The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency
Ming Hsu,1*
Cédric Anen,2*
Steven R. Quartz2
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.
2 Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences 228-77, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
* These authors contributed equally to this work.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: steve{at}hss.caltech.edu
