Justice And Cultural Concerns Research Paper

However, there does not appear to be a universal consensus on what is considered to be just or unjust. We speak of justice in the singular as if there were only one just solution for any problem. Yet there may be diverging views on what would be a just solution for any given injustice, and on which principles of justice should be applied. Many conflicts concerning justice become intense because people are not aware of the basic dilemma structure of such conflicts. This will be outlined in the first section of this research paper. The second section will deal with procedural justice and the settlement of justice conflicts. In the third section, the justice motive will be depicted as a primary motive which may assume many different faces.

1. Principles Of Justice And Disputes About Their Validity

Justice is typically regarded as the normative standard for decision making and valuation. In actual fact, there is no single standard of justice, but instead many different ones. This is true for all three domains of social life in which justice is critical: distribution, social exchange, retribution and the acknowledgment of deeds. Moreover, the application of different standards of justice results in diverging and conflicting outcomes.

1.1 Distributive Justice

In the domain of distribution—i.e., the allocation or distribution of material resources or symbolic goods, rights, duties, positions, power, opportunities, taxes, etc., within or between groups or populations— equality certainly constitutes the basic idea of justice. However, equality can be specified in many different ways. It may mean equal shares for all human beings or, if that is impossible or dysfunctional, equal opportunities. Or else, according to Aristotle, it may mean equal shares or equal opportunities for all equal human beings. This second view implies that human beings differ and that certain differences justify unequal allocations and inequalities in the overall distribution of resources, rights, duties, etc., (for instance, according to their membership to a group, organization, or population; according to their social status, specific merits, professional qualifications and productivity, age, gender, neediness, etc. Another rule of distributive justice is the conservation of the status quo and of previously acquired rights). In this sense, equality means equal shares for all those in the same position, for all those with the same kinds of merits or needs, and so forth. The equal opportunity rule can be specified, for instance, as the equal chance rule, in which a lottery procedure is used when it is impossible for goods to be split up (e.g., in the allocation of organs for transplantation), or the rotation schedule, which may be appropriate when it would be dysfunctional for a position to be split.

Walzer (1983) somewhat neutralized the problems of justice with the inequalities in allocation and distribution by his concept of ‘complex equality,’ which postulates that distributions in different ‘spheres of justice’ (material wealth, social recognition in various contexts, political power, education, kinship and love, recreation time, etc.,) are not perfectly correlated. Thus, a lower rank in one sphere may be compensated by a higher ranking in another. Moreover, the subjective importance of the different spheres of justice varies, so that perceived overall inequalities may be reduced further.

However, the question of which differences between people justify which inequalities in allocations and distributions remains open. In the ongoing discussion, arguments are inspired by cultural traditions and social philosophies such as egalitarianism, liberalism, social welf-arism, utilitarianism, and the human and civil rights movement. We are far from having reached a general consensus in this question: the preferred standards of distributive justice vary between and within cultures.

This is true in all fields of distributive justice. For instance, the populations of post-communist states are less tolerant of inequalities, and ascribe more responsibility for individual welfare to the government than do the populations of states with a liberal tradition (Kluegel et al., 1995). The rules of justice for the allocation and withdrawal of scarce goods such as scholarships, state-subsidized housing, jobs, etc., vary greatly within and across states (Elster 1992). In the dismissal of employees, for instance, the criteria applied include the seniority of the employees, their acquired skills, current productivity, neediness, responsibility for a family, age, and gender. Though it may be possible to justify the application of each of these criteria, each will result in different decisions, and not in a single just solution.

1.2 Justice Within Social Exchange Relationships

Modified forms of the equality criterion for appraising justice can also be found in other domains of social and societal life. In exchange relationships the equality criterion is found in the principles of reciprocity and equity as well as in the concept of fair contract. Social exchanges are regarded as just if reciprocity is established. This is true for positive exchanges, where equal mutual advantage is the normative standard, as well as for negative exchanges, as portrayed in the biblical rule of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ Equal mutual advantages have also been postulated in the social contract conception of the state (Hobbes 1651, 1968) and in the sociological theory of role-bound exchanges (teacher-student, physician-patient, employer-employee, leader-follower; in Parsons, [1951]). However, the general truth of this postulate of equal mutual advantage has been criticized with good reason (Gouldner 1960): Some social roles or positions are certainly more attractive, powerful, and profitable than others. Equity has also been proposed as the normative standard for informal social exchanges, implying equal ratios of investments, costs and outcomes, and benefits for all parties involved (Homans 1961). The equity principle appears to be more clear-cut than it actually is, however, since the evaluation of justice or injustice is guided by personal balances of subjectively focused exchanges (of goods, services, love, respect, trust, loyalty, harm, negligence, hostilities, etc.).

