537THE CONCERN FOR JUSTICE—THE
JUSTICE MOTIVE 537
Justice: A Means to Serve Self-Interest? 538
Justice as an End in Itself 538
Empirical Evidence for the Justice Motive as a
Primary Motive 539
Traps of Reductionism 540
Trade-Offs Between the Justice Motive and
Other Motives 541
JUSTICE: A UNIVERSAL CONCERN WITH
DIVERGING VIEWS 542
THE JUSTICE OF DISTRIBUTIONS 543
Standards of Distributive Justice 543
The Choice of a Principle 543
Social Comparisons as a Basis for Justice Appraisals 544
JUSTICE IN SOCIAL RELATIONS 546
Forms and Contents of Social Exchanges 546
What Is Fair and Just in Social Exchanges? 547
Justice Within Close Relationships 549
The Effects of Social Exchanges on Third Parties 551
THE JUSTICE OF RETRIBUTIONS 551
Just Retribution and Punishment 551
Perpetrator’s Responsibility and Blameworthiness 552
Blameworthiness, Apologies, and Retribution 553
Victims’ Need for Retribution 554
THE JUSTICE OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND POLITICS 554
Imbalances of Justice at the Societal Level 554
What Is Unjust and What Would Be Just? 556
AVOIDING AND SETTLING JUSTICE CONFLICTS 556
Procedural Justice 556
Settling Justice Conflicts by Mediation 557
JUSTICE AS A PERSONAL AND
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION 559
Justice Appraisals: Intuitions or Moral Reasoning? 559
Dispositional Factors in Appraisals of Justice 560
The Social Construction of Justice by Social Movements 561
Coping With Injustice 561
CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK 562
REFERENCES 563THE CONCERN FOR JUSTICE—THE
JUSTICE MOTIVE
Claims for justice and protests against injustice are ubiquitous
in social life. Political movements, revolutions, and wars
are initiated under the banner of justice. Justice is a prominent
issue in all fields of politics. The courts are swamped with law
suits, and their judgments are accepted without protest or
bitterness only when they are considered to be just. Perceived
injustices are at the core of everyday conflicts in private life.
Close relationships are put at risk by experienced injustice.
Victims of misfortune have to cope with the perceived injus-
tice of their fate and—not seldom—with being derogated and
blamed by others who try to preserve their belief in a just world
by reconstructing the observed misfortune as deserved.
Humans are averse to injustice—they have a justice mo-
tive. Lerner (1977, 1980) was the first to outline the essential
psychological features of the justice motive. He has empha-
sized the human need for justice, including the need to
believe in a just world in which everybody gets what he or
she deserves. Lerner has assigned the belief in a just world
(BJW) a key role in his theory of the justice motive: When-
ever people are confronted with injustices, their BJW is
challenged and they try to preserve what Lerner calls the
fundamental delusion either by efforts to restore the violated
justice in the real world or to restore it mentally by reinter-
preting the reality to minimize injustice. According to Lerner,
people build up a personal contract whereby they are oblig-
ated to observe rules of justice, expecting that others do the
same.
Can this human concern for justice be explained? And
what would such an explanation mean? It is indisputable that
views of what is just and what is unjust in general and in par-
ticular vary among individuals, subcultures, and cultures.
Some individuals and cultures are more concerned about jus-
tice than others are. Moreover, their views are subject to
intra-individual and to historical changes. It is worth explor-
ing the sources of these variations and changes: culturalCHAPTER 22
Justice, Equity, and Fairness in Human Relations
LEO MONTADA