Quotes About Fairness

Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.

These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don't even have cable?

He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn't want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.

Americans, whose self-image is so tied up with fairness, wind up making themselves suckers for the concept.

Justice is a mighty fine thing.

Justice is less easily applied to the strong than to the defenseless.

law of retaliation, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is "interwoven with injustice," since, as Ptolemy points out, "the one who is second to act unjustly still acts unjustly, differing only in the relative order in which he acts, and committing the very same act

There's really no just about it, is there?

Integrity in an interdependent reality is simply this: you treat everyone by the same set of principles.

referring, for example, to the principle of fairness, out of which our whole concept of equity and justice is developed. Little children seem to have an innate

If you use the law to judge others, go ahead, but don't assume that your judgment mimics the judgement of God.

The best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.

The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.

No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.

Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.

The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This

one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.

If my starting offer is "I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don't get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind," I can't expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there's no good reason that I should get privileges just because I'm me and you're not.

The only way [people] can end up equal is if they are treated unequally.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.

From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough."6

For one thing, empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness. Batson found that when people empathized with Sheri, a ten-year-old girl with a serious illness, they also opted for her to jump a queue for medical treatment ahead of other children who had waited longer or needed it more. Empathy would have consigned these children to death and suffering because they were nameless and faceless.

The law may be an ass, but it is a disinterested ass, and it can weigh harms without the self-serving distortions of the perpetrator or the victim.

The fickle effects of inequality on well-being bring up another common confusion in these discussions: the conflation of inequality with unfairness