ABSTRACT
Fairness concerns arise only within practices bounded by and dedicated to appropriate purposes. Fairness, like honesty, trust, and perhaps generosity, is a fundamental virtue of association. Fairness, then, seems best understood as a fundamental virtue of sociability. Social life will surely go better if people are fair-minded, but it goes better even if people must struggle to be fair and against the inclination to put themselves first and ignore or disregard their social responsibilities. Fairness as a virtue might be considered the social glue that holds associations together in the face of the forces that work to pull them apart. Many of the purposive social practices that house fairness concerns cannot themselves be critiqued as fair or unfair. The social practices most likely to give rise to this type of fairness concern generally establish specific ways of managing certain social tasks, or meeting societal needs.
