Fairness

What Fairness means in play

During a card game, a rival’s hand appears in the reflection of a shiny snack tin. The tin has become a remarkably well-informed adviser. You cover its shining side and explain what you noticed. Together you agree how to handle the exposed information. Then you return to the much more interesting difficulty of winning with your own cards.

A game gives people a chosen problem to solve together or against one another. Fairness helps keep that problem recognizable: the relevant rules, information and opportunities deserve consideration from every seat. An ingenious legal move can be part of the pleasure. Secretly using information that the game is meant to conceal changes what the others have agreed to play.

Finding the balance

In ordinary play

An online exploit

A move the software allows may still break the contest players agreed to enter. Check the event’s rule before treating a loophole as a legitimate advantage.

An agreed access aid

Agree how controls and access aids will work so everyone understands the contest.

Nearby virtues, different work

Honesty

Honesty tells the others what you saw. Fairness considers how the unintended information affects the shared contest and what remedy makes sense.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Selective rule enforcement counterfeits Fairness when you demand strict penalties for an opponent and casual forgiveness for yourself. Apply the relevant agreement consistently, including its provisions for mistakes.

Cultivating Fairness

• State the relevant agreement before applying a penalty.
• When an accident exposes information, acknowledge it and agree a proportionate way forward.

Try it today

Before a friendly game, clarify a house rule or access arrangement that could otherwise surprise someone. Agree how it will work from both sides.

Questions worth returning to

• Which difference in circumstances matters to this decision?
• Would I accept the same remedy from the other seat?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. 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.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. If it is agreed to play according to the strict rules, then those rules are to be exactly observed by both parties; and should not be insisted on for one side, while deviated from by the other: for this is not equitable.

   Benjamin Franklin · The Morals of Chess
   Rule 1
   Benjamin Franklin · 1841 version, Wikisource transcription; original essay 1786; the preserved 1841-version transcription is the display source

   The important feature is reciprocal application of an agreed rule. It helps explain why a clever excuse about an unmentioned reflective tin does not settle what the players agreed to do.

2. and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them

   Lewis Carroll · Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
   Chapter VIII, The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
   Alice · Millennium Fulcrum Edition 3.0, Project Gutenberg 11; no specific historical print imprint identified in Linked text

   Alice’s complaint gives a fictional counterexample: arbitrary conduct has made the shared contest confusing.

3. We decided that one player should plan and lay out the Country, and the other player choose from which side he would come.

   H. G. Wells · Little Wars
   II, The Beginnings of Modern Little Warfare
   H. G. Wells · Project Gutenberg 3691 transcription of the 1913 work; specific underlying print imprint not identified in Linked text

   Splitting layout and side selection makes the rule-maker live with either position. This is a concrete way to agree a fair contest before competing.

4. Without these curtains we found the first player was at a heavy disadvantage, because he displayed all his dispositions before his opponent set down his men.

   H. G. Wells · Little Wars
   II, The Beginnings of Modern Little Warfare
   H. G. Wells · Project Gutenberg 3691 transcription of the 1913 work; specific underlying print imprint not identified in Linked text

   Wells explains why concealing the setup restored comparable information. The reflective tin creates the reverse problem: information intended to remain private becomes visible.

5. She sate bolt upright; and neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours.

   Charles Lamb · Elia: Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist
   Elia, Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist
   Elia, narrator describing Sarah Battle · E. V. Lucas edited Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, volume II, Project Gutenberg 10343; essay first published 1821; this edited transcription is the display source

   Lamb’s narrator gives the serious player a reciprocal standard: she protects her own hidden information and respects her opponent’s. The portrait is comic; the note concerns this specific practice.

6. See that the selfish or most capable children do not have the lion's share of the play; the opportunities should be equally distributed.

   Jessie H. Bancroft · Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium
   To the Teacher of Games, p. 29–30
   Jessie H. Bancroft · Project Gutenberg #25660; introduction dated March 1909; Linked text does not identify a dated title-page imprint.

   Bancroft asks the leader to notice who actually gets to play. Agreed turns mean little if the strongest players continually take the opportunities.

7. without casting any sly glances at the cards held in the hands of the others, he may, by his own observation and diligence, know exactly the strength or weakness of each player.

   Anonymous (Cassell’s compilation) · Cassell’s Book of In-Door Amusements, Card Games, and Fireside Fun
   Whist, concluding advice on observation
   Anonymous contributor to Cassell’s Book of In-Door Amusements · Third edition, Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., London, Paris and New York; title page undated in preserved Project Gutenberg #49137 transcription.

   This unsigned passage belongs to Cassell’s household compilation; the individual writer is not identified. The writer distinguishes attention to play from looking at a hidden hand. Covering the reflective tin preserves that distinction.

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