Imagine that society was starting from scratch, and you didn’t know where you would end up in terms of rank or status. Your race, social location, and any of the markers that distinguish people in terms of more or less were completely hidden from you.

Under such conditions of ignorance, your basic desire for society would be that it be regulated fairly. That way, wherever you ended up, you would be guaranteed a fair shot at sharing in the society’s resources and achieving your social possibilities.

Justice, in other words, would essentially be fairness. A just society would be a fair society.

The foregoing is a large simplification, but it basically describes how the noted political philosopher John Rawls developed his theory of justice as fairness. The foundation is a hypothetical description of “the state of nature.” People are all initially behind “a veil of ignorance,” as I have more or less described it, and they must settle on appropriate principles of justice.

Rawls goes on to elaborate two such principles, which in his view define the foundation of any just social order.

The principles have been the subject of much criticism and review and I am not going to do more of that here. What I want to do instead, given the Rawls’ dominance today in discussions of justice, is to reconfigure traditional understandings of justice in terms of fairness, to give them a fresh look and a fresh appeal.

The most fundamental principle of justice, widely accepted since Aristotle defined it, has been the principle that “equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.” This is sometimes put in the form: “Equals should be treated the same, unless they differ in ways relevant to the situation in which they are involved.”

In my terms it would be: “It is unfair to treat individuals unequally, unless there are relevant reasons for different treatment.” Thus, if Michael and Jane do the same work, and there are no relevant differences either between them or in the work they do, it’s unfair to pay them unequal wages. If Michael is paid more, simply because he is a man, or because he is white, then this is unfairness, and a form of discrimination, because race and sex are not relevant to normal work situations.

On the other hand, there are differences we consider justifiable for treating people differently.

It’s not unfair, for example, for parents to give their own children more attention and care, even where no relevant distinctions exist between the latter and the children of other people. It’s not unfair that those who are first in line be given first pick in the choice of tickets for the theatre.

It’s not unfair for the government to give special benefits to the needy that it does not give to more affluent citizens. It’s not unfair that those who exert more effort or make a greater contribution to a project should receive greater benefit from it.

Other differences, however, do not constitute justifiable grounds for different treatment. People, for instance, in the world of work should not be given special treatment on the basis of sex, race, family, or religious affiliation.

If the judge’s nephew, for instance, receives a suspended sentence for armed robbery, when another offender, no relative of the judge, goes to jail for the same crime, we consider it fundamentally unfair.

If a friend of the Minister of Works gets the million-dollar contract for installing sprinklers on a golf course, in spite of lower bids from other parties, who are no friends of the minister, the same applies. Unfairness is injustice.

The traditional forms of justice, viz, distributive, retributive or corrective, and compensatory, show their import and range clearly when construed in terms of fairness. Distributive justice refers to the extent to which society’s institutions ensure that benefits and burdens are fairly distributed among the populace.

If unequal distribution is felt to prevail, with criteria such as status or social standing meaning the difference between a benefit and a burden, it doesn’t matter how eloquently the society describes itself, such a situation is a situation of unfairness.

Retributive justice refers to the extent to which punishments are fair. Relevant criteria here are the seriousness of the crime and the intent of the criminal.

Irrelevant criteria are features such as wealth and race, which should be discounted. Unfortunately, many believe that wealth has a disproportionate influence in impeding the course of justice, or in obstructing its administration altogether.

Studies elsewhere, in the US, for instance, have shown that race has much the same significance. Capital punishment is more common when blacks murder whites, than when whites murder blacks, or when blacks murder blacks.

This all means that unfairness is often synonymous with the administration of justice. The symbolic figure of justice, on the other hand, with scales in hand and blindfolded, is quintessentially a symbol of justice as fairness.

Compensatory justice refers to the extent to which people are fairly compensated for their injuries by those who have injured them. Just compensation means fair compensation, considering the nature of the injury and the extent of the negligence.

I am amazed that one never hears of large compensations for some of the injuries ordinary people suffer in our hospitals. I am also amazed that many people regard such injuries as a matter of fate.

Life is unfair, John Kennedy once famously said, but that’s often because unfairness has no advocate.

Rawls traced justice as fairness to his “original position” (created by the “veil of ignorance”), but it is equally possible to see it in terms of our equal dignity and interdependence.

A society is stable to the extent that its members feel that fairness is the operational rule, not the exception. When unfairness has the upper hand, the foundations are laid for different forms of unrest and strife.

Fairness is the expression of our mutual recognition of one another’s basic worth. It is also an acknowledgement that if we are to live together in an interdependent community, we must learn to live with and treat one another as equals.