Fairness

Living across distance

An imagined shared journey

The shared storage cubbies are equal in size. Yours is somehow the only one with a second box on top, described as “temporary” for six consecutive weeks. You start to remind a companion about the storage agreement, notice your own extension and take the box down first. The rule has finally reached the top shelf.

Fairness gives relevant interests and evidence their due even when your own convenience is involved. A shared rule loses its claim on others when you quietly exempt yourself. Begin by applying the same standard to your case, then examine whether the standard itself fits different needs. Equal treatment requires attention to relevant differences, not a refusal to see them.

Fairness: finding the balance

A fair exception can be explained without changing the principle when the beneficiary changes. The question is what justifies the difference.

Fairness gives…

A rule people can understand without knowing who is asking. Your own interests remain part of the discussion, alongside everyone else’s.

What Fairness makes possible

Shared arrangements can become easier to question and revise. A companion can raise an uneven burden without being cast as uncooperative.

Fairness in ordinary life

A common workspace

Include your belongings when considering how much room each person occupies.

Choosing meeting times

Rotate inconvenient times or account for constraints rather than always imposing the burden on the distant participant.

Nearby virtues, different work

Temperance

Temperance moderates what you want; Fairness examines how everyone’s interests should count.

Generosity

Generosity offers beyond what can be required; Fairness establishes what people may reasonably ask.

Fairness and its counterfeits

Self-serving symmetry is a counterfeit of Fairness: demanding equal sacrifices while overlooking unequal burdens.

Favour trading is a counterfeit of Fairness when an allocation depends on who will reward you afterward.

How to cultivate Fairness

• Describe your own case using the words you use for another’s.
• Ask which differences are relevant to the shared purpose.
• Make the reason for an exception available to everyone affected.

Try it today

Review one small shared arrangement. Include your own use accurately, and invite discussion of a concrete mismatch rather than assigning blame.

A household exercise does not settle formal entitlements. Respect existing agreements and seek consent before changing another person’s share.

Questions worth returning to

• Would my reason still sound persuasive if someone else benefited?
• Whose burden has the simple rule left out?

Keep the practice proportionate

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. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others,

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers
   An Apology for Idlers
   Stevenson · 1881 collection, Project Gutenberg transcription

   Stevenson makes room for another side while declaring the particular case he is writing. A discussion of shared space can likewise hear a relevant counterargument without erasing one's own interest.

2. he thought far more of Arthur’s good qualities, and attached far more value to very slight actions of his, than if they had been the qualities and actions of a common workman like himself.

   George Eliot · Adam Bede
   Chapter XVI Links
   The narrator, describing Adam's view of Arthur · 1859 novel, Project Gutenberg transcription

   The narrator shows admiration changing the standard by which the same action is judged. This is the kind of unequal weighting the article asks readers to notice in their own case.

3. Neither urge another to that thou wouldst be unwilling to do thy self, nor do thy self what looks to thee unseemly, and intemperate in another.

   William Penn · Some Fruits of Solitude
   Temperance, maxim 71, p. 20
   William Penn · Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1903; scan transcription

   The same conduct is tested in oneself and another. It directly exposes the storage rule that somehow never reaches the rule-maker’s extra box.

4. There is no hesitation and no distinction.

   Robert Falcon Scott · Scott’s Last Expedition, Volume I
   December 30, 1910, retrospective account of work in the pack
   Scott, journal · 1913; journals edited by Leonard Huxley; original English; Project Gutenberg transcription

   Scott has just described scientific staff joining shared manual tasks. The short sentence needs that context: rank does not exempt a person from common work. It does not require identical treatment of different needs.

5. They are bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole,

   Jane Addams · Twenty Years at Hull-House
   CHAPTER VI — The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited several people representing the then new Settlement movement, that they might discuss with others the general theme of Philanthropy and Social Progress.
   Addams · 1910 work, Project Gutenberg transcription

   The field of attention extends beyond the residents’ own enterprise. A shared allocation likewise needs the interests that the decision-maker’s convenient viewpoint leaves out.

6. have at least an equal claim with any other set of men, for all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give.

   Jane Austen · Persuasion
   CHAPTER III.
   Anne Elliot, speaking of naval officers · 1818 title-page edition, Project Gutenberg transcription

   Anne challenges her father’s dismissal of people outside his preferred social rank. The claim concerns equal standing in a discussion of a home, not a favour bestowed on an inferior.

7. only this time the two guests took care that Toad should do his fair share of work.

   Kenneth Grahame · The Wind in the Willows
   II, The Open Road
   The narrator · 1908 novel, Project Gutenberg transcription

   Rat and Mole stop carrying the whole travelling household while Toad calls it effortless. The allocation is the point selected here; the paragraph’s subsequent physical coercion is not adopted as a practice.

Continue through the catalog