The right and the good: distributive justice and neural encoding of equity and efficiency.

Full 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.

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Author information

Author/s: Hsu, Ming (M); Anen, Cédric (C); Quartz, Steven R (SR);

Affiliation: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Science (New York, N.Y.) (Science), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-May; vol 320 (issue 5879) : pp 1092-5

Dates: Created 2008/05/23; Completed 2008/06/02;

PMID: 18467558, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Brain - physiology
Brain Mapping
Caudate Nucleus - physiology
Cerebral Cortex - physiology
Choice Behavior
Emotions
Female
Gift Giving
Humans

Judgment
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Middle Aged
Morals
Putamen - physiology
Reward
Septum of Brain - physiology
Social Behavior
Social Justice

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