You say that utilitarians don’t care what people would have done unto them, but this can’t be the case. Because they want the greatest good for the greatest number, it is crucially important that they have some idea of what that is. So I would expect that someone who honestly wants that would be deeply concerned with what people would have done unto them, even if their moral theory says that in some cases it would be wrong to do it, for the good of the whole.

This ties back to your comment, @37, where you propose that even if we don’t know precisely what inequality is, we can still see when a particular situation is unequal. Sure, that’s true. But then what? First, is the inequality a problem? If so, what is the solution? To make things more equal? The middle class in India has a serious problem with obesity right now, as does the middle class in the U.S. Would more equality be better? In India I can build and live in a hut made of pipes and plastic sheets which, while not a palace, will keep the rain off me. Here in the U.S. if I attempt to build and live in such a structure, the building department will force me to tear it down. Is more equality better in this case?

You criticize my demand that a moral theory be simple, but if it is not simple, how is it a theory and not just a set of case-by-case guidelines? What I really mean by simple of course is that it be generally applicable; the reason I criticize a lack of simplicity is that if you have to enumerate every possible circumstance, what you are expressing is not general – it only applies to those specific circumstances you have enumerated. Is there a theory behind it that you are unable to articulate? I don’t know, because you haven’t articulated it.

In your inequality example, where is the underlying problem that you are trying to solve? What is your guiding moral principle?

I’m not clear on what you’re requiring of someone who wants to use ‘fair’ in moral discourse. You seem to be wanting them to provide a single theory or a definition which everyone (or at least most people) will agree on, and you also seem to be expecting the theory or definition to be short, because you think that a long account will be just ‘a lot of data points’.

If those really are your requirements, then sure, there isn’t such a thing as a theory of fairness that meet them. But there isn’t an account of any moral term that will meet them, either – at least, no term that will be widely accepted as having any use.

Let’s take your example of the golden rule. The golden rule itself I wouldn’t say is a term, it’s more of a principle or, indeed, a rule. But people certainly offer it as a theory of, say, right – it is right to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and wrong to do otherwise.

Now, this certainly meets your brevity requirement, no-one could argue with that. But not everyone will agree on that definition. For one thing, it’s open to obvious objections – what I like having done unto me is not necessarily what others like having done unto them. I like being kept up to all hours of the night by my friends, but they may not feel similarly. It may not even be safe – I would have people feed me food with lots of peanuts in it, but this may be deadly to someone who’s allergic to peanuts.

Now, obviously you can say “no, no, it doesn’t mean that, you need to think what you’d have done unto you if you were in their shoes – if you didn’t like staying up late”. But then you’re elaborating the definition, aren’t you – elaborating in order to fit a “data point” : an intuitive idea that we need to factor in relevant details of the other person’s situation. And making clear what relevant factors are going to need to be taken into account will complicate things still further. So you’ll end up with a long, complex account, which may satisfy you but won’t satisfy everyone.

For another thing, other people have completely different bases for their ethical systems, such as utilitarians, who don’t care what people would have done unto them so long as the greatest good is got for the greatest number, so they’re not going to agree on this definition of ‘right’ either.

I suppose if we were willing to say the golden rule is indeed an ethical term, then the same objections would apply, it’s just that the argument will be now over whether it’s of any value. I’m sure it’s possible to define some terms with absolute rigour, but there’s not much point if no-one wants to use them!

Moral terms aren’t the only terms that are difficult to define even though everyone’s happy to use them. Most words in natural languages do not have rigorous definitions. There’s a famous quote about the word ‘time’ being understood by everyone but no-one could give you an account of it, but we could also think of terms like “red”, “inefficient” or “England” or, as another thread here shows, “torture”. Even something like ‘mass’ or ‘length’ prove to be difficult to give accounts of! When people start questioning these sorts of things adequate accounts are difficult to achieve and end up being quite involved.

