时意图意图和伤害感知中涉及的大脑区域如何不同地响应。首先，我们发现人们对自己的意外伤害的判断比对他人意外的判断更为严厉，并使自己对自己选择的意外有害后果承担更多责任。其次，我们发现，对第一手疼痛经历做出反应的区域相对于第三人称伤害也对第一人称伤害更为敏感，并且在这些区域的子集中，大脑与行为的关系暗示了更多地自我判断的趋势对受害者的伤害经历的更大敏感性可能会严重支持这一点。第三，尽管我们发现第一人称伤害对心理状态推断的征募区域要比第三人称伤害小，但这种差异似乎并不能解释第一人称伤害与第三人称伤害之间道德判断上的行为差异。