Difficulty: Same Versus Fair

For example, I teach in a classroom once a week. I don't treat everyone the same. Instead, I respond to their individual differences. For example, I call on one girl a lot because she tends to be quiet but have good answers. (They like being called on and everyone else tends to volunteer answers.) I also have my own needs. The person I call on the most is perhaps the slowest person in the class, but I like teaching him, so I call on him when I want to make sure he is understanding.

I also respond differently because of how people have treated me. I tend not to call on one girl because her answers are always off-track.

So, when you treat people differently, that does not mean you are being unfair. Worse, if you treat people the same, that does not mean you are being fair. Suppose I did not like the girl who rarely volunteered answers. To punish her, I could treat her the same as everyone else -- only call on her when she volunteers an answer.

Checking for Fairness

Perhaps you are treating them differently because of your own needs. That is okay in nonmoral situations, but probably not in moral ones. Similarly, if you justify the different treatment in terms of their past behaviors, again you need to seriously consider if this is justified. When I teach, the goal is for them to learn, not to judge some moral issue.

Difficulty: Different Perspectives

So, the leaders of the organization could take one perspective that allowed them to join the fight on the side of the person I was reporting. Of course, they did not ask themselves if there was any limit to how much they should support that type of employee.

To be fair, they should have also asked themselves if there were any reasons I deserved special support. In fact, there were -- people who try to make the types of reports I was making deserve protection.

I think it is useful to consider the situation from different perspectives. From a different perspective, the other person and I had done various things in the course of my trying to report the other person. The leaders of the organization looked at my behavior, they found something they thought was wrong, and they asked me to apologize. They did not look at anyone else's behavior. (If they had, they would have found lot's of things that were wrong.) They were not going to task anyone else to apologize.

Of course, when you come to different answers when you adopt different perspectives, then you don't know what to do. That's a check that you should not be as certain as you want. I guess you need to decide which perspective is best. I think, in this case, that the person I had been reporting did deserve more support. However, they could realize that that doesn't mean unlimited support. I also deserved more protection than this person, though not unlimited protection.

Solutions?

More likely the answer will come out differently for different perspectives. That's okay. Trying to decide what is fair should be only one tool in your techniques for trying to be morally right. And just because it isn't perfect is no reason not to think about it. Actually, if you consider the different perspectives, I think you will start to see flaws in some of them.