My proposal is not at all that “fair” can be defined in a way that will be generally agreed upon. In fact, I think this is impossible. The more substantive the definition the less people will agree with it. My suggestion is actually the opposite: we don’t need such a definition in order to be able to use the word together in a useful fashion. It doesn’t matter what we think the definition is of “red” is, so long as we use it to describe roughly the same set of things. Some people won’t be able to give a definition of the word at all, but if they can use it appropriately it doesn’t matter. There will be disagreement about borderline cases, but that’s OK, if we’re only worried in the first instance about things which are clearly red. There will be disagreement about what makes them red, but that doesn’t matter either – a rigorous definition might be interesting from a theoretical standpoint, but from a practical perspective of discussing with ordinary people about what to do with the red things it could only be of use to sort out borderline cases – but we’re not going to get universal agreement about those.

But you are using it in the opposite sense—you propose that “fair” can be defined in a way that will be generally agreed upon. It is this sense of the word “fair” that I am claiming doesn’t have any meaningful existence. The fact that you feel that it would take many pages to enumerate such a theory is precisely the point. In that case you don’t have a theory. You just have a lot of data points for which you presume, without knowing, that there is a common unifying theory.

Ted: sure, it’s difficult to give a satisfactory theory of fairness. But what you say about fairness is true of all moral terms, like ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘just’ etc. People use them frequently and appear to know what they mean by them, but few can express a theory about what they mean. Even those that say they have a theory (utilitarianism is pretty common, even amongst people who have never heard the word before) often what they’re really doing is using that theory to give post-factum justifications for things they believe intuitively. And of course there’s no universal disagreement on theories.

So if we’re to follow your advice across the board, it would seem that all moral terms have no place in rational discourse, and even more strangely, none of them can provide us with any moral guidance.

However, things aren’t as bad as all that. As I indicated @ 37, just because there’s no theory that’s widely accepted doesn’t mean there isn’t broad agreement on what counts as ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘fair’, ‘just’, etc. in many cases, where the situation is clear-cut. No-one thinks keeping your daughter in a basement for decades is good. We don’t need a theory to tell us that. We don’t need two people to agree on every case. All we need is is broad agreement on the most severe and egregious cases.

To be sure, fair distribution of goods in society is one of the more contentious issues, and much less clear than, say, the example of material equality I was giving before. But you don’t seem to be limiting your criticism of the notion of fairness to just this case. Also, I suspect that the plurality of people (if not the majority) on this forum do in fact share much the same intuitive notion of fairness, and I suspect many of them would be quite capable of producing arguments for it. Just because they aren’t posted here doesn’t mean the accounts don’t exist – and it’s not really an appropriate medium for a full treatment anyway. I suspect A Theory of Justice might exceed the comment word limit by a little bit.

The point I intended to make in that paragraph is that although we talk a lot about fairness as if there were in fact a theory of fairness that we agreed upon, and that we could put into practice, in fact there is no such theory.

Rich@28 proposes two different theories of fairness: first, fairness is something that “everybody agrees on,” and second, that what fairness is is that the rules were followed. In either case, fairness isn’t a theory. In the first case, like Salient@21’s definition, it’s an observation about a situation, not a theory. In the second case, the theory is the set of rules. If fairness is just that the rules were followed, then there’s no need to bring fairness into it – at best, fairness is just that the rules, whatever they are, were followed.

I don’t think it’s an accident that nobody here has actually proposed a coherent theory of fairness more detailed than that “the rules were followed.” When you say “fairness,” everyone knows what you mean. But if you ask them to express a theory of fairness, they will be unable to do so. Their actual notion of fairness is something that they can identify after the fact. But if they were to try to express beforehand what their theory of fairness was, it would be the case that whatever they expressed, you would subsequently find cases that they thought were unfair, but that met whatever constraints they’d described. And of course finding two people who will agree in every case as to whether a particular action or outcome was fair will be quite difficult.

So the fairness that we refer to when we talk about a theory of fairness simply doesn’t exist. It can’t provide us with any moral guidance. It is a red herring. The word “fairness” has no place in rational discourse, other than to snooker someone into agreeing to an outcome with which they are otherwise unhappy.

