558 Justice, Equity, and Fairness in Human Relations
justice dilemmas and knowledge of how to deal with justice
dilemmas—are helpful to settle social conflicts. We can dif-
ferentiate several strategies for dealing with conflicts of jus-
tice in a mediation setting; they are outlined in the following
discussion.
Articulating Conflicting Concepts of Justice
Existing justice conflicts are often not clearly articulated at
the beginning of a mediation. The conflicts manifest them-
selves as emotions, specifically as resentment of the opposing
party. It happens on occasion that the parties cannot clearly
articulatetheir views of justice and require assistance with
this articulation. To be able to assist, the mediators need an
repertory of hypotheses concerning the principles of justice.
Only clearly articulated concepts of justice can be communi-
cated and reflected.
Mediators must keep in mind that the manifest objects of a
conflictare not necessarily identical with the underlying deep
structureof the conflict—an example can be found, for in-
stance, in the many conflicts between parents and their ado-
lescent children: the demands of the children for autonomy
and the demands of the parents for maintaining authority and
the acceptance of their norms and values by the children. The
manifest conflicts about dress, hairstyle, neatness, contacts
with peers, and so on do not directly reflect their deep struc-
ture. Thus, solutions to the manifest conflicts do not always
lead to a lasting settlement because the deep structure of con-
flicting demands is not articulated and not addressed in the
agreement.
Imparting Understanding for the Other Party’s
Concepts of Justice
After the proper articulation of the conflicts, the second step
in the process is imparting an understanding of the respective
demands and normative concepts of the other party. Under-
standing does not mean that their demands and normative
concepts were adopted and accepted as justified. Each party
should, however, reformulate the other party’s views of jus-
tice and injustice in such a way that this party feels itself to be
correctly understood; this is analogous to giving and having a
voice in decision making, and it is a sign of reciprocal re-
spect. If, in addition, each party can be induced to formulate
arguments for the views of the respective opposing party,
then a great deal has been achieved; this is in line with
principles of discourse ethics and the ideal communication
situation (Habermas, 1990).
Imparting Insight Into the Dilemma Structure
of Conflicts of JusticeSettling conflicts is made easier when insight is gained that
divergent principles of justice do exist and may be valid and
that justice dilemmas result from this fact (Montada & Kals,
2001). The normative character of justice implies that every-
one is convinced that his or her own conception of justice is
valid for everyone else. Each party involved draws the unre-
flected conclusion that others are either in error in their dif-
fering viewpoints or are egoistic, perhaps even maliciously
violating justice. If the person, however, recognizes that a
justice dilemma exists, then he or she no longer views the po-
sition of the other parties as completely illegitimate and his or
her own position as the only legitimate one. In conflict medi-
ation, the questioning of the exclusive validity of every single
principle of justice by pointing to the concurrent validity of
competing principles is an important strategy (Montada &
Kals, 2001).
The justification of the validity of a moral rule or principle
is to be distinguished from the justification of decisions in
concrete cases in which competing principles are relevant
(Habermas, 1993). This step requires concrete attempts to
qualify all conflicting claims for justice. Does this mean gen-
eral relativism of values, a questioning of their validity? No!
Not one of the aforementioned principles of justice is un-
founded. Their validity can be established with good argu-
ments. As this applies, however, to all conflicting principles,
this implies that none of these principles is valid exclusively.
We must counter a negative relativismthat states Nothing is
validwith the positive relativism No principle is valid ab-
solutely; many principles are valid.Making one principle ab-
solute and applying it to the exclusion of others would violate
all other principles.
It is the wisdom of institutions to consider various princi-
ples of justice in their regulations and decisions. The social
market economy, for instance, is an attempt to harmonize the
rights of the individual citizen to free economic activity with
the maxims of the social welfare state. Rawls’maximin-
principleis also a suggestion toward integration of the free-
dom of all citizens to economic activity (which ensures best
collective wealth) with the rights of every citizen to partici-
pate in the general prosperity (1971).
Regulations for decision making and individual decisions
seem to find rather broad acceptance when several principles
of justice are considered at the same time; this can be seen in
the research on the distribution of scarce goods such as
university study places, subsidized housing, and transplant
organs, as well as in the research on the layoff of employees