Jonathan Haidt on Fairness

(Community Matters)  Jonathan Haidt on Fairness in Time Ideas (he’s the author of The Righteous Mind & writes about moral clarity)

There are three major kinds of fairness, and we find that liberals and conservatives value them to different degrees.

Proportionality, which means that people are getting benefits in proportion to their contributions

Equality — everyone gets the same.

Procedural fairness– which means that honest, open and impartial rules are used to determine who gets what. It’s not that conservatives don’t value procedural fairness. They surely do want everyone to play by open and impartial rules in their workplaces, or when they go to court. It’s rather that they trust corporate America more than the federal government, and they are suspicious of all government efforts to “level the playing field,” which they see as a covert way to achieve “social justice.” Conservatives reject social justice as a liberal code word for enforcing equality of outcomes despite inequality of inputs.