Imagine that society was starting from scratch, and you didn’t know where you would end up in terms of rank or status.

Your race, social location, and any of the markers that distinguish people in terms of more or less, were completely hidden from you.

Under such conditions of ignorance, your basic desire for society would be that it be regulated fairly. That way, wherever you ended up, you would be guaranteed a fair shot at sharing in the society’s resources and achieving your social possibilities. Justice, in other words, would essentially be fairness, and a just society would be a fair society.

The foregoing is basically how John Rawls, this century’s most influential political philosopher, sets us up his theory of justice as fairness. The foundation is a hypothetical “state of nature”. People are all initially behind “a veil of ignorance”, as described in the preceding paragraph, and they must decide what principles of justice would govern the ideal society.

What Rawls is about, in other words, is what we commonly call “social justice”, or the ethical foundations of a just social order. I recall Rawls here at the outset in dealing with our second cardinal virtue, not only because of his influence in discussions of justice today, but because I should like to recast some of our traditional understandings of justice in terms of fairness, to give them a fresh look and appeal.

The most fundamental principle of justice, widely accepted since Aristotle defined it, has been that “equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.” This is sometimes put in the form: “Equals should be treated the same, unless they differ in ways relevant to the situation in which they are involved.”

In terms of fairness, it would be: “It is unfair to treat individuals unequally, unless there are relevant reasons for treating them differently.” Thus, if Michael and Jane do the same work, and there are no relevant differences either between them or in the work they do, it’s unfair to pay them unequal wages.

If Michael is paid more, simply because he is a man, or because he is white, then this is unfairness, and a form of discrimination, because race and sex are not relevant in normal work situations.

On the other hand, there are differences we consider justifiable for treating people differently. It’s not unfair, for example, for parents to give their own children more attention and care, even where no relevant distinctions exist between the latter and the children of other people.

It’s not unfair that those who are first in line be given first pick in the choice of tickets for the theatre. It’s not unfair for the government to give special benefits to the needy that it does not give to more affluent citizens. It’s not unfair that those who exert more effort or make a greater contribution to a project should receive greater benefit from it.

Other differences, however, do not constitute justifiable grounds for different treatment. People should not be given special treatment solely on the basis of sex, race, family, religious affiliation, or party group connections.

If the judge’s nephew, for instance, receives a suspended sentence for armed robbery, when another offender, no relative of the judge, goes to jail for the same crime, we judge this to be fundamentally unfair. If a friend of the Minster of Works gets the million dollar contract for installing sprinklers on a golf course, in spite of lower bids from others, who are no friends of the Minister, or belong to another party, the same applies. Unfairness is injustice.

The traditional forms of justice, viz., distributive, retributive or corrective, and compensatory, show their import and meaning clearly when construed in terms of fairness. 

Distributive justice refers to the extent to which society’s institutions ensure that benefits and burdens are fairly distributed among the populace. If unequal distribution is felt to prevail, with criteria such as status or social standing meaning the difference between a benefit and a burden, it doesn’t matter how eloquently the society describes itself, such a situation is one of unfairness. 

Retributive justice refers to the extent to which punishments are fair. Relevant criteria are the seriousness of the crime and the intent of the criminal. Irrelevant criteria are features such as wealth and race, which should be discounted.

Unfortunately, many people believe that wealth has a disproportionate influence in impeding the course of justice, or in obstructing its administration altogether. Studies elsewhere, in the US, for instance, have shown that race has much the same significance.

Capital punishment is more common when blacks murder whites, than when whites murder blacks, or when blacks murder blacks. This all means that unfairness is often synonymous with the administration of justice. The symbolic figure of justice, on the other hand, with scales in hand and blindfolded, is quintessentially a symbol of justice as fairness.

Compensatory justice refers to the extent to which people are fairly compensated for their injuries by those who have injured them. Just compensation means fair compensation, considering the nature of the injury and the extent of the negligence.

I am amazed that in Trinidad one never hears of large compensations for some of the egregious injuries ordinary people suffer in our hospitals. I am also amazed that many people regard such injuries as a matter of fate. Life is unfair, John Kennedy once famously said, but that’s often because unfairness has no advocate.

Rawls, as we saw, traced justice as fairness to his “original position”, but it is just as possible to see it in terms of our equal dignity and interdependence. A society is stable to the extent that its members feel that fairness is the operational rule, not the exception.

When unfairness has the upper hand, the foundations are laid for different forms of unrest and strife. Fairness is the expression of our mutual recognition of one another’s basic worth.

It is also an acknowledgement that if we are to live together in an interdependent community, we must learn to live with and treat one other as equals.