Fairness as a Core Value: When Fairness Feels "Unfair"
- Greg Mullen
- May 1
- 10 min read
We all believe in fairness.
But do we mean the same thing when we talk about Fairness as a Core Value?
For some people, fairness means treating everyone exactly the same — no special treatment, no exceptions. For others, fairness is about making sure people who need extra help actually get extra help, so everyone has a fair shot.
And there's often a lot of overlap between these kinds of ideas about fairness. That's where we find ourselves at odds because we don't have a clear understanding of factors that make up this idea of fairness as a Core Value. The truth is, fairness is multi-dimensional and shaped by the way we think about effort, need, and reward.
In this article, I define two main dimensions of fairness and show how they combine into four basic ways people think about what’s “fair.” I also explore why people tend to lean toward certain instincts about fairness and how we can balance these instincts to build systems that lift up both individuals and the whole group in the name of Fairness.
The Two Dimensions of Fairness
Fairness can feel like a fuzzy, emotional topic — but when you break it down, you realize it actually rests on two key dimensions.
Dimension 1: Earning as a Minimum
This first dimension asks: What’s the starting point?
Uniform Distribution (Sameness): Everyone gets the same; same resources, same rules, same treatment. For example, every student gets the same number of books, regardless of need or background.
Needs-Based Distribution (Equity): People get what they need to reach similar outcomes, even if it means giving some folks more help than others. For example, struggling readers get extra tutoring so they can catch up with their peers.
Dimension 2: Excess as a Maximum
This dimension asks: What do we do with the extra?
Shared Excess (Reciprocity): Any surplus or bonus gets shared across the group to strengthen the whole community. For example, extra school funds are used to upgrade common spaces or buy supplies for all classrooms.
Owed Excess (Compensation): Extra goes to those who’ve worked the hardest or achieved the most — those who’ve “earned” it. For example, top-performing teachers get end-of-year bonuses or special recognition awards.
Summary of the Four Fairness Combinations
Here’s a quick cheat sheet showing how these dimensions combine:
Excess as Maximum → Earning as Minimum ↓ | Shared Excess (Reciprocity) | Owed Excess (Compensation) |
Uniform Distribution (Sameness) | Equal basics + group-sharing of extras | Equal basics + extra rewards for top achievers |
Needs-Based Distribution (Equity) | Extra help for the struggling + group-sharing | Extra help for the struggling + rewards for top achievers |
These four combinations reflect deep beliefs about fairness, justice, reward, and community.
But here’s the twist: Many people — sometimes without realizing it — end up backing uniform distribution + owed excess, even when that combo works against their own best interests, especially in societies with big inequalities like ours.
Why?
On the surface, this combination aligns with certain virtues, i.e. hard work, discipline, and personal responsibility. It promises a world where everyone starts with the same base opportunities and where those who push hardest rise to the top and collect the surplus.It sounds fair. It sounds motivating.
While this narrow perspective may feel fair and motivating within a specific frame, it often struggles to adapt across different contexts and situations resulting in frustration and judgement towards others for what is likely due to larger systemic issues. A wider understanding of fairness, one that recognizes how all four combinations serve different purposes in different contexts, offers the flexibility to navigate complex realities and design systems that better serve both individuals and the communities that directly and indirectly benefit them.
The key isn’t to "pick" one fairness style forever; it’s to become aware of your patterns and stay open to adjusting when a situation calls for it.
Fairness Is a Spectrum — Not a Set of Boxes
Even though it’s helpful to name the four fairness types — uniform distribution, needs-based distribution, shared excess, and owed excess — real life doesn’t fit neatly into those boxes.
Most of us, and most schools or workplaces, operate somewhere along a continuum, blending different fairness instincts depending on the situation, the people involved, and what’s at stake.
Consider these education-specific examples:
A school might use needs-based funding to support struggling students but still reserve top honors and leadership roles for high achievers — blending equity with earned reward.
A teacher might hold the whole class to the same behavior expectations but push for accommodations or extra resources for students with learning challenges — mixing sameness with need sensitivity.
A policymaker might advocate for shared funding across schools to strengthen under-resourced areas but also set up competitive grants to reward innovation — blending shared and owed excess.
Reflection Questions for You
Take a moment to reflect on your own instincts:
When resources are limited, do you lean more toward sharing what’s left or rewarding those who performed best?
When you think about who “deserves” extra, is that based more on past effort or current need?
