Fairness vs. Justice

Our society holds two warring ideals of justice and fairness. And there is a difference between them.

In trying to be fair people have an urge to level everything out, to give everyone the same thing.

In justice, there is reference to a Right whose reality and authority transcend even humanity, and people who are charged with administering it try to give everyone what he or she deserves.

Our society's switch from justice to fairness is part of forsaking the love of good for good's own sake. Most people now seem to measure good and evil crudely in terms of pain or loss that we can immediately feel. If a human being or other creature suffers in an action it is bad; if not it might as well be good. Thus executing a murderer is wrong for it involves his pain and death; abortion, if painless for the fetus, might well be good if it saves the mother pain and sorrow. This kind of thinking begins to make sense if one is without an external measure of right and wrong.

Following this rule, justice becomes repugnant when it entails giving someone the deserts of their own evil actions. The only evil most people can see at a murder trial is the possibility that someone else (the alleged murderer) could die or suffer. We may feel retroactive pity for the victim but we feel rather that the victim was misfortunate, rather than that Moral Law was mightily transgressed. The demands of justice seem so ephemeral that we feel they can be waived for the sake of the solid human being in front of us.

Eventually, justice revolts us even when it involves handing out good things to those who earn or own them. It does not matter to a fair-minded person whether or not someone has a good right to his own money. If others have less, then it is unfair and therefore wrong for him to keep it all.

Meanwhile, someone who believes in justice may also be able to see the beauty in the virtue of mercy. It is very good for someone with a lot of money to give to those who have less. The problem is when those who have less are too selfish to take the rich man's money with gratitude and would rather take it as if they had a right to it. This is where fairness comes in and creates the welfare state. Robbing the rich is not right unless the money of the rich was robbed from the poor in the first place, so let's not talk about Robin Hood.

Here I must reference the ideas of Karl Marx, who tries to make out that no one gets rich at all unless they do rob the poor. However, while it's true that it's unjust (therefore possibly robbery) to pay someone less than their work is worth to you, Marx's thinking is circular; it turns out that the robbing he alleges is defined by the very idea of fairness that it would seek to promote. It is not robbing your employee to give him what his personal effort is worth rather than what he would like to have in order to live like you do.

In preferring fairness to justice we fail to consider that the most brilliant of philosophers and theologians have seen something enduring in the nature of goodness, something that makes it more constant in character than our ever more confused homage to it suggests. Actually it is human life that is ephemeral; the fact that our fingertips cannot close on the fabric of Justice and feel sensorilly its dimmensions and its substance speaks more about the nature of our fingertips than about the nature of Justice.

To return to our murder trial, let us say that fairness, not justice, is considered. If it turns out the victim was rich and the murderer poor, the fair-minded individual wants to reduce the sentence. If the murder was abused as a child, he takes off another ten years. Bad neighborhood, mom died young - take off a few more. The victim started out by being up on the murderer; the murder over-corrected. To return his action in full would only be to introduce a new inequality. Ten years in prison should even things out between Mr. Disadvantaged Murderer and Mr. Priveleged Victim.

But what will even things out between Mr. Murderer and Justice? I do not speak of divine justice - the wrong done God, God must punish. But in human justice, to punish the wrong done the victim requires equality not between the murderer and the victim, but between the what the murderer did and what is in turn done to him.

Let us be clear on what we mean. If a man killed another man by shooting him five times in the chest, perfect human justice would be for the murderer to be shot five times in the chest at the same range. To whine about the discomfort of a lethal injection needle (however unproffessional it may be for the executioners to struggle finding a vein) is to miss the larger picture. He's getting off easily.

I am not advocating this kind of justice system. The effect on the executioner of having to reproduce every murder would be horrific. I am simply saying that we could be far more strict in our application of justice without fear of inequality.

Rapists could be publicly lashed and theives could be made to repay with interest. Murderers could be killed, all without fear of going too far.

They are the morally blind who cannot see the difference between good and evil unless it is played out in blood and screams before their eyes; they should be excluded from public responsibility.