In the first place, why should society be fair? Has it not been the creed of societies that swear by capitalism that in the contest for prosperity, some will flourish, while some will be left bleeding by the wayside, there to waste away and perish? Every argument for fairness will be question-begging. That we must be fair cannot be proven, not because it is some gratuitous assumption that can be as gratuitously denied, but because it is self-evident. Fairness is a demand of reasonableness, and we are supposed to be reasonable! Attempting to establish ethics on a cognitivist base-and so avoid the pitfalls of making “right” depend on “what feels right”-Thomas Aquinas taught that the so-called “first principles” of practical reason from which we infer what should be avoided are as self-evident as are the principles of non-contradiction and identity-the first principles of “speculative reason”.