Does your sense of fairness change depending on the context — like at work vs. at home, or among close friends vs. strangers?
The way you define “earned” is almost always shaped by context — not just who worked hard, but who faced barriers, who had advantages, and what the situation demands.
The key isn’t to "pick" one fairness style forever; it’s to become aware of your patterns and stay open to adjusting when a situation calls for it.
The Moral Tension: Who Deserves Extra?
Here’s where things get tricky. There’s a deep, real moral tension around the question:
Who actually deserves extra when there isn’t enough for everyone?
To answer that, it helps to recognize which fairness instincts you tend to lean on — because your alignment shapes how you respond to fairness questions in everyday life.
Some of us naturally lean toward the belief that only proven contributors deserve extra — the top performers, the hardest workers, the most disciplined team players. From this perspective, it’s not where someone started and grown despite obstacles that matters; it’s the measurable output resulting from what they’ve done according to a strict rubric for equality to share in the excess. Rewarding based on need, they argue, risks encouraging dependency or undervaluing the hard work of those who achieved "more".
Others lean toward the belief that current need and context matter just as much, if not more. They argue that ignoring barriers like lack of opportunity, family hardship, discrimination, or past trauma erases the invisible forces that shape who even has the chance to succeed at higher levels demonstrated when those forces are not present. From this view, fairness is about more than just outcomes; it’s about working to level the playing field and celebrating the efforts of all who have contributed, regardless of capacity.
Why Should You Care Where You Align?
Knowing which instinct you lean on most can make a huge difference in:
How you lead — Do you emphasize rewards and accountability, or support and equity?
How you communicate — Do you assume others share your fairness perspective, or can you listen for the values behind their views?
How you make decisions — Are you balancing personal achievement with collective uplift, or favoring one at the expense of the other?
This self-awareness doesn’t lock you into one approach — it helps you stretch beyond your defaults, engage in more thoughtful conversations, and design fairness practices that truly fit the real-world complexities we all live in.
Why This Tension Is So Difficult (Generally)
This is NOT a simple right vs. wrong debate. Both sides reflect real moral instincts.
One emphasizes rewarding resilience and individual effort — no matter where someone began.The other emphasizes addressing structural disadvantages and honoring unseen struggles — so success isn’t only accessible to the already advantaged.
The challenge is that fairness often gets judged across different timelines:
Are we rewarding what people did in the past to earn their current position?
Or are we responding to what people need right now to survive, grow, or catch up?
The "Deeper Tension" of Fairness as a Core Value
Some will argue — with strong conviction — that no matter how different someone’s starting line, the “extra” should still go only to those who have already reached the top.
In this view, life’s complexity doesn’t weaken the case for rewarding success — it strengthens it. Why? Because this perspective holds that even those who start behind must prove themselves through grit, resilience, and disciplined effort before they deserve to share in surplus or rewards. Anything else, they argue, risks creating dependency, eroding personal responsibility, or cheapening the value of hard-won achievement.
From this lens, fairness is earned by surpassing challenges and not by simply facing them. A colleague who started with disadvantages but hasn’t yet “closed the gap” hasn’t earned extra; they may deserve support, but surplus and reward still go to the proven contributors.
This powerful moral stance overlaps with other Core Values such as Responsibility and Integrity that, when viewed with similar underlying beliefs, can outweigh arguments of context or circumstance. This stance insists that surplus exists to motivate excellence, not to patch over inequality and that Fairness as a Core Value is about holding everyone to the same finish line, assuming everyone started at the same starting line.
Understanding this tension helps us move past surface arguments and dig into the deeper moral roots driving each perspective — and it opens the door to creating systems that respect both sides without reducing the conversation to winners vs. losers.
Why a Middle-Ground Fairness Solution Sounds Great — But Stumbles in Practice
At first glance, the middle-ground solution seems like a win for everyone:
Provide extra supports to help people who start behind.
Keep the finish line steady, so rewards go only to those who actually meet the predetermined achievement bar.
Use rubrics to fairly adjust for gaps without lowering excellence.
Simple, right?
But here’s why this is much harder to pull off in real life...
It’s Hard to Accurately Measure Starting Lines
People’s barriers and advantages — emotional, social, financial — are complex and often invisible. Two people may look similar on paper but carry very different hidden burdens. No system can perfectly capture or weigh all that nuance.
