suliqyre:

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.

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