Distributive Justice

Abstract

Every day, and in all walks of life, the sense of justice is at work. Humans form ideas about what is just, and they make judgments about the justice or injustice of the things they see around them. Both the ideas of justice and the assessments of injustice set in motion a train of individual and social processes, touching virtually every area of the human experience. Thus, in the quest to understand human behavior, understanding the operation of the sense of justice is basic. And justice is central across the subfields of sociology. This entry summarizes the justice synthesis begun in the late twentieth century and the foundation for the coming synthesis of the twenty‐first century. The first synthesis looks inward, providing a parsimonious and coherent model for understanding and investigating every aspect of distributive justice. The coming second synthesis looks outward, forging the links between justice (generalized to all comparison processes) and the two other primordial sociobehavioral forces – status and power – and proposing a new unified theory.