Business Virtues
Fairness
Let the same relevant reasons count for each person.
Two colleagues need a shared table for different tasks. Imagine first suggesting half each, then hearing that one person needs an unbroken space for a wide sheet while your small booklet fits at the end. You move your materials and agree on an arrangement that lets both tasks proceed. The neat dividing line has lost its authority; the reasons for sharing have become clearer.
Fairness is an impartial disposition to give relevant interests and evidence their due. A workplace decision often affects people with different status, confidence and access to the conversation. Fairness asks which considerations bear on the actual question and whether they would still count if the names on the requests were exchanged.
Understanding Fairness
Canonical meaning
An impartial disposition to give relevant interests and evidence their due.
Original contextual precept: Let the same relevant reasons count for each person.
The definition concerns contemporary character practice. The situations and commentary are original to this contemporary collection; they do not treat output, rank, fluency or compulsory availability as measures of moral worth.
Impartiality does not always produce identical outcomes. A task needing a quiet hour may have a different claim from one that can use a shared table. The reason for the difference should be pertinent and open to examination, rather than a favor hidden behind the language of equal treatment. Hear the affected people before assuming what they need.
A common criterion can itself be unfair when it ignores a relevant disadvantage. Examine who could realistically meet it and what purpose it serves. The aim is not to distribute approvals mechanically; it is to give evidence and interests the consideration they deserve without letting preference or rank quietly decide.
Read the collection’s provenance and limitsFairness: finding the balance
Two people request a limited shared workspace.
Too little of the fitting response
A convenient allocation
You choose the arrangement easiest for your own task without hearing the other need.
A fitting response
Relevant comparison
You hear both requests and apply reasons appropriate to the work.
A distortion of the purpose
Mechanical sameness
You insist on identical treatment despite a relevant difference in access or need.
Fairness asks for impartial attention to relevant differences, not identical treatment regardless of purpose.
Fairness gives…
A fair process makes reasons available for discussion and correction. It cannot make every limited-resource outcome pleasing. Its contribution is to prevent irrelevant advantage from deciding whose interests count.
What Fairness makes possible
Fair decisions become more intelligible when the grounds and remaining uncertainty are stated. Explain the criterion, invite missing information and consider a correction. Nobody must perform unusual charm or gratitude to have their interest heard. Disagreement can reveal an overlooked fact rather than a lack of loyalty.
Fairness in ordinary life
- Compare proposals before reading their authors’ status labels.
- Ask who was unable to contribute to a decision.
- Explain a relevant difference instead of disguising a preference.
Nearby virtues, different work
Justice concerns what people are ethically due. Humility admits a limit in judgment. Fairness concerns impartial attention to relevant interests and evidence, including the reasons used in making a particular choice.
Fairness and its counterfeits
Badge-based favoritism is a counterfeit of Fairness and Prudence. A chooser calls the prestigious folder safer without examining its contents. Genuine fairness examines the relevant grounds and grants a plain request the same opportunity to be heard.
How to cultivate Fairness
Try the name-exchange test on a low-stakes choice: would your reason survive if a different person made the same request? Then examine whether a relevant difference, rather than preference, explains your answer.
Try it today
Use two imagined requests for a shared resource. Write a relevant criterion and one question you would ask each person. Do not collect sensitive personal information or stage an evaluation of real colleagues.
Questions worth returning to
Which fact mattered to the decision, and which decoration merely made one request feel important?
Notice what changed, what remained uncertain and whose needs the choice served. You may adapt, pause or skip the exercise; risk and endurance are not proofs of worth.
Quotations and further reading
These primary-source passages explore the page’s contemporary meaning through examples, distinctions and critical contrasts. Their notes identify the actual speaker and historical limits. Original contextual writing is separate from these excerpts.
The aim of inference is to terminate itself in an adequate judgment of a situation, and the course of inference goes on through a series of partial and tentative judgments.
D. C. Heath & Co.; copyright 1910 shown in linked text · Speaker: John Dewey
Dewey describes the limits of a partial judgment. A fair comparison needs enough of the relevant case to justify its conclusion.
In order to defend ourselves from such partial judgments, we soon learn to set up in our own minds a judge between ourselves and those we live with.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments
linked edition · Speaker: Adam Smith
Smith invokes an impartial judge against partiality. The invitation applies to one’s own favored case as well as the judgments of other people.
The result of all this is that men’s minds are becoming more plastic, that they are deciding less by prejudice and hypnotism and more by judgment.
Mary Parker Follett · The New State
Longmans, Green and Co., 1918; Speaker: Mary Parker Follett
Follett hopes that judgment can replace prejudice. Her historical expectation is an aspiration, not evidence that any procedure has already become fair.
An accurate daily record was kept both as to the quantity and quality of the work done in order to guard against any personal prejudice on the part of the foreman and to insure absolute impartiality and justice for each inspector.
Frederick Winslow Taylor · The Principles of Scientific Management
1911 indicated in linked text; linked edition · Speaker: Frederick Winslow Taylor
Taylor claims absolute impartiality for output records in a passage describing wage cuts, dismissal and timed inspection. The claim is examined critically: records and selected measures do not establish fair treatment or justify ranking worth by speed.
All judgment, all reflective inference, presupposes some lack of understanding, a partial absence of meaning.
D. C. Heath & Co.; copyright 1910 shown in linked text · Speaker: John Dewey
Dewey connects incomplete understanding with incomplete judgment. His surrounding racial and cultural hierarchy is rejected. Understanding relevant differences can improve a comparison without ranking the people making the requests.
It is not fair, however, to form any final judgment until all of the elements in the case have been considered.
Frederick Winslow Taylor · The Principles of Scientific Management
1911 indicated in linked text; linked edition · Speaker: Frederick Winslow Taylor
Taylor cautions against a final judgment before considering the elements of a case. A convenient single measure may overlook a reason that matters.
Mr. Burke said that we ought not to reject every prejudice, but should separate the husk of prejudice from the truth it encloses, and so try to get at the kernel within; and thus far he was right.
William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI
A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, editors; J. M. Dent, 1903 · Speaker: William Hazlitt
Hazlitt reports Burke’s account of prejudice and then qualifies his own agreement. The passage invites examination of inherited judgments rather than granting prejudice authority.
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