Justice and Fairness

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LESSON 8:JUSTICE AND FAIRNESS

Today, the topic of our discussion is Justice and Fairness.

Points to be covered in this lesson:

•

Concept of justice

Justice:

The word “justice” is on everyone’s lips nowadays, andmay signify almost anything. We hear the cry “Peace and Justice!” from people who would destroy existing societies withfire and sword. Other people fancy that perfect justice mightreadily be obtained by certain financial rearrangements — as if anything in this world ever could be perfected. Very often we all say that the particular action was not justified. It was not right on the part of that person to treat us like the way he or she did but do you know what is the meaning of justiceand fairness? Lets understand the meaning of these two terms.“Justice is the ligament which holds civilized beings andcivilized nations together,” said Daniel Webster at the funeral of Justice Joseph Story, in 1845.

Fairness:

Fairness is conformity with rules or standards andability to make judgments free from discrimination or dishon-esty Disputes among individuals in business are often interlaced withreferences to justice or to fairness. Justice and fairness areessentially comparative. They are concerned with the compara-tive treatment given to the members of a group when benefitsand burdens are distributed, when rules and laws are adminis-tered, when members of a group cooperate or compete witheach other, and when people are punished for the wrongs they have done or compensated for the wrongs they have suffered.Standards of Justice are generally taken to be more importantthan utilitarian considerations, however, standards of Justice donot generally override the moral rights of individuals.

Principlesof Justice

The most fundamental principle of justice—one that has been widely accepted since it was first defined by Aristotle more thantwo thousand years ago—is the principle that “equals should betreated equally and unequal 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 aman, or because he is white, then we have an injustice—a formof discrimination—because race and sex are not relevant tonormal work situations. There are, however, many differences that we deem as justifiablecriteria for treating people differently. For example, we think it isfair and just when a parent gives his own children moreattention and care in his private affairs than he gives the childrenof others; we think it is fair when the person who is first in aline at a theater is given first choice of theater tickets; we think itis just when the government gives benefits to the needy that itdoes not provide to more affluent citizens; we think it is just when some who have done wrong are given punishments thatare not meted out to others who have done nothing wrong; and we think it is fair when those who exert more efforts or whomake a greater contribution to a project receive more benefitsfrom 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 notjustifiable grounds for giving people different treatment. In the world of work, for example, we generally hold that it is unjust togive individual’s special treatment on the basis of age, sex, race,or their religious preferences. If the judge’s nephew receives asuspended sentence for armed robbery when another offenderunrelated to the judge goes to jail for the same crime, or thebrother of the Director of Public Works gets the million dollarcontract to install sprinklers on the municipal golf course despitelower bids from other contractors, we say that it’s unfair. We alsobelieve 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 harmhe or she suffered. And the people involved in the “brown lung hearings” felt that it wasn’t fair that some diseases wereprovided with disability compensation, while other similardiseases weren’t.

Issues involving Justice and fairness are usually divided into

three categories:

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Distributive Justice (concerned with the fair distribution of societies benefits and burdens),

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Retributive Justice (the just imposition of punishments andpenalties upon those who do wrong),

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Compensatory Justice, (the just way of compensating peoplefor what they lost when they were wronged buy others).

Distributive Justice

When people’s desires and aversions exceed the adequacy of their resources, they are forced to develop principles forallocating scarce benefits and undesirable burdens in ways thatare just and that resolve the conflicts in a fair way. The develop-ment of such principles is the concern of distributive justice. The fundamental principle of Distributed Justice may beexpressed as follows:Individuals who are similar in all respects relevant to the kindof treatment in question should be given similar benefits andburdens, even if they are dissimilar in other irrelevant respects;and individuals who are dissimilar in a relevant respect ought tobe treated dissimilarly, in proportion to their dissimilarity.

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The fundamental principle of distributed Justice, is that equalsshould be treated equally and unequal, unequally. It is based on apurely logical idea that we must be consistent in the way we treatsimilar situations.If, for example, Vinod and Akanksha are both doing the same work for me and there are no relevant differences between themor the work they are doing, then in justice I should pay themequal wages. However, if Akanksha is working twice as long as Vinod and if length of working time is the relevant basis fordetermining wages on the sort of the work they are doing, then,to be just, I should pay Akanksha twice as much as Vinod.

Justice as Equality: Egalitarianism

Every person should be given exactly equal shares of a society’sor a group’s benefits and burdens.Egalitarians base their view on the proposition that all humanbeings are equal in some fundamental respect and that, in virtue of this equality, each person has an equal claim to society’s goods.Equality has been proposed as a principle of justice not only forentire societies, but also within smaller groups or organizations.

Justice Based on Contribution: Capitalist Justice

According to the Capitalist view, when people engage in economicexchanges with each other, what a person gets out of the exchangeshould be at least equal in value to what he or she contributed. Justice means that the benefits a person receives should beproportional to the value of his or her contribution. Benefitsshould be distributed according to the value of the contributionthe individual makes to a society, the task, a group, and foreignexchange. The principle of contribution is the most widely used principle of fairness used to establish salaries and wages in Americancompanies. One of the assumptions behind the “Puritan ethic” isthat the harder one works, the more one deserves. The marketforces of supply and demand should determine the value of aperson’s product.But, how to measure the “value of contribution” of eachindividual. Answer to this given by capitalist is:Contribution of individuals should be measured in terms of:

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Work effort: The greater the quantity of the individuals effort the greatertheir compensation should be: the harder you work the moreyou should paid.Problems related to this method of measurement:It ignores that how effectively you work

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The incompetent drudge would be rewarded morethan someone who produced more by working less.

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If we reward people solely for their efforts and ignoretheir abilities and relative productivity, then talented andhighly productive people will be given little incentive toinvest their talent and productivity in producing goodsfor society.

