The virtue of people who honor their duties of judgmental justice and respect the rights of others to be fairly appraised is called "fair-mindedness." Whatever job our voiced and written judgments may do, whatever changes they may effect in the world, they also form part of the human record, and all persons, or at least all fair-minded persons, have a double stake in that record. Everyone will wish to make his own record as good as possible, but all fair-minded persons will also wish the record itself to be accurate and untarnished, partly as a matter of common interest, but also, as we say, as a matter of justice, and justice in a quite basic and underivative sense. Nothing makes the head spin more than the death and burial of a known truth. Those who have read the passages about rewriting history in Orwell's 1984 will understand the "dizziness" which another writer, Albert Camus, cites as his response to "the absolute murder of a truth." Our concern for the truth is also at the root of that feeling which is sometimes called "guilt" and is prominent in the consciousness of fair-minded people who sense that their own position in life implies a judgment of their merits that is too favorable, that they are therefore posing as something that they are not in fact. The moral principle behind these phenomena is that every person has a right to be treated and judged as the kind of being he is, and since this principle derives its persuasiveness and its impersonal authority from the alliance between interest and the objective truth, it also imposes a duty to accept no more favorable judgments from others than those that are in truth warranted. The alliance between personal interest and the truth may not always be present, and even where it exists, it may be short-lived, but the truth itself is timeless, and it is the truth's prestige that supports judgmental justice even when all connection with personal interests is severed. James Flexner writes that it is "unfair" to call George Washington a racist, given that he ardently and conscientiously opposed the institution of slavery. Notice how the biographer naturally thinks of doing justice to his subject well after the subject, having long been dead, has any personal stake in the record.
(Joel Feinberg, "Noncomparative Justice," The Philosophical Review 83 [July 1974]: 297-338, at 325-6 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])