Supports and Rewards Are Deeply Intertwined
The supports we give (i.e. tutoring, coaching, access) often create the conditions for achievement. If you withhold rewards until someone reaches the finish line but provide only minimal support, you risk trapping people in permanent disadvantage.
Trust and Perceptions Shape Outcomes
Even a technically fair system will fail if people don’t trust it. High achievers may feel resentful, seeing support as unfair boosts. Struggling individuals may feel hopeless, believing they’ll never be seen as equals. Without broad social trust, fairness on paper doesn’t translate to fairness in practice.
Rigid Finish-Line Standards Can Hide Ongoing Inequities
Holding everyone to the same finish line assumes that once supports are added, everyone’s truly on equal ground. But real life isn’t that clean. Lingering effects of discrimination, chronic hardship, or generational disadvantage can still hold people back, even after extra help.
The Hard Truth
While a middle-ground approach sounds appealing, it runs into the messy realities of human systems, perceptions, and moral values. That’s why fairness debates persist: because no system (however well-designed) perfectly balances reward and support without very real and very difficult tradeoffs for who gets what they think they "deserve".
The real challenge isn’t to find the perfect formula; it’s to build living systems that stay responsive, humble, and willing to keep adapting over time.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
The challenge isn’t about proving one side right and the other wrong — it’s about recognizing that both perspectives grow from legitimate moral roots, but they lead to very different systems of fairness.
One emphasizes uplifting the struggling to ensure everyone can stand on even ground. The other emphasizes honoring those who rise to the top, regardless of where they began.
The real work — for schools, workplaces, and communities — is not picking one at the expense of the other, but learning when, where, and how to balance the two in ways that build both individual excellence and collective strength.
Bringing the Perspectives Together
The most powerful fairness model is one that blends perspectives and recognizes that effort and achievement matter and should be rewarded, and that individual circumstances and challenges deserve support and attention.
For example, in a school setting, if we hold all teachers to the exact same standards across grade levels and ignore differences in their experience, training, and strengths, we risk overlooking the unique contributions and struggles each one brings to achieve the same outcomes.
This doesn’t mean lowering standards or ignoring achievement. It means designing systems so Fairness is understood to support both individual growth and collective success.
It also asks individuals inside those systems to embrace a broader, more mature understanding of fairness, one that values both personal achievement and shared responsibility. After all, true success isn’t measured just by who rises to the top, but by how many people we lift along the way.
When we blend these fairness views, we create practices that don’t punish the successful or abandon the struggling; instead, they build systems where everyone has a chance to be part of the collective success and share in the excess that comes from their collective effort.
The Bigger Lesson: Building Fairness for a Pluralistic Society
Fairness that’s built on need and reciprocity isn’t the easy path — in fact, it’s often the harder one. It takes honest conversations, moral courage, thoughtful design, and a willingness to face tough emotional and political pushback, both in yourself and from others.
Here’s the deeper truth: while fairness models focused on sameness (uniform distribution) or pure compensation (owed excess) may look simple and efficient, they quietly erode the very fabric of a functionally diverse, pluralistic society.
When we treat everyone the same despite real differences, we ignore the lived realities of those facing hidden or structural barriers — and we shrug off the shared responsibility to help lift each other up.When we reward only the top achievers, we overlook the interconnected web of contributions that made their success possible in the first place, devaluing the teamwork, support, and unseen efforts that hold communities together.
A thriving, pluralistic society — and schools, as its microcosm — honors both individual uniqueness and shared responsibility. Fairness models that embrace needs-based distribution and shared excess reflect a key truth: we are not all the same, and none of us succeeds entirely on our own.
And here’s where we confront a cultural paradox:
"With great power comes great responsibility”
This quote from the Spider-Man comics is often held up as a moral ideal. But fairness models rooted in equal minimums and owed excess tend to invert this wisdom: they allow those with great power, advantage, or success to claim even more, while offloading the burdens of inequity onto those with the least.
True fairness isn’t just about rewarding achievement — it’s about recognizing the responsibility that comes with privilege, opportunity, and surplus. Those who have worked hard have a responsibility to encourage others and not punish them. It’s not just a nice ethical stance; it’s a long-term investment in the strength, resilience, and unity of society as a whole. If we want a future where excellence thrives and communities stay strong, we can’t only look at who crosses the finish line first; we must also look at how they helped people get to the starting line, and how we share the responsibility of lifting others once we rise.
Greg Mullen
May 1, 2025
