Claims of unfairness come in too many flavors to deal with all or even several of them here. I'll focus on claims about unfairness in judgment or assessment of performance.
Anyone who's taught knows that one of the commonest student responses to a low mark is "That's not fair!" But when pressed about how it is unfair, most students usually come up with what is in fact an irrelevancy about how hard they studied. Maybe they did study hard, but what has that to do with their performance if they understood little of what they studied?
The point of this example is that too often when you hear people complaining about their performance in something being unfairly judged, they're confusing effort and performance.
It may be a hard lesson to learn, but while poor effort usually guarantees poor performance, great effort can't guarantee great performance.
Is there an ethical point here? Yes. People are demeaning themselves, lessening themselves as persons, when they start thinking that how hard they work at something is enough to earn them the right to be thought good at something.
We probably have no better evidence of this self-degradation than the weirdly popular TV shows where people with little or no talent perform in pathetic competition with each other. When the losers are briefly interviewed they invariably swear to work harder, seemingly oblivious to the fact that adding hard work to an absence of talent is like adding one and zero and expecting the sum to be ten.
Unfairness has to do with bias, with prejudice, with vested interests, with malice, with favoritism. It has almost northing to do with effort. Putting a lot of effort into something is laudable, but in a very different way than doing something well is laudable. The way we lessen ourselves if we overlook this difference is that we rob ourselves and others of the special recognition good performance merits. We make ourselves and others strivers only, rather than strivers and sometimes achievers.
The biggest danger this lessening poses is in education. Children are now constantly praised for trying, as if achieving is unimportant. This is all supposedly to protect their precious self-esteem, but what it's really doing is denying some the rewards of real achievement by making all feel better.
There's striving, and there's achieving; they're different. Of course achievements are relatively few, but that's what makes striving worthwhile.
