Quote Originally Posted by fungus pudding View Post
'Ability to pay' does not make for fairness. Should a tin of baked beans cost more if you happen to be very wealth? You and Karl Marx might think so, but not many do.
What Is Fairness? It depends on the situation. Ideologues believe that only their notion of fairness is correct.

1. SAMENESS: There is the fairness where everything is equal. So everyone pays the same price for a theater ticket, whether a child, an adult or a senior citizen. No one has more than another. Everyone eats or no one does, for example. Logically, then, an infant and an adolescent will receive the same amount of food. It doesn’t matter that one needs more than the other. Fairness is finding the average and applying it across the board. This is fairness as equality of outcome.

2. DESERVEDNESS: In this notion of fairness you get what you deserve. If you work hard, you succeed and keep all that you earn. Fairness means keeping what you deserve and deserving nothing if it isn’t earned. The hardest working, most diligent, smartest and most talented should have more because of their attributes; the lazy, indifferent, stupid and inept deserve to have less. Fairness is a rational calculation. This is fairness as individual freedom.

3. NEED: The third idea of fairness is that those who have more to give should give a greater percentage of what they have to help others who are unable to contribute much, if anything at all. Fairness here takes into account the facts that humans have obligations to one another and the more one has the more is demanded of that person to contribute to the common good. Fairness and responsibility are linked. Compassion plays a role in the calculation of fairness. This is fairness as social justice.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...at-is-fairness