The same fairness to the lowest rung

It's easy to be fair to the people who can hurt you. The client who could walk. The boss who writes your review. The vendor you'll need again next quarter. Fairness comes cheap when there's a cost to being unfair. The real test is the dishwasher, the temp, the customer who'll never come back, the delivery driver waiting in the cold — the people who have no leverage on you at all. With them, fairness is a choice nobody forces.

Cicero, writing in a slaveholding society, still pushed past it: "we must have regard for justice even towards the humblest... they must be given their dues" (De Officiis 1.41, Miller). Their dues. Not a favor, not your good mood on a good day. The thing they are actually owed — the break, the straight answer, the credit, the respect — paid whether or not they could ever make you pay it.

This is where holding power gets tested first, because the lowest rung is where it costs you nothing to cut a corner. Give the person with no leverage exactly what you'd give the person with all of it.