Fairness

What Fairness means in leadership

At a planning meeting, your favorite presenter describes a display that will rotate majestically. A quieter colleague has put a small sketch beside the model: the rotating edge would cover the information panel. You return to the sketch and ask them to explain it before the proposal is chosen. The revolving masterpiece pauses. For once, its audience can read what it is for.

The quieter contribution deserves attention because it bears on the choice, not because quiet people are automatically right. You make its content available to the group and compare both proposals by the same purpose. An impartial hearing can still lead to a clear decision.

Fairness gives…

More of the relevant information reaches the decision when familiarity and performance stop doing the work of evidence. People can also see which reason mattered, instead of guessing which relationship settled the question.

Finding the balance

Give reasons a real chance to affect the choice, then make the judgment the shared purpose requires.

In ordinary life

A written contribution

Read a submitted observation before assuming its author had nothing to add.

The same question

Ask a favorite proposal the difficult question you would ask an unfamiliar one.

Nearby virtues, different work

Justice

Justice asks what people are due. Fairness concerns impartial consideration in deciding how to meet those claims.

Open-Mindedness

Open-Mindedness gives an unfamiliar idea a hearing; Fairness keeps liking for its author from determining that hearing.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Token consultation is a counterfeit of Fairness when you invite the quiet person only after the decision is fixed. A hearing needs a real opportunity for relevant reasons to matter.

How to cultivate Fairness

• Make room for contributions in more than one form.
• State the criteria while competing proposals can still be considered.
• Explain the reason for the choice without ranking the contributors’ worth.

Try it today

In a routine shared choice, look for one relevant contribution you may have overlooked. Give it the same consideration as the contribution you first preferred.

Questions worth returning to

• Which contribution received less attention than its content deserved?
• Would I use this standard for a different speaker?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. A prejudice is a fond obstinate persuasion, for which we can give no reason; for the moment a reason can be given for an opinion, it ceases to be a prejudice, though it may be an error in judgment: and are we then advised to cherish opinions only to set reason at defiance?

   Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
   CHAPTER 5.; SECTION 5.5.; section I

   Wollstonecraft asks whether an opinion can offer a reason beyond attachment to it. Familiarity with a speaker does not supply that reason.

2. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION.

   Mill asks for the strongest reasons on both sides. The quiet objection deserves examination before the favored design is selected.

3. Few men therefore are willing to allow that custom or fashion have much influence upon their judgments concerning what is beautiful, or otherwise, in the productions of any of those arts; but imagine, that all the rules, which they think ought to be observed in each of them, are founded upon reason and nature, not upon habit or prejudice.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   PART V. Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation.; CHAP. I. Of the influence of custom and fashion upon our notions of beauty and deformity.

   Smith observes how readily custom presents itself as reason in judgments of design. The leader can ask which requirement actually supports the preference.

4. All parts of an experience are equally present, but they are very far from being of equal value as signs or as evidences.

   John Dewey, How We Think
   CHAPTER EIGHT; JUDGMENT: THE INTERPRETATION OF FACTS

   Dewey distinguishes equal presence from equal evidential weight. Fair hearing allows a relevant detail to matter more than an impressive presentation.

5. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education

   Dewey asks education to make opportunity substantive rather than merely nominal. An invitation to contribute needs conditions in which the contribution can be understood.

6. The group process shows us that we are equal from two points of view: first, I am equal to every one else as one of the necessary members of the group; secondly, each of these essential parts is the tap from an infinite supply—in every man lives an infinite possibility.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Part II THE TRADITIONAL DEMOCRACY; XVI DEMOCRACY NOT “LIBERTY” AND “EQUALITY”: OUR POLITICAL DUALISM

   Follett grounds participation in each member’s contribution to the group. The quiet contributor belongs in the inquiry before their proposal has won.

7. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION.

   Mill exposes a circular claim to certainty when the other side cannot speak. A decision should survive the hearing it permits.

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