According to Aristotle, fairness (or “distributive justice”) honors proportion: “for if persons are not equal, they ought not have equal shares.”9 More specifically, fairness honors geometrical proportion: unequal shares for unequal merit. Conversely, equality haphazardly “honors” what Aristotle calls arithmetic proportion—equal shares for unequal merit—but Aristotle deems that such egalitarianism violates justice.
