372. Justice As Fairness

Fairness is our most basic principle of justice. When someone does wrong, we feel they ought to receive a punishment in return, just as when they do good, they ought to receive a reward. Our formal systems of justice are built on this ideal of reciprocity. If someone does something that harms us, we seek justice through a process that is supposed to hold the wrongdoer to account and provide us with a remedy.

But we also encounter situations where fairness is profoundly lacking. How, for example, can we ensure fairness between a person born into abject poverty and one born into the opulence of incredible wealth? We might try to introduce laws and programs to reconcile these realities with our idea of fairness, but such efforts are typically too small and limited relative to the scale of the injustice.

The simple fact is that we are forced to live with a degree of injustice as long as the systems that produce and maintain injustices continue to exist. Our lives will not be fair, despite our belief that they should be. This discrepancy can easily cause us to resent those who are better off than we are.

But resentment does more harm than good. It causes us to manipulate our actions to enhance our personal material standing rather than allowing ourselves to act from compassion. We become obsessed with seeking an eye for an eye when wrongs are done to us instead of doing what we must to make ourselves and our world better. All of this only multiplies our suffering and the suffering of the people around us.

In the end, justice cannot be achieved through crude fairness. The path to a more just world is a much longer one. This is the path of compassion, the path of seeing need and the necessity of meeting it. When we accept that our lot might be worse than that of others, we begin to free ourselves from our attachment to reciprocity, which in turn allows us to more readily act from compassion to create a more just world for ourselves and future generations.