Moreover, indirect exchanges (e.g., services to third parties or to the community which are of indirect benefit to the partners in the exchange) may or may not be included in these subjective evaluations—the same is true for same chained exchanges, e.g., in the generation contract (Emerson 1976). (The generation contract involves members of one generation supporting the older generation in the expectation that, in their own old age, they will be supported by the next generation.)

The contract is a prototypical form of social exchange. Contracts are regarded as just when the partners are equally informed and equally free to consent to them (Nozick 1974). Justice is threatened if relevant information is withheld, if pressure is exerted, or if one party is not free to refuse to enter into the contract on account of a certain predicament. But even contracts made by informed and freely consenting parties may be unjust with respect to third parties (e.g., cartel contracts made at the expense of others).

1.3 Retributive Justice And The Justice Of Awards

Within the domain of retributive justice equality is specified firstly as impartiality in blaming and punishing people for their misdeeds or in praising and rewarding people for their achievements and heroic or moral deeds. Impartiality means that the same standards are applied to similar people in similar circumstances. This allows different standards to be applied to different people. For example, different standards of achievement may be applied in schools so that culturally or socially disadvantaged or less gifted pupils have any chance of being praised and rewarded. Secondly, equality in the domain of retributive justice is specified as proportionality, e.g., of punishment and guilt, reward and excellence. The major problem with proportionality is to determine how blame, guilt, praise, and achievements can be reliably gauged. Another crucial question with respect to retributive justice remains unanswered, however, namely which norms should be applied in the evaluation of actions. For instance, the atrocities legalized by the laws of a totalitarian regime cannot be punished if these laws are observed, but taking human and civil rights as normative standards here would violate the juridical prohibition against enacting laws retrospectively.

1.4 The Justice Of The Social System And Politics

Since the constitution, the legal system, and the institutions of a society impact on distribution, social exchange, and retribution, these components of the societal system are also the objects of justice appraisals, e.g., the economic system, the labor laws, the health and welfare system, the educational system, environmental protection laws, immigration rules, the generation contract—all of these maybe valued as basically just or may be criticized as unjust as well as the politics responsible for the implementation and the adaptation of the system. Constitutions may be criticized for failing to guarantee human rights, the protection of the environment, or animal welfare; the economic and tax systems may be criticized for allowing the development of huge inequalities in wealth or for demotivating individual productivity; the educational system may be blamed for failing to provide equal opportunities for the socially disadvantaged or failing to meet the needs of gifted students. Arguments concerning justice can be found to support or censure any given policy. And all parties concerned usually seem convinced that their view is the only valid one. This is how normative standards are conceived— as generally valid and as binding for all concerned.

1.5 What Is Unjust, What Would Be Just ?

It is easier to reveal injustices than to establish justice within complex social and societal systems. In the following, a few examples will be given to illustrate this thesis.

An action such as the distribution of grades may be evaluated as unjust with respect to a specific standard or principle of justice, e.g., the correspondence of grades and performance. Any failure to establish this correspondence would be unjust and subject to correction. This is an easy case. It becomes much more complicated when the performances are not assessed objectively, or when the principle of justice is questioned, e.g., when those giving the grades are asked to consider the individual, social, and contextual conditions of achievement which may have been favorable or unfavorable, fairly or unfairly allocated, justly or unjustly distributed.

