EQUITY, JUSTICE, AND ALTRUISM

According to traditional equity theory, justice is motivated by selfis hness. However, critics of equity have argued that it is only one rule of justice that people can apply, and that sometimes other rules of j ustice are used, such as equality and need, that appear to be altruist ically based; that is, they involve sharing and caring in a way that i gnores contributions or ''inputs'' and the probability of receiving ou tcomes in return. Disagreements have arisen, however, as to the status of these alternative rules as elements of justice, the roles of altru ism and selfishness within them, and the relative status of altruism a nd justice as moral principles. The main aim of this article is to hel p resolve some of these difficulties by examining the relationship bet ween 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 th e concepts of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. One of th e advantages of this position is that it enables a conceptual and an e mpirical distinction to be made between helping and responsiveness to need as altruistic norms, and helping and responsiveness to need as ju stice 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 sophistic ated descendants of the sociobiological concept of reciprocal altruism , that is, a set of algorithms designed to limit both unbridled selfis hness and indiscriminate altruism.