Legitimacy and fairness are related in that legitimacy may be enhanced by a commitment to fair decision making [ 3- 6].
For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference.
A health care organization that incorporates legitimate and fair decision making everyday, where the decision making culture of the organization is permeated with the conditions of 'accountability for reasonableness', will be primed to meet the challenges of fair priority setting in a crisis.
As we shall argue, fairness considerations are both procedurally and substantively important: there is a need for fair decision-making processes, as well as equitable distributions of scarce human and material resources.
The Newcastle commission has come up with a toolkit for fair decision-making.
We conclude that there is a strong demand for fair decision-making processes and an equal distribution of environmental and economic gains and losses.This article is part of a Virtual Special Issue entitled 'The collaborative "making" of Energy Landscapes'.
In none of the three study sites were the conditions specified by the AFR approach for fair decision-making and priority-setting processes ensured [ 25- 27].
Accountability for reasonableness, an ethically-based framework for fair decision-making and the fair priority-setting employed in the larger project of which this study is a part, draws our attention to the importance of trust in health systems [ 63].
To what extent should the need for quick decisions over-ride the need for legitimate and fair decision making?
Legitimacy refers to the moral authority of decision makers (what are the conditions for when a group, organization or person should be given the task of setting priorities), while fairness refers to the moral acceptability (when is there sufficient reason to accept that the decision made are fair) of the decision making process [ 6, 7].
Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes.
