ABSTRACT
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the psychological study of justice was dominated by the theory of psychological equity. Some psychologists saw the equity principle as the basic principle of justice; a principle which governs not only economic relationships between people, but also social relationships. The multiprinciple perspective has since flourished, and with it the number of different rules of justice posited. The popular view of the equity principle, as promulgated by many modern theorists, is that it is only one of a number of principles of distributive justice that operates in certain defined circumstances. Troublesome for modern perspectives on justice is that there tends to be little consensus as to the nature of the relationship between the concepts of justice, selfishness, altruism, and morality. The problems are compounded by the fact that there are other concepts, such as attributions of responsibility, that are clearly related to justice concerns, but cannot readily be accommodated by any of the other perspectives.