In many cases, efforts to correct one injustice result in the creation of another. A prominent example of this is the affirmative action taken to correct the indisputable historical disadvantages of women on the labor market which still persists to this day. For instance, woman are still underrepresented in top-level positions. Interpreting this fact as an unjust discrimination against women, various types of affirmative action have been taken to give preference to female applicants over their male competitors. The problem with this policy as far as justice is concerned is that it aims to correct a historical problem by reversing gender privileges in today’s generation of students and young professionals. Today’s young women have certainly suffered fewer injustices in education and on the labor market than earlier generations of women, and today’s young men are less privileged than their predecessors. Therefore, it is problematic for these historical injustices to be corrected by affirmative action affecting only the present generation of young women and men, and having no impact on preceding generations. The costs of this measure should not be borne exclusively by young men. Moreover, it would be an illusion to believe that the whole group of women will vicariously participate in and profit from the success of some young women. Women are not a social group, but a social category. Individually, most are members of gender-mixed social groups such as families, where they are bound not only to daughters, sisters, and mothers, but also to sons, brothers, and fathers. They may be proud of the careers of the male as well as the female members of their family.

Another example is the environmental protection policy. There is little doubt that current and future environmental pollution not only entails health risks, but the risk of climate changes with incalculable consequences. There is no doubt that the pollution of air, soil, and water entails gross injustices. As pollution is a side-effect of productive processes in agriculture, industry, and business, and of traffic, air conditioning, etc., the concern of justice is about the allocation of the profits, costs, and risks resulting from these processes. It goes without saying that some people and populations benefit more than others from these processes, and those who profit most are unlikely to be those who have most to lose from the risks and disadvantages of pollution. The costs of pollution are still typically externalized, meaning that the costs and risks are not borne by those responsible for their causation, or by those who benefit from the processes in question. One of the policies for reducing pollution is the internalization of the costs by means of pollution taxes. However, the problems for justice created by pollution are not solved by raising taxes, and this measure may result in new problems of justice. Firstly, there is no guarantee that the taxes raised will be used to compensate the victims of pollution. In fact, not all of the victims of pollution can be identified, as its harmful effects are long-lasting, may interact with many other factors, and may be cumulative. Furthermore, air and water pollution extend across regional and state boundaries and may involve delayed risks for the future, when coming generations may be affected by the greenhouse effect. Secondly, pollution taxes may intensify social inequalities. They may be ruinous for poorer firms, but not for richer ones, and prohibitive for poorer car owners, but not for more affluent drivers. The result may be the bankruptcy of some firms, the consequent dismissal of employees, and the aggravation of economic inequalities, potentially causing new problems of social justice.

A final example: It is a rule of retributive justice that crimes are to be punished. Nevertheless, what exactly constitutes a just punishment for a concrete crime is constantly under discussion. The assessment of personal guilt is difficult, as is the assessment of what constitutes an efficient punishment with respect to various purposes—general and individual deterrence, resocialization, protection of the general public, or the victims’ claims for retaliation. Equal punishment for the same category of crime and similar degrees of guilt may seem just, but may have an entirely different impact depending on the personality, life perspective, and social context of the offender. For some it may represent nothing but a small hiccup in the life plan, for others it will destroy the whole life perspective. Moreover, the impact of legal punishments is frequently not restricted to the offender; those who are close to the offender are also affected, and may suffer social discrimination and economic hardship which they have not deserved.

Claims for justice result from perceived injustices. Injustices are typically perceived as the violation of a single principle of justice, and from a restricted view of reality. The intensity of resentment about perceived injustices does not corroborate the validity of the personal or collective views. Efforts to correct perceived injustices frequently result in new injustices if further principles of justice are not taken into account, or if the complexities of social and physical reality are not acknowledged. Awareness of existing justice dilemmas and of the complexity of social systems is usually necessary for sustainable and broadly acceptable solutions to be found.

