Arguments about justice or fairness have a long tradition in Western civilisation. In fact, no idea in Western civilization has been more consistently linked to ethics and morality than the idea of justice.
From the Republic, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, to A Theory of Justice, written by the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls, every major work on ethics has held that justice is part of the central core of morality.
According to legal experts, Justice means giving each person what he or she deserves or, in more traditional terms, giving each person his or her due.
Justice and fairness are closely related terms that are often today used interchangeably. There have, however, also been more distinct understandings of the two terms.
While justice usually has been used with reference to a standard of rightness, fairness often has been used with regard to an ability to judge without reference to one’s feelings or interests.
Fairness has also been used to refer to the ability to make judgments that are not overly general but that are concrete and specific to a particular case.
In any case, a notion of being treated as one deserves is crucial to both justice and fairness.
When people differ over what they believe should be given, or when decisions have to be made about how benefits and burdens should be distributed among a group of people, questions of justice or fairness inevitably arise.
In fact, most ethicists today hold the view that there would be no point of talking about justice or fairness if it were not for the conflicts of interest that are created when goods and services are scarce and people differ over who should get what.
When such conflicts arise in our society, we need principles of justice that we can all accept as reasonable and fair standards for determining what people deserve.
But saying that justice is giving each person what he or she deserves does not take us very far. How do we determine what people deserve? What criteria and what principles should we use to determine what is due to this or that person?
The most fundamental principle of justice—one that has been widely accepted since it was first defined by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago—is the principle that “equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.”
In its contemporary form, this principle is sometimes expressed as follows: “Individuals should be treated the same, unless they differ in ways that are relevant to the situation in which they are involved.”
There are, however, many differences that we deem as justifiable criteria for treating people differently.
For example, we think it is fair and just when a parent gives his own children more attention and care in his private affairs than he gives the children of others.
We think it is fair when the person who is first in a line at a theater is given first choice of theater tickets.
We think it is just when the government gives benefits to the needy that it does not provide to more affluent citizens, just as we think it is just when some who have done wrong are given punishments that are not meted out to others who have done nothing wrong.
And we think it is fair when those who exert more efforts or who make a greater contribution to a project receive more benefits from the project than others.
On the other hand, there are also criteria that we believe are not justifiable grounds for giving people different treatment.
In the world of work, for example, we generally hold that it is unjust to give individuals special treatment on the basis of age, sex, race, or their religious preferences.
If the judge’s nephew receives a suspended sentence for armed robbery when another offender unrelated to the judge goes to jail for the same crime, or the brother of the Director of Public Works gets the million dollar contract to install sprinklers on the municipal golf course despite lower bids from other contractors, we say that it’s unfair.
We also believe it isn’t fair when a person is punished for something over which he or she had no control, or isn’t compensated for a harm he or she suffered.
The foundations of justice can be traced to the notions of social stability, interdependence, and equal dignity.
As the ethicist John Rawls has pointed out, the stability of a society—or any group, for that matter—depends upon the extent to which the members of that society feel that they are being treated justly.
When some of society’s members come to feel that they are subject to unequal treatment, the foundations have been laid for social unrest, disturbances, and strife.
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant and others have pointed out, human beings are all equal in this respect, as they all have the same dignity, and in virtue of this dignity they deserve to be treated as equals.
Whenever individuals are treated unequally on the basis of characteristics that are arbitrary and irrelevant, their fundamental human dignity is violated.
