What is FAIRNESS? Generically, it’s an attempt to achieve EQUIVALENCE in the assessment of two reciprocally important social concepts - they may represent our emotions or ambitions, promises or favors, talents or skills, tangible items, etc…
Commercially, it characterizes a situation in which parties voluntarily agree that the benefits they derive by exchanging “something” for “something else” are EQUIVALENT.
Note now the symbiotic relationship between “something” and “something else” - a simple act of exchanging one for the other already engages all the critical five outcomes of CONCEPTUAL COMPARISON at the heart of Life’s sentient awareness - 

“same / different”
“less / equal / more”

First, no exchanges can be contemplated within Descriptive Reality unless “something same as A” is being offered for “something different to A” 
Why? Nobody in the immemorial run of Commerce had as yet managed to benefit from exchanging “A” for another “A”…
Second, as it becomes intuitively axiomatic that “something A” would only be exchanged for “something B” – say, a “fish” for “some tangerines”, the events swiftly move into the Proportional realm of “less / equal / more”…
And here, our archetypal instincts to get as much as possible for as little as possible inevitably raise their clever, argumentative heads -
   Yet as a rule, after the posturing, pleading and bluffing is over, FAIRNESS informs the participants that a “fish A” is the “equal” of “x Proportion of tangerines B” – not “less then x” or “more the x” – and both parties amble away with a grin, each assured that the benefits derived from that deal are indeed EQUIVALENT.
Simple enough, but lurking behind there’s an enigma that in any Universe shall preoccupy not only the primitives nervously trying to exchange their wares, but also the greatest minds ever to arise within it…
They’ll discover that “something” in Nature can likewise be EQUIVALENT to “something else”. What’s more, it will be found that “something A” must invariably be the EQUIVALENT of a “Proportion x of something else B” and that in their right combination, those EQUIVALENTS of A = Bx explain the workings of their Universe.

To sum-up - over maybe a million years now the brains of our proto-human then human ancestors had been marinated, pickled, stewed and seasoned in the social instinct for FAIRNESS. We are hard-wired for it as much as we are for its diligent side-kick - Language. And it is this instinct that had over the ages driven “good men” into “doing something to prevent the triumph of evil” in the way Edmund Burke had envisaged.
   But it is Language that targets evil and historically, its selections had not been all that impressive. Why did it fail?
Until around ten millennia ago, Language was merely ensuring FAIRNESS within the tribes of hunter-gatherers. Then - once Agriculture arrived, it had been dragooned into imposing and enforcing JUSTIFICATIONS that gave self-appointed “good men” the right to seize the bulk of its crops.
Once that swindle paid-off, Language became so committed to extolling the virtues of such “good men” and punishing any contrary views, that despite the millennia of tyrants culminating in the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot, humanity ended-up without any “bad men” at all - only “good men” no longer semantically capable of understanding their own evil.