becoming more human by becoming more godlike 375being are written down. To reason as if such a reckoning existed is a
perversion pretending to endow an ordinary human being with a power
of judgment that the salvation religions reserve to God. Such a pretense
diverts our legitimate eff ort to become more godlike into an attempt to
put a legalistic moralism in the place of a lost faith.
We should rather understand treating others fairly as treating them
in ways that diminish the price in subjugation with which every con-
nection threatens us. In this manner, we help attenuate the confl ict be-
tween the enabling conditions of self- construction: between our need
to bind ourselves to others and our struggle to escape the jeopardy in
which all such bonds place us.
We do so, however, not for ourselves but for others, as we would
wish them to do for us. We collaborate in their self- construction. Fair-
ness, practiced in this way, is a kind of compassion, closely linked to
respect and forbearance. I will not make you denature yourself in any
degree, nor will I expect you to serve my will, is what our actions say
to another person when we treat him fairly. As a result, you will be a
little freer, a little more assured in the sentiment of being, than you
were before.
Th ere are four main contexts in which such fairness can be prac-
ticed. Each of them permits and requires a distinct variant of this vir-
tue. Th e fi rst context is personal love, founded upon the imagination of
the other and a heightened ac cep tance of vulnerability and resulting,
when it survives, in our most complete experience of success in recon-
ciling the contradictory requirements of self- assertion. Th e second con-
text is joint participation in a community for which sameness or simi-
larity of interest and mentality has ceased to be a premise of reciprocal
engagement. Our interest is to replace this premise by ideal commit-
ments and personal loyalties that fl ourish in the midst of diff erence.
Th e third context is a higher form of cooperation: one that, among other
features, no longer rigidly contrasts the conception and the execution
of tasks. Th e fourth context is a way of treating strangers, outside any
context of love, community, or cooperation, that expresses reverence
and that demands nothing but respect in return.
A fourth virtue of connection is courage: the disposition to over-
come fear, especially the fear of the harms that we must face to be-
come freer and greater. We become freer and greater by standing up