Fairness

Fairness gives shared things their public character

The public viewing telescope is aimed at the old clock tower. You have inspected the clock, its roof and a pigeon with an unusually managerial posture. Someone else is waiting. One more look is very tempting, especially now that the pigeon has turned around. You step aside and let the next visitor take a turn. The skyline remains there for both of you.

Finding the balance in Fairness

Finish a turn at a public viewing telescope when another person is waiting.

A fair arrangement follows the resource’s purpose and the people’s relevant needs, with a standard you can accept on either side.

What Fairness makes possible

A public resource becomes genuinely useful when its users can expect a reasonable chance to use it. That expectation supports small pleasures that depend on strangers cooperating: seeing a view, joining a game, finding a place to work. Fairness also makes your own preferences easier to assess because you can ask whether the arrangement would still make sense from the waiting side.

Fairness in ordinary life

A shared work surface

Keep enough table clear for another person to use a normal place beside you.

A ticketed activity

Follow the announced order even when you know the volunteer managing it.

A crowded train

Move your bag off a seat when others are standing. Pay for your own journey without treating the next seat as yours.

Nearby virtues, different work

Generosity

Generosity may give more than a fair share requires; Fairness establishes the claim each person should receive.

Tolerance

Tolerance permits harmless difference; Fairness asks which differences are relevant to the terms of use.

Fairness and its counterfeits

An exception with my name on it

Treating your interest as automatically more important counterfeits Fairness through self-preference. Test the same reason from the other side.

Identical treatment at any cost

Ignoring a relevant access need can counterfeit Fairness by making sameness the whole rule. Consider what lets people actually use the resource.

How to cultivate Fairness

1. Identify the purpose of the shared resource.

2. Apply the same reason when you are waiting and when you are using it.

3. Allow relevant needs to inform a reasonable arrangement.

Try it today

At a shared resource, notice whether your use leaves others a reasonable opportunity. Make one proportionate adjustment if it does not.

Questions worth returning to

• Would this reason persuade me if someone else offered it?
• Which needs matter to making access real?

Quotations and further reading

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

1. There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to accommodate my liberty to their liberties.

   A. G. Gardiner · Leaves in the Wind · On the Rule of the Road

   Gardiner reaches this sentence through the example of a trombone player whose neighbors also want quiet. A shared resource similarly asks us to include the next person’s purpose in our decision.

2. As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Educational Methods

   Addams connects democracy with recognizing each person’s place in common life. A shared resource should not quietly become the possession of the most confident user; the waiting person’s claim counts too.

3. The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in due consideration for their welfare, without going the length of violating any of their constituted rights.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter IV, Limits to the Authority of Society

   Mill distinguishes consideration for others from the narrower question of enforceable rights. A fair turn at a shared attraction asks more than finding a rule that permits us to stay.

4. We can recall among the selfish people of our acquaintance at least one common characteristic,—the conviction that they are different from other men and women, that they need peculiar consideration because they are more sensitive or more refined.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Introduction

   Addams identifies the private exception people claim for themselves. A resource cannot be shared fairly if every person treats the importance of their own experience as a special entitlement.

5. When he views himself in the light in which he is conscious that others will view him, he sees that to them he is but one of the multitude in no respect better than any other in it.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Part II, Section II, Chapter II

   Smith asks the person pursuing an advantage to imagine an impartial spectator. The same shift helps a visitor see their turn as one turn among others, without special weight merely because it is theirs.

6. I believe that the rights of small people and quiet people are as important to preserve as the rights of small nationalities.

   A. G. Gardiner · Leaves in the Wind · On the Rule of the Road

   Writing during the First World War, Gardiner turns from international conflict to people overwhelmed by aggressive motorists. The comparison emphasizes how easily a quiet claim can be crowded out by a noisy one.

7. Genuine experiments toward higher social conditions must have a more democratic faith and practice than those which underlie private venture.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Industrial Amelioration

   Addams has described the dismantling of amenities in a privately managed industrial town. Her argument ties a common resource to the participation of its users, rather than leaving their interests dependent on a single benefactor.

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