Equity, justice, and altruism |
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Authors: | Graham F Wagstaff |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, 1Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, L69 7ZA Liverpool, UK |
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Abstract: | According to traditional equity theory, justice is motivated by selfishness. However, critics of equity have argued that it
is only one rule of justice that people can apply, and that sometimes other rules of justice are used, such as equality and
need, that appear to be altruistically based; that is, they involve sharing and caring in a way that ignores contributions
or “inputs” and the probability of receiving outcomes in return. Disagreements have arisen, however, as to the status of these
alternative rules as elements of justice, the roles of altruism and selfishness within them, and the relative status of altruism
and justice as moral principles. The main aim of this article is to help resolve some of these difficulties by examining the
relationship between altruism and justice from the perspective of Wagstaff s theory of Equity as Desert (EAD). This theory
integrates a number of allocation rules (including those related to the treatment of offenders) with the concepts of equal
opportunity and personal responsibility. One of the advantages of this position is that it enables a conceptual and an empirical
distinction to be made between helping and responsiveness to need as altruistic norms, and helping and responsiveness to need
as justice norms. It is concluded that there may be something to be gained from viewing core rules of justice in the form
of EAD as the sophisticated descendants of the sociobiological concept of reciprocal altruism, that is, a set of algorithms
designed to limit both unbridled selfishness and indiscrimi-nate altruism. |
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