The word "fair" has a double meaning. On the one hand, we say a situation is fair when we can see that it is well-balanced in an objective sense: when, for example, things are distributed evenly, symmetrically, or in a stable configuration. On the other hand we say a situation is fair when we judge it to be well-balanced in a moral sense, when things are distributed in ways we ourselves consider good, beautiful or just. As it happens, we typically judge a situation to be in our opinion morally fair when we can see it is as a matter of fact objectively fair. But this connection between moral and objective fairness is presumably a contingent and not a necessary one. It would not be illogical to stop someone considering an objectively unfair situation to be a morally fair one but, as the papers that follow show, it would be deeply inhuman. These papers, by pioneers in the new field of scientific ethics, bring the perspectives of ethology, anthropology and experimental economics to bear on people's (and monkeys') sense of fair-play as a psychological trait. And they combine to show how deep it goes: It is the nature of human beings to value objective fairness.

Cooperative animals often find themselves in situations in which they need to monitor and compare pay-offs received from joint ventures. They can compare their pay-offs with a) the history of giving to and receiving from the same partner (reciprocity), b) the effort they put into the venture (compensation), or c) what others are getting (pay-off distribution). There is ample observational evidence that monkeys and apes follow rules of social reciprocity. There is also evidence for market effects of supply and demand (i.e. if many potential partners are available the price of their cooperation goes down). In a series of experiments we have further shown that monkeys show payment for labor (i.e. the main beneficiary shares with those who helped in the venture) and reject income inequality. The latter finding, first reported by Brosnan & de Waal (Nature 425, pp. 297-299, 2003), is directly relevant to the origin of the human sense of fairness. I will discuss how the two relate.

The term "fairness," in everyday language, seems to be used in two main ways: to express the idea of a fair division of something, and to express the idea of a fair response to the behavior of other people. This latter, by extension, captures the more general notion of reciprocity. Ernst Fehr refers to reciprocity and conditional cooperation as resulting from the operation of social norms. In this paper I suggest a different framework, recognizing differences between social norms and of moral norms, in terms of both operation and substantive content, and establishing a third category of "quasi-moral norms," comprising norms of reciprocity and of conditional cooperation and bearing both conditional and unconditional aspects. In conclusion, I offer two observations about the social consequences of fairness motivations. First, strategic or self-deceptive charges of unfairness can raise the stakes, create deadlock and prevent compromise. Reactions to perceived unfairness, and anticipation of such reactions, can make the world a better place, but may also generate waste and inefficiency. Second, the conditional motivation of fairness requires some unconditional cooperators to get activated. Once activated, it will pick up not only some who are motivated by the quasi-moral norm of fairness, but also some who are under the sway of social norms. Fairness motivations can make the world a better place, but they need help.

Recent experimental research has revealed forms of human behavior involving interaction among unrelated individuals that have proven difficult to explain in terms of kin or reciprocal altruism. One such trait, strong reciprocity, is a predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish those who violate the norms of cooperation, at personal cost, even when it is implausible to expect that these costs will be repaid. We present evidence supporting strong reciprocity as a schema for predicting and understanding altruism in humans. We show that under conditions plausibly characteristic of the early stages of human evolution, a small number of strong reciprocators could invade a population of self-regarding types, and strong reciprocity is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Although most of the evidence we report is based on behavioral experiments, the same behaviors are regularly described in everyday life, for example in wage setting by firms, tax compliance, and cooperation in the protection of local environmental public goods.

In recent years, experimental economists have complemented earlier research by psychologists on equity theory, altruism, and related theories, by studying the anonymous allocation of dollar prizes by experimental subjects. This research has helped us understand the nature of attitudes towards fairness, reciprocity, and other "social preferences," and how these attitudes interact with self interest. The author critically reviews some of this evidence and the prevalent interpretations of this evidence to suggest some general lessons and ideas for where further research would be useful.

President Lincoln's platform included a recommendation of "a vigorous and just system of taxation," because he believed that if you had been blessed by living in America and had benefited from what this country has to offer, then you should do more for your country. One hundred forty years later, we still need a "vigorous and just system of taxation," not because we like taxes, but because, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. We have been having a tax debate for more than a century, but what is new about today's debate is that tour leaders want to shift the tax burden from unearned income straight on to the backs of working people. This radical notion turns on its head the very values that built America — rewarding hard work. My radical notion is that it is time to abolish the work penalty by abolishing the tax code of special privileges for wealth. In this talk I set forth a set of ideas to do just that, and further I show how we can use our tax code to encourage asset building and reduce poverty.

