Do the Means Always Justify the Ends, or Do the Ends Sometimes Justify the Means? A Value Protection Model of Justice Reasoning

Abstract

This study explored whether personal identity concerns relate in important ways to how people decide whether an event is fair or unfair. Because moral mandates are selective expressions of values that are central to people’s sense of personal identity, people should be highly motivated to protect these positions from possible threat. Consistent with predictions based on a value protection model of justice, whether people had a moral mandate on abortion, civil rights, or immigration was completely independent of the perceived procedural fairness of political institutions when those institutions posed no salient threat to these policy concerns. However, strength of moral mandate, and not prethreat judgments of procedural fairness of the Supreme Court or a state referendum, predicted perceived procedural fairness, outcome fairness, decision acceptance, and other indices of moral outrage when either the Supreme Court or a state referendum posed a possible threat to perceivers’ moral mandates.