Fairness

Fairness gives terms that take both sides seriously

The nearby market has run out of insulated crates, and your small rental store has the last six. A stallholder arrives with produce ready for the morning. You start to slide the price marker upward, then ask what extra work the urgent rental actually requires. The marker has climbed faster than any of your costs. You set out a defensible charge and clear return terms, leaving both of you able to plan.

An illustrative scene.

Fairness: finding the balance

A supplier has unusual bargaining power during a temporary shortage.

An urgent delivery may genuinely cost more. Fairness asks what justifies the difference, and whether the explanation would make sense from the other side.

What Fairness makes possible

Clear, defensible terms help people coordinate work across unequal circumstances. The supplier can cover real effort; the customer can decide what is feasible. Neither must pretend that a bargain becomes fair merely because someone accepted it under pressure.

Fairness in ordinary life

Sharing a paid task

Agree how travel, preparation and finishing work count before dividing the fee.

Employment terms

When setting a rota or dividing paid work, consider the preparation and constraints of people who cannot readily refuse the arrangement.

Nearby virtues, different work

Prudence

Prudence examines consequences. Fairness decides how relevant interests enter that examination.

Generosity

Generosity gives freely; Fairness need not turn every exchange into a gift.

Fairness and its counterfeits

Consent as a complete answer

“They agreed” can counterfeit Fairness when it ignores the lack of meaningful alternatives. Examine the terms and the circumstances.

How to cultivate Fairness

1. List the interests on both sides before settling a disputed term.

2. Separate a real extra cost from an opportunity to exploit urgency.

3. Explain a difference in treatment with a reason you could apply consistently.

Try it today

For a small shared task, check whether your proposed division counts the other person’s preparation as carefully as your visible work.

Questions worth returning to

• Whose options have I assumed are as wide as mine?
• Which difference in treatment has a relevant reason?

Keep the practice proportionate

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

   Adam Smith · The Wealth of Nations
   Book I; CHAPTER VIII. OF THE WAGES OF LABOUR.; paragraph beginning “Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded a…”
   Adam Smith · Project Gutenberg #3300 transcription; underlying print edition not specified in preserved capture.

   Smith places the condition of workers inside the judgment of prosperity. This broadens the crate-price page to the interests of people whose labour makes an offering possible.

2. And though absolute justice be unattainable, as much justice as we need for all practical use is attainable by all those who make it their aim.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY III. / "QUI JUDICATIS TERRAM."; paragraph beginning “Absolute justice is indeed no more attainable than absolute truth; but the righteous man i…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   Ruskin resists making unattainable perfection an excuse for abandoning practical justice. The supplier can examine a charge’s grounds without claiming a perfect pricing formula.

3. We help to make their profits, and we ought to help spend ’em.

   Elizabeth Gaskell · North and South
   North and South / CHAPTER XVII. WHAT IS A STRIKE?; paragraph beginning ““State o’ trade! That’s just a piece o’ masters’ humbug. It’s rate o’ wages I was talking…”
   Nicholas Higgins, fictional speaker in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South · Walter Scott, Limited, Paternoster Square, London; title page undated in preserved Project Gutenberg #4276 capture.

   Higgins argues that workers should share in the prosperity they help create. His heated strike speech also dismisses the employers’ account of trade; the selection supplies the worker’s claim, not proof that every demand is affordable. Fair terms require attending to the contribution behind an offering.

4. If we want harmony between labor and capital, we must make labor and capital into one group: we must have an integration of interests and motives, of standards and ideals of justice.

   Mary Parker Follett · The New State
   THE NEW STATE / Part I THE GROUP PRINCIPLE / XIV THE GROUP PRINCIPLE AT WORK; paragraph beginning “The fundamental weakness of collective bargaining is that while it provides machinery for…”
   Mary Parker Follett · Longmans, Green & Co., 1918; Project Gutenberg #73755.

   Follett argues for workers’ participation in industrial control, beyond bargaining over grievances. Her proposed integration asks whose interests and standards shape an arrangement. The rental supplier can include the customer’s constraints in judging terms without adopting her entire political program.

5. No man would be tormented for the benefit of another—nay, no one man would be tormented for the benefit of Society. Nor, indeed, can that order be called Society which is not upheld for the benefit of every one of its members.

   William Morris · Signs of Change
   SIGNS OF CHANGE / p. 141USEFUL WORK VERSUS USELESS TOIL.; paragraph beginning “Thus, at last, would true Society be founded. It would rest on equality of condition. No m…”
   William Morris · Longmans, Green & Co., London, New York and Bombay, 1896; Project Gutenberg #3053 transcriber identifies this edition.

   Morris describes the society he hopes would follow the abolition of class exploitation. His test is whether its members benefit without being sacrificed to others or to an abstraction called Society. Here it challenges an agreement that serves the supplier by imposing avoidable hardship on a customer; it is a moral aspiration, not a pricing formula.

6. As for the ethical side, there is no cure but in an increasing scorn of unfair play—an increasing sense that a thing won by breaking the rules of the game is not worth the winning.

   Ida M. Tarbell · The History of the Standard Oil Company
   Volume II; CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CONCLUSION; paragraph beginning “As for the ethical side, there is no cure but in an increasing scorn of unfair play—an inc…”
   Ida M. Tarbell · Volume II, McClure, Phillips & Co., New York, MCMV (1905), second impression; copyright 1904; Project Gutenberg #60692.

   Tarbell judges the means of winning alongside the result. The supplier’s stronger bargaining position cannot itself justify terms that exploit another person’s constrained alternatives.

7. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

   Adam Smith · The Wealth of Nations
   Book I; CHAPTER VIII. OF THE WAGES OF LABOUR.; paragraph beginning “It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary…”
   Adam Smith · Project Gutenberg #3300 transcription; underlying print edition not specified in preserved capture.

   Smith distinguishes mutual usefulness from unequal power to wait. This directly illuminates employment terms and the rental customer’s urgency. His preceding account concerns eighteenth-century bargaining conditions; the page applies the distinction without treating those laws as current.

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