Equality before the law is one of the fundamental guarantees citizens expect in a just and fair society. We argue that recent trend toward mass incarceration, which has had vastly disproportionate impact on African Americans, is undermining this claim to fairness and raises a serious legitimacy problem for the legal system as a whole. Using original data from the Race, Crime and Public Opinion study we show that African Americans view the 'War on Drugs" as racially biased in its implementation. This perception of bias consequentially undermines legal system legitimacy by lowering blacks' expectations for police performance in their communities and encouraging receptivity to appeals for jury nullification based on race.

The evidence is clear and consistent that African Americans and Hispanics are treated differently depending on their skin color within their racial or ethnic group, and yet the surveys that show these results also show very few political or political-psychological patterns as a result of skin color. To investigate why this is so, this paper uses the fact that discriminatory treatment by skin color does not necessarily result in political action or perceptions around that discrimination to raise the larger question of when racial or ethnic groups see and protest unfairness, and when they do not. My hypotheses about why this occurs differ for blacks and Latinos. In the former case, the ideology of group consciousness is strong enough, and embarrassment about internal skin-color hierarchy is powerful enough, that blacks don't want to recognize differences by skin color. Light-skinned blacks, in fact, may be more racially identified than dark-skinned blacks — so their economic and social advantages are offset by their commitments to their race as a whole, and they behave politically like dark-skinned blacks do. The case of Hispanics may be better explained in terms of a weak sense of group consciousness rather than a strong one. That is, Latinos may not think of themselves as a group, such that they see skin color differentiation as a consequence of being members of different races (or nationalities) rather than as a form of discrimination against some members of "their" group.

In this paper I will focus on what might be meant by fairness in a democratic regime. There may be more general fairness criteria applicable to any political system, democratic or authoritarian, but fairness in relation to political decisions is especially central in a democracy. Democratic regimes are supposed to be run by the citizenry, or at least the citizenry ought to be the ultimate authority. Democracies depend on legitimacy to function effectively; only when a regime is considered legitimate can it rule by consent rather than coercion. Democratic regimes cannot rely on coercion to govern and long remain democratic. Thus, public acceptance is important. This also explains why the public determination of what is fair, both as a matter of principle and in the evaluation of particular actions of particular governments, is central in democratic rule.

This paper emplaces arguments about affirmative action today inside a history of racial harms inflicted by public policy during the last heyday of southern power in Congress in the 1930s and 1940s. Showing how social programs utilized occupational exclusions and administrative decentralization to protect the Jim Crow racial order, it argues that assertive remedies can be found that connect the ambitions for affirmative action announced by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965 with the principles enunciated by Justice Lewis Powell in the Baake case in 1978.

The papers included in this panel are quite diverse, ranging from Cass Sunstein's analysis of the conflicting conceptions of procedural fairness to Edna Ullmann-Margalit's analysis of family fairness. But there are common themes running through these discussions. All stand in the shadow of John Rawls' powerful and dominant understanding of justice as fairness. In different ways, they seek to bring out the complexity of issues of fairness, since fairness involves much more than justice. They exhibit skepticism about the attempt to "tidy up" this complexity with neat philosophical formulations. They open up areas of inquiry to be explored in order to do "justice" to the multifarious aspects of fairness, and they indicate ways in which this may be done without oversimplifying the varieties of fairness. These four papers collectively advance two goals. They expose different dimensions of fairness and warn against oversimplifying the relevant issues. At the same time, they seek to show us how it is possible to be sensitive to this complexity and yet advance a theoretical understanding of fairness in politics, society, law, and the family.

In this paper I take up the notion of family fairness and contrast it with justice. In particular I take issue with Susan Okin's notion of the just family and develop, instead, the notion of the not-unjust fair family. Driving a wedge between justice and fairness, I propose that family fairness is partial and sympathetic rather than impartial and empathic, and that it is particular and internal rather than universalizable. Furthermore, I claim that family fairness is based on ongoing comparisons of preferences among family members. I finally characterize the good family as a not-unjust family that is considerate and fair.

The paper puts forward a pluralistic account of fairness within which concepts of equality of sacrifice and outcome, desert, and randomized outcomes within a fair framework all have their place. The distinction between efficiency and fairness is set out early on, and it is later argued that only efficient social arrangements can withstand the questioning about the fairness of the way they distribute their benefits to their beneficiaries and impose demands on those whose taxes pay for them that the modern welfare state increasingly has to face.

