Convenient exclusion
You assign work without consulting those affected.
The people with the least say may receive the largest burden.
Justice
Count the person outside the plan.
Franklin names both injuries done and benefits wrongfully omitted. Justice therefore asks about the distribution of burdens and responsibilities, including what you have failed to do. A contemporary reading must also examine who was excluded from a historical account of rights. Franklin’s aspiration and his participation in slavery belong in the same honest historical frame.
Franklin’s Virtues · Try a practice
Reading the historical wording
Franklin’s original precept
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Part II · Harvard Classics 1909 text
Franklin names both injuries done and benefits omitted. This makes Justice more than avoiding direct interference: a neglected duty can matter too. The precept does not itself settle the scope of those duties or who was included in his moral and political world.
A contemporary adaptation
Consider harms caused by action and neglect, and ask whose interests and claims your account leaves out.
An ordinary choice
A committee congratulates itself on a beautifully balanced rota. Each member has exactly one duty. Then the person who cannot reach the meeting room asks how they were meant to volunteer. The arithmetic is correct. The arrangement has left someone outside the calculation.
An invented contemporary illustration.
What Justice gives
Justice gives affected people a place in the decision. A clear allocation and a real route to correction can reduce arbitrary burdens, though good intentions alone do not establish a fair result.
What becomes possible
A shared plan can be corrected without requiring the harmed person to prove that everyone else is malicious. Looking at effects, authority and omitted duties gives the group something practical to repair.
Justice: finding the balance
You are allocating a shared task among people with different access and availability.
An answerable arrangement
You hear constraints, explain the allocation and provide a way to correct it.
People can assess and challenge how the responsibility was assigned.
Sameness as fairness
You insist on identical tasks despite a relevant difference in access.
The visible symmetry hides an unequal practical burden.
A fair rule needs to encounter the circumstances in which people must live under it.
If a claimed exception transfers a recurring burden to one person, revisit the arrangement with them. Flexibility needs accountability too.
Who is outside this calculation?
Justice in ordinary life
The missing acknowledgment
Credit the person whose work made the result possible, including work performed out of sight.
The duty nobody noticed
If an agreed access arrangement has failed, helping restore it is part of the task, not an optional kindness after the real work.
Nearby virtues, different work
Fairness
Fairness weighs relevant interests and treatment. Justice asks also about rightful claims, duties and accountable remedies.
Compassion
Compassion notices suffering; Justice asks what is owed even when the claimant does not inspire personal sympathy.
Justice and its counterfeits
Equal-looking neglect
This is a counterfeit of Justice and fairness: applying an identical demand while ignoring an access barrier protects the appearance of equality.
Charity instead of a duty
This is a counterfeit of generosity and Justice: presenting an owed correction as a personal favor leaves the recipient dependent on goodwill.
How to cultivate Justice
- Identify everyone affected, including anyone absent from the discussion.
- Ask which burdens the proposed arrangement actually imposes.
- Explain a decision and provide a practical way to raise an overlooked fact.
Try it today
Review one modest shared arrangement you can influence. Ask who was consulted and whether a relevant constraint was missed.
Questions worth returning to
- Who is outside this calculation?
- What is owed rather than merely offered?
- Can the person carrying the burden realistically challenge the arrangement?
Keep the practice proportionate
A reflective exercise does not determine legal rights or require a harmed person to confront an unsafe authority. Historical moral language must not obscure slavery, exclusion or unequal power; keep those matters visible when reading Franklin.
Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause or skip an exercise. Putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.
About these practicesQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage. These quotations retain their historical wording; the notes offer contemporary interpretations.
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Injury by action and omission of owed benefits appear together. That distinction keeps the article from reducing justice to personal innocence while overlooked duties remain unfulfilled.
A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of another are his own affairs.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter V, power over others · excerpt
Mill distinguishes managing one’s concerns from exercising power over another person. The rota example makes that distinction concrete by including those who must live under its allocation. This is a later comparison, not a source Franklin read.
though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.
Franklin reports his father’s objection to using stolen stones for a useful project. A benefit to your own group cannot erase the claim of the people whose resources it takes.
There are, on the other hand, two kinds of injustice—the one, on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being inflicted.
Cicero · De Officiis, 1913 Loeb edition · Walter Miller translation · Book I, §23 · excerpt
Cicero distinguishes doing wrong from failing to shield someone from it when one can. This classical comparison parallels Franklin’s action-and-omission distinction without making unlimited rescue a duty or erasing a person’s actual capacity.
I do not consider that it is becoming even to an emperor to give merely in order to cover a man with shame.
Seneca · On Benefits · Aubrey Stewart translation · Book II, chapter VIII · excerpt
Seneca rejects a ruler’s gift designed to humiliate its recipient. The example makes power and delivery part of the assessment: meeting a need does not justify making a person publicly abase themselves.
I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.
Defoe objects to excluding women from learning. His proposed academy still carries unequal assumptions, so this documented influence is not presented as a complete account of equality; it opens a concrete question about denied opportunities.
The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
James connects injustice with claiming authority over another person’s ideals without understanding them. This later comparison challenges a ruling judgment’s confidence; it does not excuse conduct that violates another person’s rights.
Continue through the collection
Practice this collection
The optional workbook uses contemporary adaptations. Original historical wording and quotations remain on the reading pages.
Explore the contemporary practice program · Choose in My Virtues