Another example of neuroscientists using fMRI to study the way brains work during decision-making, this time when dealing with problems of distributive justice:

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.

As the Neuroscientifically Challenged explains,

The investigators found that distinct neural regions are activated in the consideration of equity and efficiency. The putamen, a mid-brain structure that forms part of the dorsal striatum, seemed to be correlated specifically with efficiency. On the other hand, activity in the bilateral insular cortex was correlated with inequity. Regions of the caudate were activated by both. They also found that individual differences in aversion to inequity corresponded with higher neural activity in the insula.

Overall, the participants showed the greatest neural reaction to an inequitable distribution of food, leading the authors of the study to speculate that distributive decisions are made to avoid inequality more so than to engender efficiency. Thus, the results of this experiment seem to support the deontological argument. As the insular cortex is thought to play an important role in emotional processing, the experiment also indicates that our decisions are not devoid of an emotional element (contrary to the beliefs of Kant and Plato).

Thus, the imaging evidence from this study may help to explain why the debate over distributive justice has never been resolved. The concepts of equity and efficiency, and their respective values, are deeply rooted in our brains.