This paper will argue for the need to attend to the impact of cognitive and other psychological limitations on the ways in which we theorize about fairness and unfairness. In particular it will consider the implications of (i) the fact that people seem better able to describe situations as unfair than to articulate coherent conceptions of fairness, and (ii) that theories that make demands on people that they perceive as inordinate will be ignored regardless of the strength of the arguments in their favor.

Legal systems must proceed in the face of two conceptions of procedural fairness. The first, embodied in the rule of law ideal, calls for clear rules, laid down in advance and susceptible to mechanical application in individual cases. The second calls for a high degree of individuation, on the theory that fairness requires particularized consideration of the whole person. Both conceptions can be found in judicial interpretation of the due process clause of the American Constitution, which sometimes requires rule-bound decisions, and sometimes requires individuation. Both conceptions have a great deal of appeal in particular settings. The choice between the two depends largely on an investigation of the costs of decision and the costs of error. In addition, "planning costs" play a large role; where people need to be able to plan in advance, rule-bound judgments look fairer and much more attractive even if they produce significant unfairness and arbitrariness.

When can we say that a debt crisis has been resolved fairly? An often overlooked but very important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support, limiting their capabilities and those of their citizens to exercise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewed by many not merely as extremely unfortunate and regrettable, but also as deeply unfair. And indeed, increasingly potent popular movements have pressured governments, financial institutions, and the financial community to seek what they take to be fairer solutions to debt crises. The merits of these programs and proposals for dealing more fairly with sovereign debt remain hotly disputed. In this essay, we try to take a step back from the political fray and examine some more fundamental considerations that seem relevant to assessing the fairness of current arrangements governing economic exchanges related to debt contracts and alternatives that have been (or might be) proposed to them.

Our discussion is organized into seven sections. First, we characterize briefly the concept of fairness and its role in social evaluation. Second, we clarify what sovereign debt is, and, third, the ethical statuses that particular sovereign debts can have. Fourth, we identify and describe the main features of current practices related to sovereign debt. Fifth, we describe an "ideal picture" of creditor/debtor relations. We argue that in such a scenario a broad range of ethical considerations can plausibly be invoked in support of practices that closely resemble those presently governing sovereign debt. Sixth, we draw attention to the many ways in which in reality the relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors differ markedly from the relationships between the creditor and debtor in the ideal picture. Because of this, many of the ethical considerations that would support present practices were relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors to resemble more closely those depicted in the ideal picture fail to do so under present circumstances. We conclude, moreover, that the remaining ethical considerations that might be advanced in support of the present system are at best quite inconclusive. Finally, we describe briefly specific reform proposals to current practices. While we will not attempt to show that these proposals would necessarily make the rules governing economic exchanges relevant to sovereign debt more fair, we conclude, in light of our earlier analysis, that they must be given much more serious consideration than they have so far received in policy circles. Indeed, there are strong prima facie reasons to believe that some combination of these proposed policies might prevent or mitigate some of the most ethically regrettable outcomes of present practices and norms by changing the incentives of sovereign borrowers and those who lend to them.

Publicly funded services such as health care and education often offer their users little by way of choice of provider. Partly in consequence they often create substantial inequities, with the less well off utilizing those services less relative to their needs than the better off. Contrary to popular perception, policies that offer choice of provider within these services can increase equity — provided that those policies are properly designed.

Why do people in more unequal societies have worse health and shorter lives than those in less unequal ones? Why do more unequal societies tend to have more violence and weaker community life? This paper discusses the research evidence on the psychosocial pathways which suggest how and why we are affected by inequality.

How big income differences are in any society seems to serve as an indicator of the scale of social differentiation and social distances within it. The evidence shows that more hierarchical societies incur a wide range of social costs reflecting the corrosive effects of inequality. But why are we so sensitive to inequality? Epidemiological research on health inequalities and the social determinants of health has demonstrated that the quality of the social environment has powerful effects on health. Particularly important are social status, friendship and early childhood experience. The indications are that poor health may share causal pathways with many other social problems associated with relative deprivation - including violence.

Summarizing my recent book, The Impact of Inequality (The New Press, N.Y, 2005), this paper provides an account of how inequality gets under the skin to affect both health and wellbeing. Rather than making comparisons with some impractical state of complete equality, all the evidence presented shows the importance of the differences in inequality between different states of the USA or between different developed market democracies: it shows that even small increases in equality matter.