Fairness Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The distinctive domain of fairness is decision-making processes or institutions. The concept of fairness is closely linked to a number of other moral concepts, including justice, equality, and impartiality. Like these other notions, fairness centers on how people are treated by others, especially the requirement that everyone be treated alike unless there are good reasons to treat particular people differently. Thus, a fair procedure makes decisions or allocates benefits or burdens on the basis of appropriate criteria, which are applied similarly to all cases unless exceptions can be justified. Fairness is appealed to in assessing both means through which decisions are made and the outcomes decisions bring about. The former is generally labeled “procedural” fairness, the latter “distributive” fairness. Although these two dimensions of decisions frequently run in tandem (i.e., fair procedures give rise to fair outcomes, and unfair procedures to unfair outcomes), this may not always be true. While the notion of fairness pertains to both dimensions, it is more closely associated with procedures, whereas the notion of justice (distributive justice) is generally more closely associated with outcomes.

Specific qualities that constitute fairness vary across contexts, in accordance with the nature of different decision processes or institutions. The variety of relevant contexts requires a corresponding range of criteria of fairness. For instance, in a fair election, candidates compete on even terms. In a fair bargain, participants reach an agreement under conditions that are similar for all, with no one having an advantage over others. In a fair trial, court officials are not biased toward one or another of the parties involved. In these and countless other cases, fairness turns on people’s being treated equally, with departures from equality requiring justification, although exactly what constitutes equal treatment varies according to context.

Historical Examples

The concept of fairness has a long lineage. The Oxford English Dictionary gives examples of fairness and cognate words used in English with their present sense as far back as 1460. But we find clear instances in other languages many centuries earlier. For example, although the Greeks lacked a word that clearly means “fairness,” Thucydides uses the concept in his History of the Peloponnesian War (late fifth century BCE). He describes the besieged people of Melos asking their Athenian besiegers to consider “that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing (ta eikota kai dikaia)” between people. In other words, they request that similar rules apply to the strong and the weak without regard to differences in power. In his Politics (late fourth century BCE), Aristotle argues that standards of justice or fairness differ in different regimes. In democratic regimes, ruled over by the many who are poor, the governing idea is that people should be treated alike, so political offices should be distributed through a lottery system, while according to this view, free birth and citizenship constitute being alike. In contrast, in oligarchical regimes, ruled over by the rich, fairness is treating people differently, according to their merits, with amount of property in this case constituting degree of merit. An important lesson of Aristotle’s account is that there is no generally accepted standard of fairness with regard to either procedures or distribution. Different ways of dealing with people may seem to be fair as long as they accord similar treatment to people who are similar in important respects.

Recent Usage

In recent years, fairness has received considerable attention because of the work of John Rawls and his theory of “justice as fairness.” In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls argues that specific principles of justice can be justified by showing that they would be chosen by representative individuals placed in a carefully constructed, artificial-choice situation. To ensure that people’s particular interests do not influence their choice of principles, Rawls places the representative individuals behind a hypothetical “veil of ignorance.” They are to choose principles without knowing about their own specific identities or attributes (e.g., social position, talents, religion, sex, age). Rawls calls his theory justice as fairness because this designation conveys the idea that the resultant principles of justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair. In recent years, different aspects of fairness have figured prominently in social science research. Researchers have examined people’s views about procedural fairness in political, business, education, and other settings. Numerous studies support the strong effects of procedural considerations, which are not only distinct from outcome considerations but frequently more influential, even in cases with highly unfavorable outcomes. In assessing a variety of institutions, participants have been shown to place greater weight on their views of how decisions are made than on how the outcomes of the decisions affect them. An important implication of this so-called fair-process effect is the realization of people’s willingness to accept undesirable decisions if they believe that the decisions have been made fairly. This has special salience with regard to political or other systems that require sacrifice of their subjects. Contrariwise, people have been shown to react strongly against decision processes they view as unfair, especially when decisions have outcomes they also view as unfavorable.

Concerns about fairness are also appealed to in order to ground moral requirements to support cooperative associations. The principle of fairness (or fair play), developed by H. L. A. Hart in 1955, is based on fair distribution of benefits and burdens. When a number of people join in cooperative activities to produce and receive common benefits, other people who receive the benefits but do not share the burdens of providing them (i.e., free riders) may be viewed as treating the cooperators unfairly. To remedy this situation, they too should cooperate, even if they would prefer not to. Developed along these lines, the principle of fairness grounds an influential recent account of why people should obey the law. Given the large-scale cooperation necessary to produce essential benefits of contemporary societies that include national defense and law and order, people who receive the benefits incur moral requirements to bear their fair share of the burdens required to produce them. Since important state benefits are coordinated by the law, the principle of fairness can support general moral requirements to obey the law.

Bibliography:

Klosko, George. The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992.
Lind, E. Allan, and Tom R.Tyler. The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. New York: Plenum, 1988.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Tyler,Tom.“What Is Procedural Justice? Criteria Used by Citizens to Assess the Fairness of Legal Procedures.” Law and Society Review 22 (1988): 103–135.