2. Procedural Justice And The Settlement Of Conflicts

Given this broad spectrum of options for appraising and constructing justice in the various fields of social life, conflicts about justice are preprogrammed. How can these conflicts be settled? How can peace be preserved? One answer is to ensure fair procedures of decision making, procedures which are broadly accepted as just within the population (Luhmann 1983). This holds for parliamentary procedures, elections, institutional decisions, decisions of courts, arbitrators and other authorities. The separation of powers is a crucial element in the appraisal of justice in a given society—this includes the right to appeal against institutional and parliamentary decisions in administrative and constitutional courts. Extensive empirical research has confirmed the impact of fair procedures on conflict resolution and on the acceptance of authoritative decision making. It is not only the impartiality of the authorities, the consistent use of norms and arguments, and the objectivity in the use of relevant information which people consider to be criteria of fairness—the granting of a ‘voice’ to all concerned, meaning that all concerned are given the opportunity to present their views and claims and to influence the decision-making process, is also seen as an essential criterion (Thibaut and Walker 1975, Leventhal 1980). There is ample general evidence of what has been dubbed ‘the fair process effect,’ describing the phenomenon that perceived procedural fairness helps the parties involved to accept decisions or outcomes which are less favorable than they had expected or hoped for. Decent and polite treatment by the authorities may add to this effect (Lind and Tyler 1988). There is also evidence that perceived procedural fairness bolsters trust in the justice of institutions.

The settlement of conflicts—in the political arena as well as in all other fields of social life—requires the parties to acknowledge that conceptions of justice different from their own are not completely erroneous, and that the realm of justice is not without contradictions. It might be helpful to demonstrate the divergent conceptions of justice in different fields of life, social contexts, historical periods, and cultural traditions. It is necessary for the parties involved to understand that dilemmas of justice are unavoidable since conflicting standards of justice all have some validity. Conflict settlement therefore requires all conflicting principles and views of justice to be considered. Moreover, solutions which harmonize them have to be sought. Diverging constitutional principles such as freedom, equality, and solidarity have to be harmonized in the same way, since one-sided applications of each individual principle in societal practice would violate the others.

It is the wisdom of institutions to pay heed to several contradicting justice standards in their policies. The ‘social market economy,’ for instance, is conceived as a way of harmonizing liberal capitalist principles with social welfare maxims. In his theory of justice, Rawls (1971) has tried to integrate the right of all citizens to free economic activities with the right of all citizens to participate in the general welfare. His ‘maximin’ principle justifies both freedom of economic activity for all and the resulting inequalities in economic wealth, but restricts freedom and social inequality to the point that the maximum benefit will result for the least privileged category of citizens. When asserting every citizen’s right to participate in the general economic wealth, Rawls also justifies redistribution and regulation by the state.

Similarly, most of the procedures for the allocation or withdrawal of scarce goods described by Elster (1992) at the level of institutions and corporations combine several principles of distributive justice. Together with elements of procedural fairness, this might explain why these procedures are broadly accepted without considerable public protest in all of the countries studied.

3. The Justice Motive And Its Many Faces

It is not generally acknowledged that the concern for justice is an anthropological universal. When asked why people care about justice, one of two answers are generally given: (a) humans have a primary or primordial motive for justice (Lerner 1980), (b) they believe that it is in their own interest to apply and to respect the standards of justice. These two answers are radically different. The first implies that people want or need justice as an end in itself. The second answer implies that the concern for justice is merely a function of another motive, namely self-interest (Walster et al. 1978).

This second answer mirrors the rational choice hypothesis of social contract theories in political philosophy. From Hobbes to Rawls, the metaphor used has been that of a fictitious original pre-state situation, in which a crowd of individuals consensually contracts to establish a society with a binding normative system and powerful institutions restricting individual freedom because they believe that this would be mutually advantageous to all and that it would best serve their own interests in the long run.

By applying the rational choice model, concerns for justice are reduced to self-interest. For instance, it may be argued that equity rules are observed in business exchanges because the actors expect this approach to pay off in the long run of continued exchanges. Similarly, politicians may commit themselves to the cause of social justice because they hope to win the votes of those whose claims they are voicing. An employer may pay fair wages in the hope that this will enhance employees’ motivation and performance. In such cases, justice is not the primary concern of the actors—not an end in itself—but a useful ‘rational’ choice for individuals aiming to maximize their own outcome.

There is no doubt that standards of justice may be observed for such reasons. But once internalized, justice is no longer an option which is rationally deliberated. Instead, it imposes itself as an ought, valid for oneself and for others, in the same way as Shweder and Haidt (1993) have postulated for moral norms. As long as justice is only an optional element in making rational choices, it is not an unconditionally valid ought, and can be disregarded without any moral disquiet if other useful options arise. As an ought, however, every unjustified violation will evoke moral reactions—guilt when the subject himor herself has failed to meet a norm of justice by either action or omission, and resentment when others have violated such a norm (Montada 1998).

