On fairness vs justice

Fairness is treating everyone equally.

Justice is treating people as they deserve to be treated.

Fairness is poor man’s justice.  Fairness is Kahnemann’s Type I thinking personified. Fairness is lazy.

This illustration will serve.  Consider the idea that there be no exceptions to any given rule.  In an effort to be truly fair, to be truly just, it needs to be applied consistently, in every case.  Zero tolerance for violations.

What then do you make of the following?  

A Florida school district, following a popular trend in American education and in response to persistent media-driven hysteria, adopts a “zero tolerance” policy for weapons.  Of any kind.  This means that local hunters can no longer have shotguns or rifles in their window racks when they drive to school.  It means pocket knives are cause for immediate suspension.

The justification for this policy is that student safety is paramount.

And of course, no one will argue that student safety is in fact an important thing to safeguard.

But what then do you make of this case: A middle school girl in this district, an honors student with NO history of disciplinary issues, took a plastic knife to cut a peach to then share with her friend.

A lunch aide sees this, takes her to the principal, who promptly suspends her 6 days for violating the weapons policy.  The school district upheld this decision and turned the case over to local police.

Now there is the basic fairness notion in place here, and it suggests that both the policy and its enforcement are entirely fair.  Bring a weapon to school (and a knife is a weapon), you suffer the consequences.  Zero tolerance is synonymous with no exceptions.  They have suspended others for weapons.  She brought (and displayed) a weapon, so she gets suspended.  QED.  That is treating everyone the same way.  [None of this addresses the issue of the proper definition of a weapon.  Guns are pretty straightforward.  Knives are probably understandable, till you consider tens-of-thousands of students who have brought pocket knives to school to use as tools or utensils, just as the student above did.  But one can suppose that they also can clearly be used as tools of injury (which is a weapon).  But, what of tools or utensils or implements that we view usually as non-weapons but can be wielded as such?  Say, pens and pencils.  They  are sharp.  And I vividly recall torturing an annoying student who sat in front of me by stabbing him in the back numerous times with my pen, sometimes so hard as to draw blood.  Isn’t that a weapon?  So now we need to outlaw pens and pencils?  But. . .this makes life real difficult.  So they keep it to guns and knives. . .but what about pepper spray for self-defense. . .but I digress.]

Most people with even partially functioning sensibilities will read this story and say, “Wait JUST a minute here.  This kid, an honor student, deserves suspension?  For this?  That’s crazy.”

And these people would be rightly irritated, because their sense of justice has been violated here.  Recall, justice is treating people as they deserve to be treated.

Another case can help illustrate this.  A student comes to his school’s dean with a $20 bill, saying they found it on the floor, it must belong to somebody, so perhaps he can find out who it belongs to?

Later in the day, a second student happens upon another $20 bill, and does the same as the first student.

Both are clearly conscientious, and the dean recognizes this.

Two weeks later, both students approach the dean, separately, and ask about the disposition of their respective $20 bills.

The first student is told, “Yeah, I was unable to find out who it belonged to.  Here, you keep it as a testament to your honesty.”

The second is told, “Yeah, I was unable to find out who it belonged to.   I donated it to the school’s Rice Bowl in your name, as a testament to your honesty.”

Now, has the dean treated these two students fairly?  Obviously not.  But has he treated them justly?  Lack of context suggests he has not.  Some actual context shows that he has.  The first student is one of the poorest in school.  The dean knows that his parents struggle to keep him in clothes, and often sees that he has no lunch.  The second student is from one of the richest families in the community.

Once provided context, most readers would say the dean did quite well here.  But is he in keeping with the spirit of fairness doctrine as promulgated by the Florida school district mentioned prior?  No.

And now having the competing cases before us, let us dive into the qualitative, and motivational, differences between the two cases.

Recall that fairness is also labeled as poor man’s justice.  More accurately, fairness is lazy man’s justice.

The great thing about fairness is it requires almost no thought.  Context is never an issue, and need not be an issue.  Treat everyone equally, and problem solved.

But as the second case illustrates, equal treatment is not always the just thing to do.  Discovering a little context can often be rather illuminating.

The sticking point comes about from the fact that understanding context takes time and energy.  The context in the case of the Florida middle schooler easily shows that suspension is an absurd overreaction.  But seeking and obtaining context requires taking the time and energy to ask the question “Why did you bring the knife to school and display it?” And, once the question is asked, one must process the response.  Which presents, for administrators, the two challenging problems of “making an exception,” and how do we measure those in the future and, still more troubling for those with a bureaucratic bent, “setting a precedent.”  If we let this kid off with a knife, who knows who else will come in with a knife?

No tolerance policies remove the necessity to obtain context.  This has the added bonus of making administrators’ lives easier.  No need to seek or obtain context.  Just prosecute the infraction.  Not to mention it both makes for an easily enforceable policy, one that is putatively “fair” and “treats everyone equally,” as well as allows for “sending the message” to the community that one is “tough on school violence.”  And troubling issues of future exceptions and precedents are avoided.

Reality however, is often much messier than policy intends.  Fairness is easy but, as we have seen, too often, it is also a very blunt instrument.  And in that bluntness, it is often unjust.

Justice however, takes time and energy.  One must get to know the party or the parties involved and have some level of understanding of their background, so that one can come to a nuanced conclusion to achieve actual justice.

It is at this point that the critical observer might state, “But how can one fully know one’s background, so that full justice can be achieved?”  The answer is, of course, never.  We have no ability to “look into another man’s soul” in the words of Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, and we likely never will.

But this does not abrogate within us the responsibility to at least try to obtain some level of understanding of that person’s background, in an attempt to be actually just, rather than lean on the convenient and easy crutch of “fairness” and “no tolerance.”