Relative Fairness and Quasifairness

Fairness has been an important topic of the philosophic literature in recent decades, with John Rawls' (1971 1993), ideas at the center. It is less well known that there is a literature on fairness (or equity) in neoclassical economics, which shows the influence, at least, of Rawls' difference principle, and that that literature has in turned influenced philosophical writing, principally through the work of Robert Dworkin (1981). Dworkin designates his view as "resource equalitarianism" and essentially adopts Varian's (1973) ideas from the neoclassical literature in order to define equal access to resources. In this paper, the first section will outline concepts of relative fairness and quasifairness in the comparison of social situations; the second will offer an argument for their representation of fairness based on an adaptation of the veil of ignorance, and the third will argue that relative quasifairness, in particular, addresses what has been an unsolved problem: intergenerational fairness.