Beyond fairness: integrity and moral risk in governance

In this companion piece to his recent article about philosopher John Rawls, Taylor turns to Amartya Sen to ask what happens after fairness: how boards can balance principle with outcome, integrity with impact, and conscience with consequence.

Fairness is a powerful idea. In the boardroom, as in public life, it speaks to conscience as much as compliance. But as the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen reminds us, good intentions are not enough. Justice is not secured by perfect institutions alone; it depends on what people are actually able to do and to be.

This is where the conversation about fairness in governance must go next. In my previous article, I argued that John Rawls taught us how to design fair processes – transparent, empathetic and equitable in deliberation. Sen asks us to go further and judge our decisions by their consequences. A board may follow every principle of fairness and still leave people unable to exercise agency or achieve basic capabilities.

If Rawls gives governance its moral compass, Sen gives it a sense of direction.

From principles to outcomes

Rawls’s great insight was that fairness could be reasoned into institutional design. His ‘veil of ignorance’ creates empathy by stripping away privilege, forcing decision-makers to imagine rules from a standpoint of equality. Yet Rawls’s framework assumes that just institutions will produce just lives.

Sen challenges this. A system can be impeccably designed yet still leave some citizens voiceless or powerless. Fairness, in his view, is not only about formal equality but about capability – the genuine freedom people have to live the lives they value.

For boards, this means that fairness cannot end with process. A decision about resource allocation or service redesign may appear balanced in principle, but what matters is how it lands in practice – who can still access the service, who understands the decision, who feels heard.

This is the shift from justice as design to justice as experience – from fairness imagined to fairness lived.

Integrity and moral authority

If Rawls offers legitimacy through fair procedure, Sen invites integrity through fair outcome. The two together form the moral architecture of good governance.

Integrity, in this context, is not a matter of personal virtue but of institutional coherence. It exists when an organisation’s decisions, values and impacts align. A board that claims to serve the public must demonstrate that its decisions genuinely enhance the capabilities of the people it serves.

Moral authority arises from the same source. Public-purpose organisations do not command obedience through market power or profit; they depend on trust. And trust grows not from efficiency alone but from the perception that decisions are both principled and humane.

Legitimacy, then, is earned at two levels: first by fair process (Rawls) and then by fair consequence (Sen). Governance that achieves both commands not only compliance but respect.

The risks of over-fairness

Yet fairness pursued without discipline has its own dangers. It can become sentimental, paralysing, or self-defeating.

A board determined never to disadvantage anyone may end up serving everyone poorly. The pursuit of procedural balance can become an excuse for delay; consultation can turn into avoidance. Decisions that try to please all stakeholders risk becoming lowest-common-denominator choices – technically fair, strategically feeble.

This is not just a theoretical risk. In public services, attempts to preserve every local service in the name of fairness can lead to underinvestment in modern equipment or innovation. Equity without efficiency breeds fragility.

In the current health and care context, for instance, where efficiency and centralisation of services often go hand in hand and financial pressure looms large, boards are faced with difficult decisions around community hospital provision. Faced with these choices, some delay due to a reluctance to close any facility. But keeping such hospitals open can spread budgets too thinly across multiple sites, resulting in chronic under-investment, workforce strain, and outdated facilities.

The opposite of over-fairness is also true: efficiency without fairness erodes legitimacy. The challenge is to hold the two in creative tension. As Sen would put it, justice requires practical reasoning – the continual weighing of context, impact, and capability.

Fairness, in other words, is not a static rule but a living discipline. It demands moral courage: the ability to decide between competing goods and to justify those decisions publicly.

Governance as capability

How might a board translate this into practice?

First, by recognising that fairness is both procedural and substantive. It begins with inclusive deliberation but must end with tangible improvement in people’s lives. Boards can test this through questions that move from principle to outcome:

• Who benefits most, and who is left behind?
• Do our decisions expand or restrict what stakeholders can actually do or access?
• If fairness requires unequal investment to level opportunity, are we willing to make it?

Second, by embedding fairness into the machinery of governance. This means requiring distributional impact statements in major business cases to evaluate how a proposal might affect different groups, integrating equity into assurance frameworks, and monitoring not just compliance but consequences.

Third, by treating stakeholder voice not as consultation but as capability. Genuine participation expands what people can do: it allows them to influence decisions that affect them. Listening becomes an act of empowerment.

Finally, by cultivating what Rawls called public reason – the discipline of explaining decisions in terms that any reasonable person could accept, even if they disagree. In an age of polarisation, that kind of reasoning is itself a form of justice.

Between conscience and consequence

The synthesis of Rawls and Sen offers a richer understanding of governance: fairness not as sentiment or slogan but as a continuous negotiation between conscience and consequence.

Rawls keeps governance anchored in principle – equality before preference, empathy before expedience. Sen ensures that those principles remain tethered to reality – that fairness is judged not by intention but by effect.

Together they frame a demanding kind of leadership. It is easier to count votes than to weigh values, easier to meet targets than to measure trust. But public institutions exist precisely to do the harder thing: to make decisions that are justifiable both morally and practically.

Fairness as maturity

A mature board does not see fairness as an additional assurance domain or compliance exercise. It sees it as a measure of organisational maturity – the point at which good process and good outcomes align.

Boards can express this maturity through a few simple habits:

• Asking who benefits and who bears the burden in every major decision.
• Embedding fairness questions in assurance frameworks.
• Communicating decisions in fairness terms as well as efficiency terms.
• Inviting challenge as a sign of health, not dissent.

Such habits transform fairness from aspiration into reflex. They move boards from compliance to conscience, from governance as management to governance as moral imagination.

Conclusion: the moral imagination of governance

Rawls gave us the language of fairness as justice. Sen teaches us that justice must be lived, not merely designed.

For those who govern public-purpose organisations, the task is to weave these together – to design processes that are fair, deliver outcomes that are enabling, and communicate decisions that are intelligible and just.

Fairness pursued blindly can weaken institutions, but fairness pursued wisely can renew them. It reminds us that governance is not simply about performance; it is about purpose.

In the end, the test of a board’s integrity is not whether it follows rules flawlessly but whether the people it serves can recognise themselves in its decisions. Justice begins in empathy but is completed in capability.

Between Rawls’s principles and Sen’s pragmatism lies the true art of governance – the steady work of aligning conscience with consequence.