Fairness

What Fairness means in a networked world

A stranger’s sentence circulates beneath a caption calling them contemptuous of volunteers. The sentence is sharp; the caption supplies the verdict. You open the surrounding exchange and find that the stranger was quoting a policy they opposed. You correct your draft response. The quotation marks had stayed home while the accusation went sightseeing.

Fairness gives an unfamiliar person’s statement the context you would seek for someone you trusted. Read what they were responding to, distinguish quotation from endorsement and separate what the words establish from the caption’s interpretation. Context may change your judgment; it may also confirm the concern. The aim is a conclusion proportionate to the evidence, with relevant interests and differences given their due. A stranger does not have to become likable before their position deserves an accurate account.

Fairness gives…

A fair reading makes disagreement answerable. People can address what was actually said, correct a mistaken interpretation and judge a serious concern without first fighting a borrowed caricature.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

A familiar name

Compare your reading of a stranger’s suggestion with the patience you would give a friend proposing the same thing.

A troubling passage

If the full context confirms the problem, explain that problem accurately. A fair hearing does not require an acquittal.

Nearby virtues, different work

Discernment

Discernment evaluates the support for a claim. Fairness gives relevant evidence its due without making familiarity the admission ticket.

Benevolence

Benevolence wishes people well; Fairness asks what their words and circumstances actually warrant.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Automatic exoneration counterfeits Fairness when every damaging statement receives an invented innocent explanation. Fair judgment leaves room for both correction and justified criticism.

How to cultivate Fairness

• Separate the quoted words from the interpretation attached to them.
• Read enough of the exchange to identify its subject and speaker.
• Use a standard you would accept for a member of your own group.

Try it today

Before repeating a harsh interpretation of an unfamiliar person’s statement, read the accessible surrounding passage. If context is missing, leave your judgment open. This need not involve contacting the person or entering the dispute.

Questions worth returning to

• What did the speaker actually endorse?
• What would change my interpretation?

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. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   Chapter II, final paragraph, printed page 99

   Mill names grave faults in public discussion. Reading the surrounding exchange helps you avoid repeating a misrepresentation, even when the caption fits your first impression.

2. Does any one bathe hastily? Do not say, that he does it ill, but hastily. Does any one drink much wine? Do not say that he does ill, but that he drinks a great deal.

   Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus
   Enchiridion XLV; printed p. 395; scan leaf 419

   Describe what is observed before adding a verdict. A clipped action and the conclusion attached to it are different things.

3. The superior man does not promote a man simply on account of his words, nor does he put aside good words because of the man.

   Confucius, The Analects
   Book XV, chapter 22

   An unfamiliar or disliked speaker can still say something worth considering. Give the statement its due without making the person’s status decide its meaning.

4. As every meaning is set in the context of some situation, so every word in concrete use belongs to some sentence (it may itself represent a condensed sentence), and the sentence, in turn, belongs to some larger story, description, or reasoning process.

   John Dewey, How We Think
   Chapter XIII, language and thought

   Words belong to larger statements and situations. Restoring the surrounding exchange can change what an isolated sentence appears to assert.

5. Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   Part I, section I, chapter I

   Smith directs attention from a visible emotion to the situation behind it. A fair reading likewise asks what the person was responding to.

6. In Relations, the Force of the Expression lies very often more in the Look, the Tone of Voice, or the Gesture, than the Words themselves; which being repeated in any other Manner by the Undiscerning, bear a very different Interpretation from their original Meaning.

   The letter-writer in No. 521, in Richard Steele, The Spectator
   No. 521, Tuesday, October 28, 1712

   Words can arrive without the tone and gesture that gave them their meaning. A fair reading asks what changed when the statement was repeated.

7. He had misinterpreted the feelings which had kept her face averted, and her tongue motionless. They were combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern.

   Narrator of Emma, in Jane Austen, Emma
   Volume III, chapter VII, after Knightley’s rebuke

   A turned face and silence admit more than one interpretation. Austen lets the reader see the remorse that Knightley mistakes for something else.

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