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? 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.īut saying that justice is giving each person what he or she deserves does not take us very far. 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 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 any case, a notion of being treated as one deserves is crucial to both justice and fairness. 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. There have, however, also been more distinct understandings of the two terms. Justice and fairness are closely related terms that are often today used interchangeably. Justice means giving each person what he or she deserves or, in more traditional terms, giving each person his or her due. 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. In fact, no idea in Western civilization has been more consistently linked to ethics and morality than the idea of justice. Is affirmative action fair? Are congressional districts drawn to be fair? Is our tax policy fair? Is our method for funding schools fair?Īrguments about justice or fairness have a long tradition in Western civilization. Many public policy arguments focus on fairness.
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