But obviously what this jerk said off the cuff doesn’t really matter. Burke is an attempt to justify one’s relatively arbitrary act of anchoring. I’m merely pointing out why it’s necessary. Because everyone wants to help themselves to fairness, but they really only want a paraconsistent version. So there needs to be something that keeps it from devolving into Calvinball.

It may as well be that there is (or may be) some inherent merit to some Burkean arguments. But that’s sort of a separate question.

I don’t think there’s a great difference. Part of Burkeanism has always been that swift social change is bad, especially rationalized schemes for social change. That means that you can recognize the current state of affairs as arbitrary, possibly even not very good, and still caution people against trying to fix it.

Burkeanism has never been a very good argument for anything. It’s still one of the only ones the conservatives have. If you’re really interested in a half-fair system, appeals like that is how they are done. I, for one, think that an appeal to a social norm is a perfectly respectable pragmatic argument—most of what people actually do seems to be following social norms, rather than reasoning out what they should do.

On the other hand, do you have a proof that all can be free of everything that limits their liberty? Or what levels of liberty are just? Or even a coherent account of liberty?

It seems to me that we’re in a much better position with material equality. We can at least measure material wealth – the dollar value of income and assests is a good first approximation, and there are lots of more elaborate methods involving baskets of goods and things like that. How would you go about measuring liberty?

(I’m sure people have tried to do exactly that, but it seems like a notion far more up for grabs than equality is )

Yes, this is a good way to put it. That’s the point of my Calvinball analogy (thanks, Jacob!) He recognizes that the norms he follows are very artificial. (Nothing Burkean about it: nothing ancient, and no presumption that they have some mysterioud, hidden, tested goodness or wisdom.) They are just a big fat IS. And all you can say in response is: that’s not a reason. There’s a difference between arbitrary anchoring and Burkeanism, in other words. (Or at least there had better be, if there is anything to Burkeanisn.)

It is my impression that there is available, from experimental economics, a working negative definition of “fair enough”, which is roughly “not so unfair that the proles revolt”.

There’s an experiment by Brosnan and DeWaal in which two brown capuchin monkeys must cooperate to get a treat. The two monkeys are separated, but can see each other. You rig the thing so that if both monkeys press the switch while the light is on, each of them gets a treat.

Now, monkeys value various treats differently: a grape is much preferred over a slice of cucumber.
If the treats are randomly awarded, so that each monkey sometimes gets a grape, sometimes gets cucumber, and sometimes gets nothing, monkeys cooperate enthusiastically and consistently.
If the treats are consistently and grossly one-sided, so that one of the monkeys always gets grapes, while the other always gets cucumbers, there comes a day beyond which the cucumber-receiving monkey may begin to refuse to cooperate, and in effect decides he would rather have nothing than have an unfairly-distributed something.

From this, we learn that monkeys are not rational utility maximizers, and that their apparently inborn aversion to rank unfairness can outweigh their desire for a treat.

If I remember correctly, related experiments on students show that humans too resent structural unfairness, and may eventually refuse to cooperate with a grossly unfair regime, even if that refusal harms their own interests.

I am not yet seeing news items about pitchforks, torches, tumbrils, and guilliotines on Wall Street, but maybe it’s just because the masters of Wall Street are separated from the rest of us by something less transparent than a sheet of glass.

Links to
New Scientist on Brosnan and DeWaal’s experiment
Wikipedia on inequity aversion in monkeys

John, can I start writing into my grant proposals “pay stipend to Holbo once a year to read all my papers and come up with witty, insightful, memorable, occasionally-pop-cultural phrasings of their ideas for me to use”?

Right, rich and poor are free to sleep under a bridge; that’s what justice is all about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27krugman.html

That’s what he seems to be saying, under any charitable construction. Not something abstract about fairness. Something about how U.S. society is presently constituted.
”

This comes across as basically the same argument as (saying in 1980)
“If South African blacks hate apartheid so much, why they don’t vote for another government”?

US society, as it is presently constituted, has its culture/media run by and for large corporations, and its political system driven by money. And we are supposed to then be happy with the resulting system as one designed to funnel money to the rich?