Too little
The friendly exception
“We know our people; only the other group needs all these checks.”
Allegiance substitutes for a relevant reason.
Fairness
Defend an opponent's equal treatment when your supporters would prefer an exception.
An impartial disposition to give relevant interests and evidence their due.
Fairness gives relevant interests and evidence their due without letting allegiance decide their weight. In the use of public power, a procedure earns credibility when an opponent can receive the consideration you would claim for an ally. Impartiality still requires attention to real differences; equal scrutiny is not a promise of identical outcomes.
Fairness gives a public rule people can recognize on either side
Two political groups request the municipal hall under the same bookings policy. Your supporters’ application has passed quickly; the rival group’s has acquired a mountain of sticky notes. Both ask for forty chairs and the same closing time. At the council’s policy review, supporters urge you to defend the extra scrutiny. You put the forms side by side and ask the responsible team to explain any difference by the published criteria. The stationery has been conducting a campaign of its own. It need not win.
Finding the balance in Fairness
A councillor’s supporters want a rival group’s comparable hall application subjected to extra scrutiny.
A fitting response
Comparable scrutiny
“Apply the same relevant conditions and explain any difference.”
Both requests receive an intelligible assessment.
Pursued too far
Mechanical sameness
“Ignore every difference so the decisions look identical.”
A genuine difference in capacity or access needs disappears under an appearance of equality.
A larger event may need different arrangements. Fairness asks whether the difference is relevant and would count the same way if the groups exchanged names.
What Fairness makes possible
People can understand a decision they dislike when its grounds are open to examination. Fair treatment also improves the decision itself: it makes the committee notice evidence that loyalty might otherwise filter out. The gain is a usable public process, not merely a reputation for being agreeable.
Fairness in ordinary life
A club request
Read an unfamiliar member’s proposal with the same patience you give a friend’s.
A contested account
State the other side’s strongest relevant reason before answering it.
Nearby virtues, different work
Justice
Fairness concerns impartial assessment; Justice asks what people are ethically due, including after a fair assessment.
Magnanimity
Magnanimity loosens rivalry’s hold on pride. Fairness governs how the competing claims are considered.
Fairness and its counterfeits
The symmetrical verdict
Giving each side half of what it asks can counterfeit Fairness when the evidence supports different conclusions. Examine the merits rather than stage a midpoint.
Reverse favoritism
Automatically favoring an outsider is another counterfeit of Fairness. Unfamiliarity deserves an open hearing, not a predetermined victory.
How to cultivate Fairness
Name the relevant conditions before applying them to the favored case.
Try exchanging the names in a disputed decision.
Explain exceptions in terms that could be applied to another applicant.
Try it today
Reconsider a small group decision by swapping the people’s names in your explanation. Notice whether your reason still holds.
Questions worth returning to
- Which difference actually bears on the decision?
- Would this condition survive a change of allegiance?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
It is clear then that we do not go to our group—trade-union, city council, college faculty—to be passive and learn, and we do not go to push through something we have already decided we want.
Follett rejects both passive attendance and a fixed determination to prevail. Comparable scrutiny of room requests requires the decision-maker to remain available to reasons that do not favor their own side.
The injustice and violation of principle are not less flagrant because those who suffer by them are a minority, for there is not equal suffrage where every single individual does not count for as much as any other single individual in the community.
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Chapter VII
This is an argument about electoral representation. Its relevance to room applications is the refusal to make a smaller or unpopular group’s standing depend on the decision-maker’s sympathies; it does not equate the two procedures.
The voter who is eager to serve the alderman at all times, because the tenure of his job is dependent upon aldermanic favor, might find great relief and pleasure in working for the city in which his place was secured by a well-administered civil service law.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Chapter VII — Political Reform
Addams contrasts personal dependence with an administered public standard. Fair treatment of a room application similarly relieves people of having to cultivate the decision-maker’s favor before their reasons can count.
Now, can you or not be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.
Lincoln challenges Southern opponents who condemn Republicans before hearing their case. In its argument over slavery’s extension, the passage demands an answer to stated reasons rather than exclusion by a party label.
It is largely in this modern tendency to judge all men by one democratic standard, while the old charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of two standards, that much of the difficulty adheres.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Chapter II — Charitable Effort
Addams examines the double standard by which charity visitors judge poorer people. Applied to a public room, the question becomes whether the opposing group is being asked to meet a test that allies never faced.
It is not fair to judge of the temper or dispositions of any man, or any set of men, when they are composed and at rest, from their conduct or their expressions in a state of disturbance and irritation.
Edmund Burke · Speech on Conciliation with America · House of Commons, 22 March 1775
Burke warns against taking an agitated response as the whole character of the colonists. A room decision should likewise turn on relevant criteria, not on a selective impression of a group at its least composed.
When the multitude hate a man, it is necessary to examine into the case. When the multitude like a man, it is necessary to examine into the case.
Confucius · The Analects · Book XV, chapter XXVII · Translated by James Legge
Approval and hostility receive the same demand for examination. The repeated sentence makes the symmetry precise: neither the supporters’ enthusiasm nor their dislike settles the hall application.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.