Fairness

Understanding Fairness

Fairness asks what is relevant when deciding how people are treated. It resists convenient favoritism and unexplained exclusions. Equal treatment can be appropriate; a relevant difference can also call for a different arrangement. The task is to make the reason answerable to the people affected, rather than treating symmetry as its own justification.

Fairness: finding the balance

Two painting tasks need different amounts of paint.

The relevant difference is the work to be painted, not who the host likes or whether the pots look equal.

Fairness gives…

A considered allocation lets people understand the basis of a decision. It can account for agreed purposes and actual needs without making preference for a familiar person decisive. A transparent reason also gives others a way to identify a mistake.

What Fairness makes possible

Fairness can improve a process as well as a result: clarify criteria, hear the missing account or separate a personal liking from a relevant qualification. People may still disagree about the right allocation, but they can disagree about an intelligible reason.

Fairness in ordinary life

• Before distributing a shared resource, ask what purpose the allocation is meant to serve.
• Apply the announced criterion to a familiar person as well as a stranger.
• When a decision is questioned, explain the relevant reason and check whether an important fact was missed.

Nearby virtues, different work

Kindness attends to a particular need. Prudence weighs consequences. Integrity applies a considered principle. Fairness supplies impartial due consideration; it does not require suppressing every difference or making every outcome identical.

Integrity · Kindness · Prudence

Fairness and its counterfeits

Mechanical equality is a counterfeit of Fairness: the host insists that identical spoonfuls settle the question although the shared tasks differ. Genuine fairness considers the relevant purpose. Favoritism disguised as need is another counterfeit; a convenient explanation still needs examination.

How to cultivate Fairness

State the criterion before seeing who benefits. Ask which differences matter and which are merely comfortable excuses. Give affected people a reasonable opportunity to correct missing information. Be willing to revise an allocation when its basis no longer fits.

Try it today

For a routine shared decision, identify one criterion and one relevant difference. Consider whether you would use the same reasoning if the names of the people were exchanged.

Keep the practice proportionate

This reflection is not a legal allocation rule or an instruction to overrule someone else’s authority. Respect access needs and privacy; no one must disclose private circumstances to earn ordinary consideration.

A question worth returning to

Could someone affected understand and challenge the basis of the decision?

Quotations and further reading

These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this strength.

1. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct, and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason.

   John Stuart Mill · Utilitarianism

   CHAPTER V.

   Mill distinguishes the feeling of justice from the judgment that should enlighten it. A strong feeling does not settle whether its expression is fitting.

2. Also I mean by honesty, the careful and eager giving his due to every man, the determination not to gain by any man’s loss, which in my experience is not a common virtue.

   William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art

   The Art of the People

   Morris defines the honesty he means through giving others their due and refusing to gain through their loss.

3. At times of social disturbance the law-abiding citizen is naturally so anxious for peace and order, his sympathies are so justly and inevitably on the side making for the restoration of law, that it is difficult for him to see the situation fairly.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics

   INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION

   Addams examines how a reasonable wish for peace can obstruct a fair view during social disturbance. She is analysing a source of partiality.

4. Thou must turn to profit the present by the aid of reason and justice.

   Marcus Aurelius · The Thoughts (Meditations)

   BOOK IV. · George Long; linked edition

   Marcus connects present action with reason and justice. Fair allocation asks what the particular people and tasks need now.

5. For that by which alone man is true can only be nourished by love and justice.

   Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

   REALISATION IN LOVE · Linked 1916 Macmillan text; first publication 1913. Chapter VI translated by Surendra Nath Tagore; other English translation contributions acknowledged in the preface.

   Tagore joins love and justice in his account of a true human life. Warm feeling does not replace attention to a fair share.

6. Nearly allied to the idea of impartiality, is that of equality; which often enters as a component part both into the conception of justice and into the practice of it, and, in the eyes of many persons, constitutes its essence.

   John Stuart Mill · Utilitarianism

   CHAPTER V. · ,

   Mill distinguishes impartiality and equality while observing their connection in accounts of justice. Identical amounts require further judgment when the tasks differ.

7. Of these, equality is the basis, and an intercourse of sentiments unclogged by that observant seriousness which prevents disputation, though it may not inforce submission.

   Mary Wollstonecraft · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

   CHAPTER 12. · ,

   Wollstonecraft makes equality a basis for an exchange of sentiments that allows disputation. Fairness includes being able to challenge a proposed arrangement.

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