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Published May 23, 2008 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency

Abstract

Distributive justice concerns how individuals and societies distribute benefits and burdens in a just or moral manner. We combined distribution choices with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the central problem of distributive justice: the trade-off between equity and efficiency. We found that the putamen responds to efficiency, whereas the insula encodes inequity, and the caudate/septal subgenual region encodes a unified measure of efficiency and inequity (utility). Notably, individual differences in inequity aversion correlate with activity in inequity and utility regions. Against utilitarianism, our results support the deontological intuition that a sense of fairness is fundamental to distributive justice but, as suggested by moral sentimentalists, is rooted in emotional processing. More generally, emotional responses related to norm violations may underlie individual differences in equity considerations and adherence to ethical rules.

Additional Information

© 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 3 December 2007; accepted 21 April 2008 Published online 8 May 2008. This project was supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation (S.R.Q.), and the Beckman Institute (M.H.). We thank the Canaan Children's Home for their cooperation; M. Stewart for research assistance; and T. Anastasio, K. Binmore, P. Bossaerts, C. Camerer, P. Glimcher, S. Mysore, R. Montague, and S. Williams for valuable suggestions and discussion of ideas.

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