When evaluating the moral worth of an action of human agent, we take into account not only the consequence of but also the intention behind the action. In legal practice, for example,  actusreus ("guilty act") has to be in combination with  mensrea  ("guilty mind") to produce criminal liability. In the present study, we investigated how humans integrate intention and consequence to form proper responses in an interpersonal transgression context. We adopted an interpersonal interactive paradigm where we orthogonalize the consequential damage of and the intention behind a transgression. As a victim of transgression, the participant could punish the partners by reducing their monetary payoff. We found that the punishment was lower in the accidental condition (unintended harm relative to intended harm) but higher in the failed-attempt condition (unintended no-harm relative to intended no-harm). Neurally, the left amygdala was activated in the conditions with blameworthy intention (i.e., intentional harm and failed attempt). The accidental (relative to intentional) harm activated the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the anterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), while the failed attempt (relative to genuine no-harm) activated the anterior insula (AI) and the posterior IFG. Effective connectivity analysis revealed that in the unintentional conditions (i.e., accidental and failed attempt) the IFG received input from the TPJ and AI, and sent regulatory signals to the amygdala. These findings demonstrate that the processing of intention may gate the emotional responses to transgression and regulate subsequent reactive punishment. 

Hongbo Yu, Jia Li, &Xiaolin Zhou (2015). Neural substrates of intention-consequence integration and its impact on reactive punishment in interpersonal transgression.  Journal of Neuroscience , 35(12), 4917– 4925.