Unintended, but still blameworthy: the roles of awareness, desire, and anger in negligence, restitution, and punishment.

Two experiments (Experiment 1 N = 149, Experiment 2 N = 141) investigated how two mental states that underlie how perceivers reason about intentional action (awareness of action and desire for an outcome) influence blame and punishment for unintended (i.e., negligent) harms, and the role of anger in this process.

Why side-effect outcomes do not affect intuitions about intentional actions: properly shifting the focus from intentional outcomes back to intentional actions.

Over the last decade, many articles have suggested that the "badness" of side-effect outcomes influences perceivers' intuitions about intentionality, contradicting the traditional notion that mental state inferences lead to moral judgments rather than the reverse. Challenging this assertion, we argue that typically, consideration of intentionality involves thinking about "intentional actions" (things people do) rather than unintended outcomes. Across several studies, we offer an explanatory framework describing why side-effect asymmetries emerge.