Proportionate Justice

Equal treatment, however, is not the only principle of justice — there are circumstances in which treating everybody exactly equally would itself feel unjust. Consider a situation in which a school decided that all students who sat an exam should get equal marks simply because they belong to the same school and wrote the same paper. Most people would feel this was unfair, and that it would be more just for students to be awarded marks according to the quality of their answers, and possibly also according to the degree of effort they had put in.

In other words, provided everybody starts from the same baseline of equal rights, justice can also mean rewarding people in proportion to the scale and quality of their effort. Most people would agree that although people doing the same work should get the same reward, it would be fair and just to reward different kinds of work differently, if we take into account factors such as the effort required, the skill required, and the dangers involved in that work. If we apply these criteria, we may find that certain kinds of workers in our society are not paid a wage that sufficiently accounts for such factors — for instance, miners, skilled craftsmen, or people in sometimes dangerous but socially useful professions like the police may no …