What\u2019s in a Word? Just vs. Fair vs. Appropriate Earnings for Self and Others

Jule Adriaans,Stefan Liebig,Clara Sabbagh,Guillermina Jasso

doi:10.1007/s11211-021-00380-1

Jule Adriaans, Stefan Liebig + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-021-00380-1

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Abstract

Despite Rawls’ famous call to distinguish between justice and fairness, these and other justice-related words often seem to be used interchangeably by both ordinary people and justice researchers. Based on a survey-embedded question wording experiment (N = 4534) fielded in Germany as part of the GESIS Panel, we explore the effects of three justice words— “just,” “fair,” and “appropriate”—on the sense of justice about earnings for self and others. We observe differences in the just reward, justice evaluation, and justice consequences by justice word. For example, justice evaluations of one’s own earnings are more negative, i.e., deeper in the underreward territory, signaling larger just rewards, when using “just” instead of “fair” or “appropriate” in the question wording. No such clear pattern emerges for justice evaluations of others’ earnings. Our analyses show the decreasing effect of an underreward situation on psychosocial health to be significantly stronger in the “just” condition compared to the “fair” condition but do not reveal differential consequences by justice word for measures of satisfaction and trust. Overall, the observed differences by justice words are moderate in size. Nonetheless, our findings suggest caution for justice researchers in communicating with peers and respondents and warrant further inquiry extending research on the role of “justice language” to other language–country contexts.

Highlights

More than 60 years ago, Rawls (1958, p.164) forged a new frontier in the study of justice with the celebrated opening lines: Extended author information available on the last page of the article1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Social Justice ResearchIt might seem at first sight that the concepts of justice and fairness are the same, and that there is no reason to distinguish them, or to say that one is more fundamental than the other
We examine the effect of the three justice words—“just” versus “fair” versus “appropriate”—on basic justice quantities, starting with the just reward process, continuing with the justice evaluation process, and ending with the justice consequences process
This guiding principle of empirical justice research signals the importance of asking ordinary people about their sense of justice

Summary

Introduction

More than 60 years ago, Rawls (1958, p.164) forged a new frontier in the study of justice with the celebrated opening lines: Extended author information available on the last page of the article1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Social Justice ResearchIt might seem at first sight that the concepts of justice and fairness are the same, and that there is no reason to distinguish them, or to say that one is more fundamental than the other. Notwithstanding ubiquitous attempts to distinguish between the two concepts; to establish how something can be “just” but “unfair” or “fair” but “unjust”; to introduce deities, governments, and laws to assist in making the distinction; to draw precise links to legitimacy, appropriateness, morality, impartiality, equity—and sometimes even with a flavor of “oughtness”—the ordinary speech of ordinary people remains the final arbiter.. The ordinary speech of ordinary people struck an early blow, and it was not on the side of a distinction between justice and fairness. The Spanish translation renders it “la justicia como imparcialidad.”. Both raise the new challenge of establishing the relation between the French “justice” and “équité” and between the Spanish “justicia” and “imparcialidad” and their relation to the Rawlsian English-language concepts of “justice” and “fairness.” While English possesses both words (with “fairness” acquiring the justice meaning in Middle English, roughly 1150–1470), as does German (with “fairness” entering the language in the nineteenth century), most languages do not have distinct words for justice and fairness. As Sen (2009, pp. 72–73) notes, the French translation of Rawls’ (1971) book writes of “la justice comme équité.” Concomitantly, the Spanish translation renders it “la justicia como imparcialidad.” Both raise the new challenge of establishing the relation between the French “justice” and “équité” and between the Spanish “justicia” and “imparcialidad” and their relation to the Rawlsian English-language concepts of “justice” and “fairness.”

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