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Productivity: The better the quality of the individual’s contributed productthe more compensation they should receive.Problems related to this method of measurement:It ignores peoples’ needs

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The needs of handicapped & other disadvantagedpeople will not be metIt is hard to place an objective value on contributed products

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Especially in certain fields such as

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Artistic production

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Science — especially basicresearch

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Education

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Religion

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Health care The better the quality of a person’s contributed product, themore he or she should receive.In order to deal with the second criticism the principle of contribution has been suggested. They say that the marketforces of supply and demand should determine the value of aperson’s product. The value of a product would then dependnot on its intrinsic value but on the extent to which it is bothrelatively scarce and is viewed by buyers as desirable.

Justice based on Needs and Abilities: Socialism

The socialist principle states that: Work burdens should be distributed according to people’sabilities and benefits should be distributed according topeople’s needs. This principle is based first on the idea that people realize theirhuman potential by exercising their abilities in productive work. The benefits produced through work should be used topromote happiness and well being and this means distributing them so that people’s basic biological and health needs are met,and then using what is left over to meet people’s other non basicneeds. The principle of need and ability, however, is the principle thattends to be least acknowledged in business. Needs and abilitiescertainly should be taken into account when determining how benefits and burdens should be distributed among themembers of a society or group.

Justice as Freedom: Libertarianism

From each according to what he chooses to do, to each accord-ing to what he makes for himself (perhaps with the contractedaid of others) and what others choose to do for him andchoose to give him of what they’ve been given previously (under this maxim) and haven’t yet extended or transferred.In general, people should be allowed to keep everything they make and everything they are freely given.

Criticism of Libertarianism:

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Libertarians only stress on one value that is the freedom fromthe coercion of others and sacrifices all other rights and values to it, without giving any reason that why this shouldbe done.

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This means that it would be wrong to tax one person (that is, takethe persons money) in order to provide welfare benefits forsomeone else’s needs.

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The critics of Libertarianism say, if people through no-fault of their own happen to be unable to care for themselves, theirsurvival should not depend on the outside chance that others will provide them with what they need. A person may be ill, handicapped, unable to obtain the tools orland needed to produce goods, too old or too young to work, orotherwise incapable of producing anything through his or herown efforts. And other people may refuse to provide that person with what he or she needs. According to libertarianism this personshould not get anything but critics say that this is not right Eachperson’s life is of value and consequently each person should becared for, even if this means coercing others into distributing some of their surplus to the person.

Justice as Fairness: Rawls

By this time so many theories were discussed that a comprehen-sive theory capable of drawing these considerations togetherand fitting them together into a logical whole was needed. Sothat’s how John Rawl’s came up with this theory. John Rawl’s theory is based on the assumption that conflictsinvolved should be settled by first devising a fair method forchoosing the principles by which conflicts will be resolved. Theprinciples of distributive Justice that Rawls proposes can beparaphrased by saying that the distribution of benefits andburdens in a society is just if, and only if:1. Each person has an equal right to the most extensive basicliberties compatible with similar liberties for all, and2. Social and economic inequalities are arranged so that they arebotha. To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and b. Attached to offices and positions open to all underconditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Principle 1 is called the Principle of Equal Liberty

Essentially it says that each citizen’s liberties must be protectedfrom invasion by others and must be equal to those of others.

Principle 2a is the Difference Principle

It assumes that a productive society will incorporate inequalities,but it then asserts that steps must be taken to improve theposition of the most needy members of society such as the sick and the disabled unless such improvements would so burdensociety that they make everyone, including the needy, worse off than before.

Principle 2b is the Principle of Fair Equality of Opportu-nity

It says that everyone should be given and equal opportunity toqualify for the more privileged positions in society’s institu- tions. This means not only that job qualifications should be related tothe requirements of the job, but that each person must haveaccess to the training and education needed to qualify for thedesirable jobs.Rawls principle of Justice consists of determining whatprinciples a group of rational self interested persons wouldchoose to live by, if they knew they would live in a society governed by those principles, but that they did not yet know what each of them would turn out to be like in that society.Rawls refers to the situation of such an imaginary group of rational persons as the “original position”, and he refers to theirignorance of any particulars about themselves as the “veil of ignorance”.

Retributive Justice

If the purpose of a punishment is to deter others fromcommitting the same wrong or to prevent the wrongdoer fromrepeating the wrong, then punishment should not be greaterthan what is consistently necessary to achieve these aims.

Compensatory Justice

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It concerns restoring to individuals what they have lost dueto being wronged by another. We generally hold that whenone person wrongfully harms the interests of anotherperson, the wrongdoer has a moral duty to provide someform of restitution to the person he or she wronged.

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Insofar as possible the wrongdoer should restore the loss The most controversial forms of compensation undoubtedly are the “preferential treatment” programs that attempt toremedy past injustices against groups. If a racial group, forexample, has been unjustly discriminated against for anextended period of time in the past and its members conse-quently now hold the lowest economic and social positions insociety, does justice require that members of that group becompensated by being given special preference in hiring, training,and promotion procedures? Or would such special treatmentitself be a violation of justice by violating the principle of equaltreatment? Does justice legitimize quotas even if this requiresturning down more highly qualified non- minorities? These arecomplex and involved questions that we will not be able toanswer at this point.

Overview

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The most fundamental principle of justice is the principlethat “equals should be treated equally and unequalsunequally.”

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Issues involving justice and fairness – distributive justice,retributive justice and compensatory justice.

Activity

Briefly discuss the principles of justice. What are the differenttypes of justice?

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Category:	Business/Law > Taxes & Accounting
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Upload Date:	07/23/2009
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