538 Justice, Equity, and Fairness in Human Relations
traditions, acculturation, information about the implications
of applying specific rules of justice, personal and socially
shared values, the impact of social roles and positions (for
reviews, see Tyler, Boeckman, Smith, & Huo, 1997), person-
ality traits, and basic belief systems (cf. Schmitt, 1994, for a
review). It is not the aim of this chapter to review and discuss
this kind of research. Rather, the influential theory that the
concern for justice has the instrumental function of maximiz-
ing self-interest is disputed.
Justice: A Means to Serve Self-Interest?
The view that people care about justice purely as a means to
pursue their own self-interest is prominent in social psychol-
ogy (a review is provided by Tyler et al., 1997). It forms
the core assumption in the equity theory of social ex-
change (Adams, 1965; Homans, 1961; Walster, Berscheid, &
Walster, 1978), which states that people prefer equity as a
strategic choice to maximize their individual gains within so-
cial exchanges on either the short or the long term.
Thibault and Walker (1975) took a similar approach to
explain people’s preference rankings for different ways of
settling conflicts with others—by negotiation, mediation,
arbitration, or court decisions. They supposed that people’s
preferences were guided by their personal self-interests. The
best strategy is to keep control over the outcome. In situations
in which people have only limited control over the outcome
because authorities have decisional power, people seek pro-
cedural control and attempt to influence the outcome by hav-
ing a voice and by presenting arguments, their views, and
evidence. Therefore, people view those procedures in which
they have voice and influence as fairer than others. That
means that the fairness ratings given to procedures are
dependent on the indirect control over the outcome that these
procedures allow.
The reasons given for this reduction of the concern for jus-
tice to a concern for self-interest mirror social contract theo-
ries in political philosophy. Philosophers—from Hobbes
(1648/1970) to Rawls (1971)—have tackled the question of
why individuals living in a fictional “original” prestate situa-
tion consented to build a state with powerful institutions,
laws, and rules of justice. The basic answer is that it was to
their best mutual advantage to restrict their egoistic fight for
their own interests by establishing a system of social norms
which would and could regulate their rights and obligations
in competition as well as in cooperation. If this idea is gener-
alized slightly, informal social norms (like most justice
norms) can also be regarded as serving the mutual advantage
of all (Hardin, 1996). Both the establishment of a state with a
system of rules and of powerful institutions to ensure their
observation can be considered to be rational choices in the
well-understood self-interest of individuals, especially when
the social system is structured in a way that even the weak,
less fortunate, and less able individuals participate in the
common wealth (Rawls, 1971).
For several reasons, this rational choice modeling of the
justice motive is disputable.- What is missing in these theoretical accounts is the norma-
tive, prescriptive core of justice. Justice is anought,a
moral imperative for social life. It is not a means to achieve
personal aims, but rather an end in itself (Montada, 1998a).
People are obligated to observe the norms of justice re-
gardless of whether this is in their self-interest. Moreover,
they are entitled to claim justice from other actors, organi-
zations, state institutions, and so on, not only for them-
selves but also for others. - The model does not fit to empirical data showing that
justice concerns are not reducible to self-interests and may
in fact conflict with self-interests. - There is no empirical proof of the reductionistic view of
the model; it is merely an anthropological assumption. As
such, it is part of a belief system and is not a testable sci-
entific hypothesis. These three arguments are elaborated
in more detail in this section.
Justice as an End in ItselfIn every rational-choice explanation of the justice motive, it
is not the concern for justice that is the primary motivational
factor—rather, it is concerns for one’s self-interests. If justice
matters at all, then it matters only insofar as it serves these
other concerns. This implies that justice is not acknowledged
as a prescriptive normative standard.
When the equity principle is applied, inequity is unjust
and needs to be rectified. The disadvantaged are entitled to
claim equity, and anybody observing inequity is entitled or
even obligated to claim equity for the disadvantaged. Those
who are overbenefited within an exchange relation are
morally obligated to reestablish equity.
The prescriptive nature of justice norms is not dependent
on the actors’ self-interest or on observers’ sympathies with
the advantaged or disadvantaged party in a social exchange
relationship. Of course, self-interest may motivate actors to
interpret and to balance the investments and benefits to their
own advantage, and observers’ sympathies with advantaged
actors, for instance, may motivate them to discount the in-
vestments or overestimate the benefits of the disadvantaged
in order to avoid or cope with feelings of injustice. Such
biased distortions of so-called objective justice, however, do