Justice is not Fairness — Fairness is Symmetry

Liberal theories of justice, from Hobbes to Rawls, rest on a particular theory of value: the satisfaction of subjective preferences. On this view, a person's good is whatever they happen to prefer, and justice consists in fairly distributing the means to satisfy those preferences. This paper argues that the preference‑satisfaction model is both empirically and philosophically inadequate. Human beings are not preference machines; they are meaning‑makers. Flourishing is not the satisfaction of arbitrary preferences, but the integrated exercise of cognitive, moral, and agentive capacities to sustain a meaningful life. The paper further argues that Rawls was mistaken to identify justice with fairness, and mistaken to suppose that his two principles fully articulate the concept of fairness. Properly understood, fairness is a necessary condition of justice, and fairness consists in symmetry—the alignment of benefits and burdens with causal responsibility. Rawls's "fairness" is a vague mixture of the indeterminate "maximum co‑possible liberty" principle and an intuitive belief that society should make the worst off as well off as possible. But without a concept of flourishing, "as good as it can be" is empty. Justice in a complex society of strangers—a commonwealth—requires more than fairness alone. A just commonwealth enables all citizens to flourish by providing the institutional and material conditions necessary for the development and exercise of distinctly human capacities for meaning‑making, care, and informed agency. Fairness as symmetry is one of four institutional conditions required for such flourishing. Together with visibility, contestability, and repair, it forms part of the deep structure of a commonwealth. In addition, a just commonwealth must provide adequate education and ensure meaningful opportunities to secure the material requisites of flourishing through participation in cooperative production. Together with the four scaffolds, these conditions result in informed agency. The paper concludes that society is not responsible for equalising outcomes. It is responsible for ensuring that everyone has fully informed agency and the necessary support so that each can develop and sustain a flourishing life through their own informed choices and cooperative production. Justice is not the fair distribution of the means to satisfy preferences. It is the design of institutions that enable all persons to develop and exercise their capacities for meaning‑making, care, and agency, thereby sustaining lives of their own choosing.