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 Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Fairness and Justice
I was asked to facillitate a meeting earlier today with a group of community helpers.  The purpose of the meeting was to establish criteria and policy for the distribution of emergency assistance (money) to "needy" individuals.  The meeting went on and on as there was much discussion about "fairness".  How much do we give each person who asks for help? What is a fair amount?  What about those who do not ask for help - should money be given to them to make things "fair"?

There was little opportunity to speak so I am offering my reflective thought in this space.  There is no fairness in assistance to those in need.  And, we should not hope for fairnes but work for justice.  As social work students at Lourdes College well know, I am a huge fan of John Rawls and his ideas of justice.

Rawls wrote The Theory of Justice that includes the idea of "original position" -- a hypothetical situation in which people of roughly equal ability decide to agree on principles of social cooperation, without knowing how anybody is placed in society. That position  provides a model of a deeply held  collective and moral norm. As Rawls puts it in the famous last sentence of the book, "Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view."

Rawls' model of "purity of heart" has two parts. First is the description of people in the hypothetical situation of choosing principles for living together. They are imagined as rational, self-interested individuals who aim to do as well for themselves as they can, who are roughly equal in capacity (no one can easily dominate all the others), and who have needs that can be met more effectively by cooperation than by noncooperation.Then the second part of Rawls' model comes in: the "veil of ignorance," which ensures that the parties do not know where they will be placed in the resulting society.  It is the ignorance that supplies "purity of heart," in the form of a morally decent impartiality toward the well-being of others. Rawls' idea is that, where social justice is in question, people should always try to choose without being biased in the direction of their own special interests.

Maybe I will get a chance to share Rawls' ideas with the community group but only if the group can agree that it is OKo be unfair.



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Wednesday, August 08, 2007 8:33:49 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)  #  Comments [0] | 
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