Fairness

What Fairness means in a protective role

Two people say they returned the same borrowed projector: a longtime teammate and a visitor you met today. You accept the teammate’s recollection at once, then notice you are asking the visitor for three kinds of proof. You return to the shared checkout record and put the same questions to both. Your friendship has many good qualities; a built-in projector detector is apparently not one of them.

Familiarity can supply relevant history, but it can also grant a statement more weight than its evidence earns. Fairness asks you to make the relevant standard explicit and use it consistently. It leaves room for different conclusions when the evidence differs, while refusing to make being known a substitute for being supported.

Fairness gives…

A person can more readily understand a decision when the questions and reasons are consistent. Fairness also helps a group discover its own convenient blind spots before an outsider has to bear their cost.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

A complaint about a colleague

You give a specific account the hearing it would receive if the names were reversed.

A reasonable adjustment

You change the way someone supplies information when needed, while preserving the standard for what it must establish.

Nearby virtues, different work

Justice

Justice concerns what people are ethically due; Fairness concerns impartial attention to the interests and evidence in deciding.

Discernment

Discernment evaluates the information; Fairness keeps attachment or dislike from deciding whose information gets evaluated.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Identical treatment can counterfeit Fairness when relevant differences are deliberately ignored. A fair standard may require different practical arrangements.

How to cultivate Fairness

• State the relevant question before considering who supplied the answer.
• Try the name-reversal test on your proposed conclusion.
• Explain which evidence, rather than which affiliation, made the difference.

Try it today

Choose a routine group decision and imagine exchanging the names of a familiar and unfamiliar participant. If your judgment changes, identify whether a relevant fact changed too. Reconsider an unsupported preference.

Questions worth returning to

• What evidence am I demanding from only one person?
• Which difference is relevant to this decision?

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 selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. nothing can be more frivolous than to reject the evidence of women on the pretext of their feebleness

   Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, in Crimes and Punishments
   Chapter VIII, Witnesses

   Beccaria challenges the exclusion of testimony by a stereotype about its speaker. The passage asks the reader to examine credibility rather than inherit a prejudice.

2. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person's preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people's liking instead of one.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   Chapter I, Introductory

   Mill asks whether a public rule has reasons beyond the preferences of those imposing it. A popular preference needs examination just as a private preference does.

3. through him I learned to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus; and from him I received the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed;

   Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius
   Book I, section 14

   Marcus recalls the example of Severus. Equal rights and freedom of speech are standards for the way authority treats people, including those who have little influence.

4. Barbarians are no more a wonder to us, than we are to them; nor with any more reason, as every one would confess, if after having travelled over those remote examples, men could settle themselves to reflect upon, and rightly to confer them, with their own.

   Michel de Montaigne, Essays
   Book I, chapter XXII, Of Custom

   Montaigne reverses the gaze that makes unfamiliar people seem strange. Applying the same scrutiny to one’s own customs weakens an easy double standard.

5. Bradford being unkind enough to forbid it, which occasion’d some resentment on my part; and I thought so meanly of him for it, that, when I afterward came into his situation, I took care never to imitate it.

   Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
   Part I, early Philadelphia printing business

   Franklin recalls a competitor’s use of the post office to disadvantage him. Once he held the same position, he chose not to repeat the practice: having suffered a double standard did not justify passing it on.

6. We should take care also that the punishment shall not be out of proportion to the offence, and that some shall not be chastised for the same fault for which others are not even called to account.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   Book I, XXV, section 89

   Proportion and consistency belong together here. Cicero asks why the same fault should attract a penalty for one person and pass unnoticed for another.

7. These irregularities of judgment, I imagine, are found even in riper minds than Mary Garth’s: our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

   The narrator, in George Eliot, Middlemarch
   Chapter XL, Mary Garth’s judgments of Farebrother and Fred

   Eliot’s narrator notices that Mary excuses in one person what she condemns in another. Impartiality becomes harder when the people involved matter to us.

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