Justice concerns and self-concerns may be confounded, e.g., in cases of relative personal deprivation when compared with similar others, relative deprivation of one’s own group when compared with other social groups (Crosby 1976), tangible cuts in salaries, increases of taxes or the prices of basic foodstuffs (Moore 1978), or when one’s own interests are frustrated (Pastore 1952). In such cases, individual diagnostics will be required to decide whether self-interest or the justice motive is under primary threat. Empirical evidence indicates that violent responses only become probable in any of these cases when the frustration of self-interest is perceived as unjustified and illegitimate (Major 1994).

However, self-interest and justice concerns may also conflict with one another. Many of those who live in privileged conditions or who have been advantaged by fortune have ‘existential’ guilt feelings when thinking about the fates and hardships of less fortunate others. Evidence of existential guilt feelings has been gathered from Holocaust survivors, Hiroshima survivors, released prisoners of war, and ‘survivors’ of layoffs, as well as from heterogeneous samples of well-situated people confronted with the hardships of poor people in the Third World, unemployed individuals in their own country, and other socially and physically disadvantaged groups (see Montada 1998 for a review).

Compelling evidence for the prescriptive nature of justice is provided by observations that subjects without any vested interest of their own resent injustices inflicted upon others, and engage in the support of these victims. It is not unusual for social movements to be initiated and supported by people without any vested interests of their own. Keniston’s (1968) study of young radicals involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement and the study by Haan et al. (1968) of activists involved in the 1960s civil rights movement in USA serve as examples here.

However, other manifestations of the justice motive suggest that views of justice and injustice are personal or social constructions within specific contexts and realities. This can be observed in processes of emotional coping with experiences of loss, e.g., by denying obvious injustices or emphasizing questionable cases of injustice (Montada 1994). It can also be observed in the social emergence of perceived entitlements and political protest (Major 1994), as well as in mechanisms by which personal and social deprivation can be ignored (Wegener 1987).

The three psychologically fascinating phenomena described in the following can be interpreted as examples of trade-offs between concerns of justice and self-interest.

Blaming innocent victims was a phenomenon observed in many experiments conducted by Lerner and his students (Lerner 1980), as well as in studies carried out elsewhere (Montada and Lerner 1998). Blaming victims is plausibly interpreted as subjects doing an injustice in an attempt to preserve their Belief in a Just World which is, or would be, threatened by the victimization of innocent people. Belief in a Just World can be assumed to be a psychological resource which may be defended by attributing responsibility and blame to the victims themselves, thus reframing the injustice of their victimization.

Another phenomenon is the exchange fiction (Lerner 1980). It has been observed that many people tend to prefer buying an overpriced 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 explanation for this is that helping a needy person establishes a commitment and personal responsibility for this and other needy persons. Thus, any act of helping is problematic in several respects: It implies an acknowledgment of undeserved neediness, thus threatening the Belief in a Just World, it creates a continuing and generalized responsibility for needy people which may interfere with personal concern and, finally, further injustices would emerge with respect to all other similarly needy people who have not been helped. Nevertheless, provided that they are not to blame for having inflicted their hardships upon themselves, needy people deserve to be helped. This conflict is best solved by an exchange fiction which allows the donation to be masked as a purchase.

The third phenomenon is called the free riding dilemma. Everyone will agree that free riding— profiting without investing—serves self-interest. 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, willing to reduce their working hours and income (on average by 10 percent to 20 percent), if this would result in the creation of new jobs for the unemployed. However, this willingness was very rarely translated into action. At least two hypotheses explain this discrepancy: (a) self-interest (preserving one’s level of income) finally outweighs the justice motive, (b) moving the targets of social comparison changes the objects and contents of the justice motive: When considering mass unemployment and its undeserved sequel, 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 behavior may well be motivated by justice concerns.

In sum, the justice motive is an anthropological universal, but one which may assume many different faces.

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