542 Justice, Equity, and Fairness in Human Relations
or would be threatened by the victimization of innocent
people. Belief in a just world can be assumed to be a psycho-
logical resource that may be defended by attributing respon-
sibility and blame to the victims themselves, thus reframing
the injustice of their victimization.
Another exciting phenomenon is theexchange fiction,
discussed in more detail in works by Holmes, Miller, and
Lerner (cited in Lerner, 1977) and Lerner (1980). It has been
observed that many people tend to prefer buying an over-
priced article when they know that the profits will go to
needy people, rather than directly donating an amount of
money corresponding to the price difference. The explana-
tion for this phenomenon is that helping a needy person es-
tablishes a commitment and personal responsibility for this
and other needy persons. Thus, any act of helping is prob-
lematic in several respects: It implies an acknowledgment of
undeserved neediness which is threatening the belief in a just
world; it creates a continuing and generalized responsibility
for needy people, a responsibility that may interfere with
personal concerns; and finally, it creates further injustices
with respect to all other similarly needy people who have not
been helped. Yet provided that they are not to blame for hav-
ing inflicted their hardships upon themselves, needy people
deserve to be helped. This conflict is best solved by an ex-
change fiction that allows the donation to be masked as a
purchase.
The third phenomenon is called thefree riding dilemma.
Everyone will agree that free riding—profiting without
investing—serves self-interests. Those who do invest resent
free riders for their selfishness. A relevant observation here
is that opinion polls conducted in Europe during the 1990s
revealed that two thirds of employees were in principle will-
ing to reduce their working hours and income (on average
by 10% to 20%), if this would result in the creation of new
jobs for unemployed persons. However, this willingness
was very rarely translated into action. At least two hypothe-
ses explain this discrepancy: (a) Self-interest (preserving
one’s level of income) finally outweighs the justice motive,
and (b) moving the targets of social comparison changes the
objects and contents of the justice motive. When considering
mass unemployment and its undeserved sequelae, it would
be a just decision for the relatively privileged to share their
working time and income. When comparing themselves with
free riders (other full-time employees who are not willing to
share their privileges), however, subjects who do choose
to share would feel relatively deprived. Thus, not sharing
can be justified as long as free riding is not prevented at the
societal level. What at first glance appears to be selfish be-
havior may well be motivated by justice concerns (Montada,
1998b).
JUSTICE: A UNIVERSAL CONCERN
WITH DIVERGING VIEWSThe concern for justice seems to be an anthropological uni-
versal.However, there does not appear to be a universal con-
sensus on what is considered to be just or unjust. We speak of
justice in the singular as if there were only one single, just
solution for every social system and for every problem or
conflict; yet frequently, there are diverging views about what
would be just, which criteria should be applied, and how they
should be applied in order to establish justice. This is true for
all domains of social life in which justice is critical: distribu-
tions, social exchanges, and the retribution and acknowledge-
ment of deeds. The application of different standards of
justice results in diverging and conflicting outcomes. A com-
mon view about what is just and what is unjust would be
helpful to avoid and to settle social conflicts in private and
business contexts, as well as in the political arena within and
between societies.
The normative nature of justice is obvious. The aim ofnor-
mative disciplinesis to analyze and account for normative
standards, to elaborate reasonable and just solutions for
specific cases, and to conceive criteria and procedures for just
decision-making. The ultimate challenge for normative ap-
proaches may be to find universally valid solutions. In view of
the difficulty of that task, the focus may be displaced from the
concrete solutions to the procedures of finding a solution—
precisely as in discourse ethics (Ackerman, 1980) in which
ideal rules of discourse are considered a guarantee for the eth-
ical truth of the result.
It is not the aim ofempirical approaches to propose the
best standards of justice and the best solutions for justice
problems. Instead, the following questions are investigated:
What do people consider to be just and unjust? How diver-
gent or convergent are the views about justice? Which are the
belief systems and dispositions that influence people’s per-
ceptions of justice and injustice? What is the motivational
impact of experienced or observed injustice? How do people
cope with experienced or observed injustices? How can
justice conflicts be settled? How can one-sided views of jus-
tice be qualified? What is the impact of procedures on the
appraisal of decisions?
There are interfaces between normative and empirical
approaches: Philosophical theories of justice imply anthro-
pological assumptions that need to be tested empirically
(e.g., Frohlich & Oppenheimer, 1990, on Rawls’ theory of
justice), and the ethical validity of empirically assessed
views about justice and injustice as well as the claims for
justice has to be examined normatively and cannot be taken
for granted.