Credit card companies justify charging cardholders additional fees for late payments by asserting the principle that those who expose other individuals, companies, or institutions to financial risk should pay for that risk, and by pointing out that late-paying cardholders present a greater risk of default than other cardholders.
Companies' Conclusion
We should charge individual cardholders a late payment fee when they're late on their payments, rather than increasing the cost of all cardholders' policies.
Evidence / Principle
If ... Then ... you expose others you should pay to financial risk for that risk
And cardholders who pay late present a greater risk of default than other cardholders.
Evaluate
Credit card companies lend out money. If they don't get paid back, if the lender defaults on that loan, what happens to the credit card company?
They are probably paying for some sort of insurance, so that they wouldn't be totally on the hook for the unpaid debts. Hence, that's increasing their costs. Should they raise the cost of using their card for all customers in order to offset that increased cost?
No, they argue, the extra cost should be paid by the offending parties, not the innocent ones.
Goal
It's hard to say what level of coarse / fine grained similarities we'll see, but roughly I'd be looking for 1. A subset of a group is causing a certain thing to occur 2. So, we're going to assess a special treatment (probably negative) on them, and not the others