This paper uses a conjoint survey experiment fielded in the U.S., Australia, Chile and Argentina to develop and test the compensatory theory of tax fairness. Drawing on social psychology, I argue that evidence of preferential treatment by the state violates well established distributive and procedural fairness principles, and show experimentally that it leads to the use of taxation as a means of restoring equality not only in crisis times, irrespective of wealth, and across a variety of settings. The paper makes three important contributions. It provides the first direct, causal and descriptive evidence of the importance of compensatory arguments for tax preferences. It presents unconfounded estimates of the effect of more established fairness considerations as benchmarks against which to compare the importance of compensatory arguments. And it provides cross-country evidence of the relevance of compensatory arguments across different cultures, tax regimes and levels of inequality, suggesting it represents a basic, shared expectation regarding the role of the state.