Too little
A partisan eye
I can see mine is closer from here.
A favorable viewpoint substitutes for a shared way of deciding.
Fairness
Give the same close call the same honest attention.
An impartial disposition to give relevant interests and evidence their due.
Fairness lets the relevant facts count even when they favor the other side. A contest becomes interesting because its outcome is genuinely open: another person’s effort can prevail. An impartial judgment protects that openness. You may want your ball to be nearer without making your wish the measuring instrument.
Fairness gives a result both sides can recognize
Two bowls lie close to the small target ball. From where you are standing, yours looks nearer. From your opponent’s side, the geometry appears to have changed its allegiance. You both laugh, bring out the measure and look together. The distance has no interest in your afternoon’s ambitions. When the other bowl proves closer, you can still wish it were yours.
Finding the balance in Fairness
Two players must judge which bowl is nearer the target when both have a reason to prefer their own.
A fitting response
The same measure
Let’s check both distances in the same way.
The relevant comparison is open to both players and independent of whose ball benefits.
Pursued too far
Equality of outcomes
We should call every close result a draw.
Avoiding all disappointment removes the meaningful difference the agreed contest was designed to test.
Fairness gives each claim a proper hearing; it does not promise each claim the same outcome.
What Fairness makes possible
A fair call lets people invest effort without having to win a second contest over whose interests matter. The same disposition can improve decisions about practice time, access and selection. Equal attention may sometimes require different arrangements, such as an agreed adaptation that makes participation possible. Explain the relevant difference instead of treating identical treatment as the whole of justice.
Fairness in ordinary life
Choosing a team
Use the announced purpose of the session when selecting players; do not quietly invent a new criterion to include your friend.
Sharing a court
Give waiting players the consideration you expected when you were waiting.
Nearby virtues, different work
Integrity
Integrity keeps your standard consistent; Fairness asks whether that standard gives the relevant interests their due.
Courtesy
Courtesy can make a disputed call easier to discuss, but pleasant manners do not make a biased call fair.
Fairness and its counterfeits
Our side’s exception
A rule becomes flexible only when your own side needs flexibility.
The appearance of neutrality
Refusing to hear a relevant difference may sound even-handed while preserving an avoidable disadvantage.
How to cultivate Fairness
Agree how uncertain calls will be handled while the stakes are still low.
Ask whether you would accept your reasoning with the names reversed.
Explain an adaptation by its purpose and discuss it with the people affected.
Try it today
Recall an ordinary close call. Describe the relevant facts without naming which side you favored, then consider what process you would trust.
Questions worth returning to
- What fact would change my mind?
- Am I comparing like cases, or ignoring a relevant difference?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Owing to my color, I was not allowed to join the Y. M. C. A., and in consequence was not permitted to go on the gymnasium floor with my companions.
Marshall W. “Major” Taylor · The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World · Chapter 1
Taylor recalls being excluded from the gymnasium while his friends were admitted. Fairness concerns access to participation as well as calls within a contest; a rule can be consistently enforced and still be unjust.
It is well to observe the rules carefully in practice, or else they may distract one’s attention in a match.
James Dwight · Lawn-Tennis · How to Learn to Play
Dwight recommends keeping the rules present in practice. A standard learned only when a match becomes important is more likely to feel like an interruption than part of the activity.
Many men became alarmed at the idea of obtaining a reputation for giving partial decisions, and would go to the other extreme, and decide against their own side oftener than the facts justified.
A. G. Steel · Cricket · Chapter V · Umpires
Steel identifies an overcorrection: fear of seeming partial can produce unfair decisions against one’s own side. The remedy is attention to evidence, not compensating bias.
Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.
William James · Talks to Teachers and to Students · On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
James warns that our own urgent concerns conceal the significance of other lives. A competitor’s disappointment is not evidence that their interests or account deserve less attention.
This gives a great field for the flatterer in friendship, who finds a wonderful base of operations in our self-love, which makes each person his own first and greatest flatterer, and easily admits a flatterer from without, who will be, so he thinks and hopes, both a witness and confirmer of his good opinion of himself.
Plutarch describes self-love preparing a welcome for flattering evidence. The measuring rule matters because a sincerely hopeful eye can still be a poor judge of its own bowl.
An umpire wants practice and experience in keeping his attention and whole mind fixed impartially on the game, and this can only be acquired by those who stand day after day in that capacity.
A. G. Steel · Cricket · Chapter III · Bowling
Steel treats impartial attention as a practiced skill. Agreeing to judge fairly is a beginning; sustained attention to what happened is the work.
And secondly, if any man that is present shall be able to rectify thee or to turn thee from some erroneous persuasion, that thou be always ready to change thy mind, and this change to proceed, not from any respect of any pleasure or credit thereon depending, but always from some probable apparent ground of justice, or of some public good thereby to be furthered…
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations · Book IV · X · Meric Casaubon translation
Marcus asks a change of mind to follow reasons concerning justice or public good, rather than credit. Revising a disputed call is fairer when the evidence changes the judgment, even if it costs face.
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