The Virtue of Justice: Fairness and a Sense of Community
The Virtue of Justice: Building Community
Some strengths only make sense in the company of others: of the six virtues Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman proposed in their 2004 classification of positive psychology, justice is the one that groups together the strengths oriented toward life in community. If the virtue of humanity looks at close bonds, justice looks at the group.
People who lead with this virtue tend to care actively about whether the rules of the game (in a team, a family, or a group of friends) are fair to everyone involved.
The Three Strengths That Make It Up
- Teamwork (citizenship): a sense of identification with the common good and of obligation toward it, beyond self-interest. It shows up as being a good group member, loyal and committed to the community.
- Fairness: the product of well-exercised moral judgment: giving everyone a chance, not letting personal feelings about someone distort a decision about them, and being sensitive to social injustice.
- Leadership: the ability to organize your own activities and other people’s within a system, motivating the group toward a common goal while still looking after the relationships among its members.
How It Shows Up in a Group
- They treat everyone with the same respect, regardless of position or status.
- They make sure decisions are fair, weighing the impact on everyone involved, not just on themselves.
- They don’t let liking someone bend their judgment: they can recognize a mistake or a good call just as well coming from a friend as from a stranger.
A familiar scene: in a shared apartment, someone finally proposes a cleaning rota. The person who leads with justice doesn’t just split the chores evenly; they ask who works nights and who’s away on weekends, and they write down how to swap a shift. The split may not be identical for everyone, but everyone knows how it was decided.
What Research Says About Justice
The psychology of justice is much older than positive psychology, and it helps explain why this virtue carries so much weight in groups.
- How a decision is made matters, not just what is decided. Research on organizational justice distinguishes four dimensions: distributive (whether the outcome is fair), procedural (whether the process is), interpersonal (whether people are treated with respect), and informational (whether decisions are explained). A meta-analysis of 183 studies showed that, although related, each one contributes something of its own to perceived fairness and is associated with job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and trust in those in charge (Colquitt et al., 2001).
- A fair process makes people feel part of the group. According to Tom Tyler and Steven Blader’s group engagement model (2003), when people perceive that a group makes decisions through fair procedures, they identify with it more, and that identification is what sustains voluntary cooperation. It’s the bridge between fairness and teamwork: the first feeds the second.
- Fairness is a very widespread strength. In the comparison of more than 100,000 people from 54 countries, fairness was among the five strengths people most often attributed to themselves, along with kindness, honesty, gratitude, and judgment (Park, Peterson and Seligman, 2006).
Statistical analyses of the VIA-IS questionnaire add a nuance: justice doesn’t emerge as a separate block. In the data from more than a million people analyzed by Robert McGrath (2015), fairness was one of the strengths that weighed most heavily on a general factor of “goodness” of character, and teamwork (citizenship) grouped with caring strengths such as love and gratitude.
Leading From the Team’s Strengths
In Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), a popular business book, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, creators of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder method, criticize a common habit in organizations: taking each person’s strengths for granted while becoming expert at diagnosing their weaknesses, relabeling them “areas for improvement,” and sending them to training to fix them. The authors call this damage control, not development.
Applied to leadership, the proposal is to build the division of work around what each person already does well and to surround each weak spot with support or with someone who covers it, rather than imposing the same improvement plan on the whole team. It’s a management recommendation more than a research finding, but it fits with the above: a division of work that takes each person into account, and is explained, is perceived as fairer.
What’s Said About Building It
One point that often comes up is listening to different perspectives before deciding, especially those of people with less power to make themselves heard in a group: a meeting where only the same two or three profiles speak tends to produce less informed decisions, not just less participatory ones.
Add to that explicitly recognizing other people’s merit, rather than taking it for granted, and periodically reviewing your own decisions for bias: asking whether liking or being close to someone influenced a particular judgment.
The Character Strengths Test places justice against the other five virtues and helps you see whether it’s the one that defines you most.
Sources
- Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.
- Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. and Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425
- Tyler, T. R. and Blader, S. L. (2003). The group engagement model: Procedural justice, social identity, and cooperative behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(4), 349-361. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0704_07
- Park, N., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Character strengths in fifty-four nations and the fifty US states. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(3), 118-129. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760600619567
- McGrath, R. E. (2015). Integrating psychological and cultural perspectives on virtue: The hierarchical structure of character strengths. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.994222
- Buckingham, M. and Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths. Free Press.
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Frequently asked questions
What strengths make up the virtue of justice?
Three: teamwork (also called citizenship: a sense of belonging and responsibility toward the group), fairness, and leadership, the ability to organize a group toward a shared goal.
Is justice the same as strict egalitarianism?
Not exactly. It's treating people with fairness and impartiality, which sometimes means recognizing legitimate differences rather than treating everyone identically without nuance.
Can you have this virtue without being a formal leader?
Yes. A sense of community and fairness also show up in non-hierarchical roles: cooperating well as part of a team is as much a part of this virtue as leading one.
What exactly is 'teamwork' in this model?
A sense of identification with the common good that goes beyond self-interest: being a loyal group member with a sense of duty toward the community you belong to.
