A new fMRI study examined participants' brain activity while they made decisions with respect to 'the orphanage conundrum':

"Say you have a load of donated food to deliver to an orphanage in Uganda. But due to circumstances beyond your control, you're forced to make a hard choice: give some of the children enough meals to stave off hunger for several days and let the rest go hungry, or evenly distribute a smaller amount of food so that each child feels full for just a few hours."

A series of versions of this problem were presented to the participants, with varying values for the number of meals given/taken away. Findings revealed not only the types of strategies people used in which scenarios, but also linked such moral decision-making with different areas of brain activity, particularly the insula and putamen.

There's been a rapid rise of reseach into emotions, largely through new imagining technology (see earlier post at http://sciencex2.org/en/node/364), as well as widely reported imaging studies tracking/predicting aspects of participants' thoughts. Such research raises the possibility of making judgements or predictions about the moral beliefs or thoughts of another based on brain activity - which engenders a whole host of ethical questions (e.g., potentiality of committing crimes).