The Justice Motive in Human Relations

And so, as described in the previous chapter, the attempt to understand how people will react to conditions of scarcity leads directly to the issue of whether they experience their fate and the fates of those they care about as just or unjust. This statement is not at all simple nor obvious in its implications, as we shall see in a moment. After all, identifying the sense of justice as the key issue is equivalent to saying that in order to understand what will happen in our future, collectively and individually, we must solve one of the most enigmatic and complex problems that has preoccupied social analysts throughout the history of Western civilization: How does the theme of justice appear in people’s lives?