Nonetheless, respondents may endorse harming an individual for utilitarian gains when the harm is impersonal rather than personal, or unintentional rather than intentional. Recent research demonstrates that participants�� willingness to endorse utilitarian actions that require personally harming an innocent victim can be affected by variables that influence brain functioning, such as lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and pharmacological challenges. For example, respondents who receive a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor are less likely to endorse utilitarian outcomes that result in harm to an innocent victim. This may be because serotonin enhances the aversive emotional response to causing others harm, perhaps through its influence on brain structures like the amygdala, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which are implicated in moral judgments and behavior. By contrast, intentionally causing harm as a means of bringing about the good end would not be permissible. For example, scenarios in which one moves a switch to divert a train onto a track away from five bystanders, even though it can be foreseen that another person standing on the track will be killed, are usually judged to be permissible. But scenarios in which one moves a switch to drop a person in front of a train, deliberately killing him but saving five people further down the track, are usually judged to be impermissible. We hypothesized that 5HTTLPR genotype would interact with intentionality in respondents who generated moral judgments. Whereas we predicted that all participants would eschew intentionally harming an innocent for utilitarian gains, we predicted that participants judgments of foreseen but unintentional harm would diverge as a function of genotype. Specifically, we predicted that LL homozygotes would adhere to the principle of double effect and preferentially select the utilitarian option to save more lives despite unintentional harm to an innocent victim, whereas S-allele carriers would be less likely to endorse even unintentional harm. Publications Using Abomle Lonidamine Results of behavioral testing confirmed this hypothesis. More important for our specific hypotheses, we also analyzed variation in response times when participants made different responses. In other words, how did participants�� response times vary as a function of how acceptable they judged a course of action to be? To conduct this analysis, we calculated for each participant the correlation between his or her mean response times and the numeric response he or she provided for both foreseen and intentional harm scenarios. Thus, a positive correlation indicated that the participant responded more slowly when judging actions to be more acceptable, and a negative correlation indicated that participants responded more slowly when judging the action to be less acceptable. Accumulating research suggests that serotonergic activity plays an important role in moral reasoning and related social behaviors. SLC6A4 is a gene that regulates serotonergic activity and has been described as the most investigated genetic variant in the fields of human psychology and neuroscience. However, the association between 5-HTTLPR genotype and individual differences in moral judgments has not previously been determined. Our results showed that participants agreed that intentionally causing the death of one innocent victim was not a morally acceptable means to a utilitarian end. By contrast, participants�� judgments diverged according to genotype when judging foreseen harm.