This book contains new essays in honor of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest or (...) a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined. (shrink)

Despite the resurgent interest in the emotions, not much attention has focused specifically on those emotions that relate to others. deserved or undeserved fortunes. In this essay, I explore such emotions, logically and morally, with special emphasis on indignation and Schadenfreude. I argue that, when Aristotle.s treatment of this family of emotions is stripped of certain anomalies, it gives a logically satisfying and morally suggestive, if perhaps overly rigid, account of all the relevant emotions and their relations. I use those (...) insights to challenge some recent accounts of Schadenfreude and to focus instead on pleasure at deserved bad fortune as satisfied indignation. Furthermore, I suggest that the proper experience of fortunes-of-others emotions lays the ground for justice as a personal virtue, a virtue which, in turn, is required for full-scale social justice. (shrink)

I endorse an old view that distributive justice can best be understood as people getting what they deserve. John Rawls has several famous arguments to show that such a view is false. I criticize those arguments, but agree that more work needs to be done on the clarification and explanation of the concept of desert in order for the old view to be more than a platitude. I then criticize attempted analyses of the concept of desert by Feinberg, Kleinig, and (...) Miller. I claim that desert must be taken as a primitive concept. However, even though desert is primitive, there still needs to be some account of what sorts of things make a person deserving . Some proposed desert bases include need, personhood, diligence, moral worth, autonomous action, and entitlement. I criticize George Sher's work on autonomous action, diligence, and moral worth, then propose and defend a modified version of the view that all legitimate desert bases are either virtues or vices. (shrink)