Too little
The convenient suspect
That component is usually troublesome, so it caused this failure.
A prior attitude receives the status of present evidence.
Fairness
Apply the same evidential standard to favored and disfavored work.
An impartial disposition to give relevant interests and evidence their due.
Fairness governs how a claim and a contributor are heard. It asks whether the standard would change if the component, rank, or preferred explanation changed names. Equal consideration does not mean equal confidence after evidence differs; it means that loyalty and dislike do not secretly choose the test.
Fairness gives a hearing that allegiance does not rewrite
The failing test touches the component you have distrusted for months. Its author is in the review, already braced for the verdict. You run the comparison you would demand for your own favored design. The fault moves elsewhere, and the room gets both a corrected diagnosis and one fewer convenient culprit.
Finding the balance in Fairness
Two colleagues compare favored and disliked component cards on the same balanced test rig as the result points away from the expected culprit.
A fitting response
The reversible standard
Run the comparison we would require if this were our preferred design.
The test stays constant while the evidence is allowed to change the conclusion.
Pursued too far
Flattened judgment
Every explanation must receive equal weight forever.
Impartial hearing is confused with ignoring what a fair test has shown.
Fairness keeps the hearing equal so the conclusion can become unequal for good reasons.
What Fairness makes possible
A colleague can be corrected without becoming a designated culprit, and a favored design can lose without the test being rewritten to save it. The team learns more because responsibility follows evidence.
Fairness in ordinary life
A hiring exercise
Apply the stated criterion to every work sample before discussing whether the candidate feels familiar.
A household disagreement
Ask whether you would accept the same evidence if it supported the other person’s account.
Nearby virtues, different work
Discernment
Discernment identifies which explanation the comparison supports; Fairness ensures the comparison was not chosen to protect a favorite.
Humility
Humility lets you accept that your preferred side lost; Fairness gives both sides the same relevant terms before that result.
Fairness and its counterfeits
Polite prejudice
A person receives courteous language while being judged by a harsher unstated standard.
Outcome balancing
A reviewer changes the rule after seeing the result in order to distribute wins evenly.
How to cultivate Fairness
State the criterion before attaching names or ownership.
Reverse the names and notice whether your required evidence changes.
Explain the result without turning a mistaken contributor into the joke.
Try it today
Take one ordinary judgment, reverse the names, and ask whether you still accept the test.
Questions worth returning to
- What would I require if the result favored the other side?
- Did the evidence change my confidence, or did allegiance change my standard?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Mere letters or certificates emanating from individuals, expressive of opinions concerning a particular lock, would be out of place in a volume relating to locks generally; but it is quite within the limits of the subject, and has indeed become part of the history of locks, to notice experiments and attempts of a more public character.
The editors prefer sanctioned experiments to promotional opinions when commercial motives are involved. Fairness asks for a test both sides can inspect.
Day and Newell deposited five hundred dollars with the cashier of the State Bank at Boston, to be by him paid to any one who could pick the parautoptic lock: the trial was to be conducted under the auspices of the bank.
A bank—not either competitor—holds the reward and oversees the trial. The arrangement separates the standard from the party hoping to win.
One of the locks was brought to the bank, and was minutely examined by two machinists on two afternoons, after which it was secured to an iron chest, and locked by a committee appointed by the bank.
Two machinists examine the lock before a committee secures it. Shared inspection reduces the chance that one side controls the starting conditions.
I have endeavoured to perform an editor’s duty conscientiously, without entertaining the feeling of a partisan in the matter.
Tomlinson states an editor’s duty to work without partisanship. The aspiration is a standard that does not change with allegiance.
If I doubt whether a certain handful gives a fair sample, or representative, for purposes of judging value, of a whole carload of grain, I take a number of handfuls from various parts of the car and compare them.
John Dewey · How We Think · Systematic Inference: Induction And Deduction
Dewey samples several parts of the same carload before judging the whole. Fairness improves the basis of comparison instead of letting one convenient handful stand for every case.
There are two different occasions, upon which we examine our own conduct, and endeavour to view it in the light in which the impartial spectator would view it.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Paragraph 242
Smith asks us to view our own conduct as an impartial spectator would. Reversing the viewpoint tests whether a standard survives a change of allegiance.
It is only necessary to make it clear to the voter that his individual needs are common needs, that is, public needs, and that they can only be legitimately supplied for him when they are supplied for all.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Political Reform
Addams argues that an individual need is supplied legitimately when it is supplied for all. The standard is general enough to include people beyond the favored case.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.