Principle No. 4: Be Fair (Part 2)

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The following questions are right to consider in our efforts to come up with a fair response:

• What was the nature of the offense?

• How many times has the person committed the offense before?

• What's the magnitude of the harm that resulted from the infraction?

• Were the consequences of the offense reasonably foreseeable?

• If the misconduct occurred in an institution, is there a policy that specifies what the punishment is to be? If so, is it fair?

• If the misconduct involves a violation of the law, what does the law specify as a punishment? If so, is it fair? (Granted, the latter question applies only to those in the judicial system, but the men and women entrusted with the responsibility of applying the law should still take the notion of fairness into account.)

On the other hand:

• The college president who responds to a student's violation of the honor code with merely a stern warning because that student's parents donate a lot of money to the school;

• The CEO who responds to an employee's harassment of a coworker with indifference "because the guy is a friend of mine;" and

• The parent who ignores her child's pot smoking "because it would be hypocritical of me to punish him for something I did myself as a teen"

are all guilty of using irrelevant criteria in meting out justice, which results in unfair outcomes—and the failure to honor Life Principle No. 4.

Fairness and Rectificatory Justice

Rectificatory justice is just a fancy way of saying "making things right again." When a person or a group of people have been the victim of injustice, he, she, or they are entitled to some sort of compensation. This might involve money, or goods and services, or a simple apology.

Where retributive justice is concerned with responding fairly to the perpetrator of wrongdoing, rectificatory justice focuses on how the good parent, employer, or society should care for the victim of another's wrongful conduct. As is the case with distributive and retributive justice, our efforts to "make things right again" don't come from a rigid formula or set-in-stone criteria. Rather, one seeks to combine knowledge of the facts with an application of the relevant rules (e.g., "give to others their due—no more, and no less") along with the wisdom that can come only from experience.

Next week we turn to the fifth and final Life Principle: Be Loving.

Have a professional ethical dilemma? Need help figuring out the right thing to do on the job? Ask the Ethics Guy! Write to Dr. Bruce Weinstein at Bruce@TheEthicsGuy.com, and your question may be answered in his weekly column on BusinessWeek.com.

Weinstein is the corporate consultant, author, and public speaker known as The Ethics Guy. He has appeared on numerous national TV shows and is the author of several books on ethics. His Ask the Ethics Guy! column appears every other week on BusinessWeek.com's Managing channel.