To be fair we have to be impartial or we have to follow the rules or our judgement has to be legitimate. These all tell us the ways to get to a fair choice or decision, but they don’t tell us about the characteristic of fairness itself. We recognize when something is fair, and we come to these conclusions quickly and consistently, and typically it takes important new information to change our minds. So we can recognize fairness, and we have a pretty good idea about how to get there. But I suspect that it’s just because fairness is such a basic and instinctual idea that we have trouble describing what qualities it has.

There’s three qualities to fairness that seem important:

It’s needs a comparison. For something to be fair there must be two (or more) sides and those two sides have to be roughly equal, or at least as equal as we can possibly asses. Something can’t be inherently fair or be fair in a vacuum.

The comparison involves people. Often it’s us and someone else, but it could be two other people or groups. But we don’t ask if the river was fair to the rock or if the stars are fair to the sky, or at least we don’t without first personifying them.

There has to be some positive to it. I can’t think of any example where two negatives, just by themselves, would be considered fair. If I’m mean to someone and then I stub my toe, that doesn’t seem fair, even if the two harms were judged to be exactly equal. For something to be fair it seems like both sides need to have some good or some benefit, maybe there’s negatives that are partially offsetting, but the end result has to achieve some good.

The last characteristic might be the most difficult, and I could see situations where it might be marginal. For example, what about someone being punished for a crime? A punishment by itself isn’t a benefit to anyone, but I don’t think we actually ever describe just a punishment as being fair. Instead we describe the entire process as fair, the punishment is negative, but the process achieves a net benefit. And this is related to the first characteristic, that fairness can’t happen in a vacuum. If we’re saying something bad happening to someone is fair, I think we’re making a judgement about the choices and system and society that caused that result as well. It’s a difficult concept to precisely articulate, but I like the idea of describing it as being “balanced” because that implies that there’s positives to both sides. We don’t typically use scales to measure negative weights.

Fair: when a comparison involving empathy is equally balanced

This definition captures the idea that we’re comparing feelings, that are based at least partially on some other person’s view of the world, and that we’re looking for an equal amount of something on both sides (as opposed to an equal negative or lack of somethings).