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1 - Fairness

from Part I - The Substance of Reciprocal Concern

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2016

Christopher McMahon
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Summary

I have distinguished the morality of reciprocal concern from the morality of direct concern. I have suggested that the morality of reciprocal concern finds application when what is at issue is the organization of a mutually beneficial arrangement of some sort, and I have said that I will focus on mutually beneficial cooperation. Fairness, reasonableness in the concession sense, and justice are central concepts of the morality of reciprocal concern. In this chapter, I develop an account of the first of these concepts, fairness.

The concept of fairness has received less discussion in the philosophical literature than the concept of justice. John Broome has provided one interpretation. For Broome, fairness consists in the satisfaction of claims in proportion to their strength, where a claim is a particular kind of reason that a good should be distributed to a person. Broome's view has been criticized by Brad Hooker. Hooker begins his discussion by mentioning two other conceptions of fairness. Formal fairness requires that rules be applied impartially and equally to each agent. And “broad” substantive fairness requires that all applicable moral reasons be appropriately accommodated. Hooker takes Broome to have proposed a narrower substantive view.

The interpretation of the concept of fairness that I offer here is also narrow and substantive. We should be clear about what this means. Perhaps the most familiar approach to fairness in the contemporary literature ties the concept to arbitrariness. Thus in What We Owe to Each Other, T. M. Scanlon says that policies that arbitrarily favor one person over others are in that respect unfair. And Jonathan Wolff has examined the place of fairness, which he understands as “the demand that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by arbitrary factors,” in egalitarian theories of justice. We can speak here of fairness as nonarbitrariness (or unfairness as arbitrariness).

But when advantage and disadvantage are at issue, arbitrary factors are factors that lack a sound moral justification, and this can obscure an important point about our employment of the concept of fairness. Especially in political contexts, there are situations where it seems to make sense to say that moral considerations of other kinds trump fairness.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reasonableness and Fairness
A Historical Theory
, pp. 21 - 60
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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  • Fairness
  • Christopher McMahon, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Book: Reasonableness and Fairness
  • Online publication: 24 November 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316819340.002
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  • Fairness
  • Christopher McMahon, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Book: Reasonableness and Fairness
  • Online publication: 24 November 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316819340.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fairness
  • Christopher McMahon, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Book: Reasonableness and Fairness
  • Online publication: 24 November 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316819340.002
Available formats
×