Justice and Fairness

Monday, November 17, 2025

Fairness: “fair or impartial treatment : lack of favoritism toward one side or another.”  Justice: “conformity to truth, fact, or reason.”  Do you see the difference?  Fairness makes sure each child gets a sucker.  Justice says the well-behaved kid has earned what he or she gets.  The concepts are intertwined and in recent decades have become nearly synonymous, but their roots and original meanings are no where near synonymous.  All things being equal fairness and justice are synonymous, but since when have all things been equal?

Everyone is differently abled.  Not everyone is cut out to be a straight-A student.  Some who are very good at writing cannot do math to save their life.  When I was an upper division college student in chemistry I tutored several lower division students.  I learned there are break points in people’s abilities.  You can teach people to pass a test on stereochemistry, but to truly understand it requires an ability to imagine three dimensional structures in your mind and I have never figured out how to teach that.  That ability, which as far I as I can tell you either born with, or not, is the difference between a C student and a A student in that topic.

Things are not always equal.  Hence justice and fairness are not really synonymous.

And yet we have, for decades now, been trying to build our institutions as if they were – statistical proportionality in college admissions, grants, etc.  The statistics are race, gender, and the lot.  The net result may be “fair” in the strictest since of the word, but it is far from just.  There is no justice when a qualified student is not admitted to make room for an unqualified student so that the statistical proportionality is preserved.

D.E.I. has been the ultimate expression of this unjust trend and it is dying.  But some people cannot let go of it – people like former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Former first lady Michelle Obama said Americans are “not ready” to elect a woman to the White House, citing former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential election loss to President Donald Trump.

Obama made the comments to a crowd of women at the Brooklyn Academy of Music while promoting her new book, “The Look.”

“As we saw in this past election, sadly, we ain’t ready,” she said on Friday.

Seriously?!  Kamala Harris lost the last election for a lot of reasons, but her gender was not among them.  She was, arguably the least qualified presidential candidate put up by a major party in history – and everyone knew it.  Not only did she lack the abilities necessary to do the job; she was an awful candidate – just awful.  If we are frank, justice demanded that she lose, gender notwithstanding.

The time has come for us to let go of the kind of thinking the former first lady exhibits here.  Justice demands it.