The Subjective Judgment on Social Inequalities: Which Principles of Justice Do Apply?

ABSTRACT

This article studies the subjective evaluations of social justice in Chile, a country in which acute social inequalities prevail, as in other Latin American countries. We empirically analyzed the perceptions of fair and unfair salaries for different social positions, trying to answer the question: what principles of justice guide people in these assessments? The results show that, in addition to the individual merit linked to effort in education and work, people consider other principles of justice, referring to cultural and social capital as well as social interaction. The incidence of these principles of justice varies, depending on the social positions considered and the socioeconomic characteristics of the participants of the research. The data comes from a vignette-based survey applied in 2016 to a sample of 2,000 individuals statistically representative of the Chilean population.

social inequality; social justice; social comparison; vignette analysis; sociology