Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments

The RTPJ doesn't control morality, it controls theory of mind. This is known and the study admits it (though the BBC doesn't).

All this shows is that moral judgments that require considering people's mental states call the theory of mind function, which is predictable. If you can't think about someone's beliefs at all, you can't use them as a mitigating factor in a moral judgment.

If you gave someone a stroke and caused hemineglect, they'd stop condemning immoral actions that happened on one side of the visual field, but that wouldn't mean you'd discovered something interesting about their morality.

The study gets this exactly right: "Our hypothesis therefore is that TMS to the RTPJ affects an input to moral judgment (i.e., belief information) but not the process of moral judgment per se."

To be honest, I discount anything with Hauser's name attached, unfair though that might be to his poor grad students. And I particularly discount anything with Hauser's name which did not go through normal peer review.

Interesting (though unsurprising to us non-dualists). To repost the abstract for easy reading:

"When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions). Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment (experiment 1, offline stimulation) and during moral judgment (experiment 2, online stimulation). In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms (e.g., actors who intended but failed to do harm): Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms."

I interviewed the lead author of this paper for my podcast, in which Dr. Young provides some context for the study and discusses greater implications, for example the possibility that the normative theory you find most plausible is influenced by your brain configuration, for example how active your RTPJ is.