Somewhere in our early years most of us began a life-long struggle to understand what it means to be “fair.” At home, on the playground, in school, at work and in countless other settings we have heard admonitions to “play fair,” make a “fair deal,” give a “fair shake” or pay our “fair share.” The “fair share” phrase has also popped up in slogans about the American way of giving. “Your One Fair Share pledge given to the United Way is working many wonders.”

Sometimes the first step toward fairness is to identify what is not fair. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, a young minister thought it was outrageously unjust for the well-to-do to give the same proportion of income as one with lesser means. “Will any imagine,” he asked, “that a man who has wealth, or even a competency, is required to give no larger a proportion of his income than that widow? A poor laborer may be subjected to more inconvenience by giving five dollars, than a man of wealth by giving five thousand.” So the beginning of justice lies in the willingness of all of us, whether poor or rich, to give “according to capacity.” The higher our income, the more we give. He called this rule “proportionate giving.” There is no reason to believe, he declared, that God has forever set that proportion at ten percent. Only in the solitude of prayer and careful self-examination will we ever discover what God calls us to give.

The absence of a formula and recognizable benchmark make this version of giving far more demanding than tithing. Each one of us must decide how large or small our share is. This approach calls for a sturdy sense of justice, a rigorous personal discipline and the uncommon virtue of freedom from self-deception and self-interest when dealing with money. The stark individualism inherent in this style of giving is its glory and its burden.

Can we trust our own estimates of our fair share? One vivid answer to that question came from Reinhold Niebuhr, a brilliant, mid-twentieth century critic of the foibles and hypocrisies of human beings. In the late 1940s Professor Niebuhr and an ethics class were discussing American voluntarism. One enthusiast for the voluntary principle asked, “Wouldn't the voluntary payment of income taxes be morally superior to state coercion?” His instantaneous quip was vintage Niebuhr. “Most of us would pay twice as much as we think we should pay, and that would only be half of what justice would require us to pay.”

Is such blindness inevitable? And how do we know what “justice would require?"