<p>Childhood trauma has a profoundly negative impact on cognitive and emotional functioning, which may affect an individual’s moral judgment. The dual-process theory of moral judgment posits that individuals have both utilitarian (consequence-oriented) and deontological (norm-oriented) moral principles. However, traditional analyses have not been able to clearly reveal how childhood trauma affects moral judgment. The Process Dissociation (PD) approach and “consequences, norms, inaction” (CNI) modeling analyses, by quantifying the independent contributions of different psychological processes, are able to reveal the mechanism of effect of childhood trauma on moral judgments, providing a new way to understand its complex effects.</p><p>This study examined the relationship between childhood trauma and moral judgment using a moral dilemma task. Traditional analysis revealed that the childhood trauma (CT) group made more utilitarian judgments compared to the non-childhood trauma (NCT) group. According to PD approach analysis, the CT group’s utilitarian inclination were not statistically different from those of the NCT group, but its deontological inclination were significantly smaller. The CNI model analysis also showed that while the CT group was similar to the NCT group in terms of sensitivity to consequences and general preference for inaction over action, but different from the NCT group in terms of sensitivity to norms. This suggests that individuals with traumatic childhood experiences made more utilitarian judgments and that childhood trauma influences moral dilemma judgments by reducing sensitivity to moral norms. Emotional processing may be the critical mechanism influencing the moral judgments of those who experience childhood trauma.</p>