Abstract
Humans form ideas of fairness, and they assess the fairness or unfairness of the rewards that they and others receive. These ideas and assessments set in motion a large train of behavioral and social consequences, at all levels of analysis, across farflung topical domains, and in groups of all sizes. This chapter provides an overview of the world of distributive justice, starting with the three key actors—Allocator, Observer, and Rewardee—and the three key terms—Actual Reward, Just Reward, Justice Evaluation, and Justice Consequences—and embedding them in four basic processes:
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1.
Actual Reward Process. The Allocator, guided by allocation rules, uses Rewardee characteristics and other inputs to generate the Actual Reward for the Rewardee.
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2.
Just Reward Process. The Observer, guided by justice principles, uses Rewardee characteristics and other inputs to generate the Just Reward for the Rewardee.
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3.
Justice Evaluation Process. The Observer compares the Actual Reward to the Just Reward, generating the Justice Evaluation.
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4.
Justice Consequences Process. The Justice Evaluation triggers a long train of Justice Consequences, possibly incorporating non-justice factors—stretching out to all domains of human behavior and the social life and giving distributive justice the character of a basic sociobehavioral force.
These processes may vary by the configuration of Allocator, Observer, Rewardee, Reward, and features of the spatiotemporal context. The challenge is to accumulate reliable knowledge about their operation, and to that end the chapter briefly examines theoretical contributions and empirical research designs. Along the way, the chapter discusses (1) the link between inequality, poverty, and injustice, (2) the possibility that, given the Hatfield Principle whereby ideas of Just Rewards vary across Observers, voting rules that produce Actual Rewards by averaging Just Rewards may reduce inequality in the Actual Reward Distribution, and (3) the longstanding idea that distributive justice is a cornerstone of the emerging general theory of behavioral and social phenomena.
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Notes
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For example, naval prize money plays a prominent part in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, set in 1814–1815. The rules for dividing the prize money among a British ship’s personnel at the time of the Napoleonic Wars were based on the Cruisers and Convoys Act of 1708, described in Lavery (1989).
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Homans (1976, p. 231) cautions that justice cannot be the only cornerstone of the envisioned theory, that status and power also play foundational parts. In that spirit, Jasso (2008, 2015b) proposes a new unified theory based on three fundamental forces—justice, status, power—each operating on the same raw elements of personal quantitative characteristics like beauty and wealth, but characterized by a distinctive rate of change. For example, as wealth increases, the Justice Evaluation, status, and power all increase, but the Justice Evaluation increases at a decreasing rate, status at an increasing rate, and power at a constant rate.
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For fuller discussion of models and research designs, including tools for distinguishing between what people think, say, and do in justice matters, see Jasso (2015c).
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For examples of this design, see Jasso and Resh (2002), who found that actual grade and just grade are shaped in a similar way by student ethnicity and parental education but are affected differently by gender and ability, and Jasso and Wegener (1999), who found large variability in the mechanisms by which actual earnings and just earnings are determined both across gender and across country.
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Jasso, G., Törnblom, K.Y., Sabbagh, C. (2016). Distributive Justice. In: Sabbagh, C., Schmitt, M. (eds) Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3216-0_11
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