Justice and Fairness

Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer
This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics V3 N2 (Spring 1990).
Many public policy arguments focus on fairness. Is affirmative action fair?
Are congressional districts drawn to be fair? Is our tax policy fair? Is our method
for funding schools fair?
Arguments about justice or fairness have a long tradition in Western
civilization. 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.
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 desert is crucial to both justice and fairness. The Nortons and Ellisons of this
world, for example, are asking for what they think they deserve when they are
demanding that they be treated with 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?
 Principles of Justice
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." For example, if Jack and Jill both do
the same work, and there are no relevant differences between them or the work they
are doing, then in justice they should be paid the same wages. And if Jack is paid
more than Jill simply because he is a man, or because he is white, then we have an
injustice—a form of discrimination—because race and sex are not relevant to
normal work situations.
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; 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. These
criteria—need, desert, contribution, and effort—we acknowledge as justifying
differential treatment, then, are numerous.
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. And the people
involved in the "brown lung hearings" felt that it wasn't fair that some diseases
were provided with disability compensation, while other similar diseases weren't.
Different Kinds of Justice
There are different kinds of justice. Distributive justice refers to the extent to
which society's institutions ensure that benefits and burdens are distributed among
society's members in ways that are fair and just. When the institutions of a society
distribute benefits or burdens in unjust ways, there is a strong presumption that
those institutions should be changed. For example, the American institution of
slavery in the pre-civil war South was condemned as unjust because it was a
glaring case of treating people differently on the basis of race.
A second important kind of justice is retributive or corrective justice.
Retributive justice refers to the extent to which punishments are fair and just. In
general, punishments are held to be just to the extent that they take into account
relevant criteria such as the seriousness of the crime and the intent of the criminal,
and discount irrelevant criteria such as race. It would be barbarously unjust, for
example, to chop off a person's hand for stealing a dime, or to impose the death
penalty on a person who by accident and without negligence injured another party.
Studies have frequently shown that when blacks murder whites, they are much
more likely to receive death sentences than when whites murder whites or blacks
murder blacks. These studies suggest that injustice still exists in the criminal justice
system in the United States.
Yet a third important kind of justice is compensatory justice. Compensatory
justice refers to the extent to which people are fairly compensated for their injuries
by those who have injured them; just compensation is proportional to the loss
inflicted on a person. This is precisely the kind of justice that was at stake in the
brown lung hearings. Those who testified at the hearings claimed that the owners of
the cotton mills where workers had been injured should compensate the workers
whose health had been ruined by conditions at the mills.
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. The
members of a community, Rawls holds, depend on each other, and they will retain
their social unity only to the extent that their institutions are just. Moreover, as the
philosopher Immanuel Kant and others have pointed out, human beings are all
equal in this respect: 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.
Justice, then, is a central part of ethics and should be given due consideration
in our moral lives. In evaluating any moral decision, we must ask whether our
actions treat all persons equally. If not, we must determine whether the difference
in treatment is justified: are the criteria we are using relevant to the situation at
hand? But justice is not the only principle to consider in making ethical decisions.
Sometimes principles of justice may need to be overridden in favor of other kinds
of moral claims such as rights or society's welfare. Nevertheless, justice is an
expression of our mutual recognition of each other's basic dignity, and an
acknowledgement that if we are to live together in an interdependent community
we must treat each other as equals.
 Bibliografie
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