Fairness for me, but not for thee – a prolegomenon to any paraconsistent theory of justice

Well, John, he’s the moral idiot but you’re rather emotional about it. He’s right that the system is to blame and he’s wrong to use the blatant blameworthiness of the system as an excuse. But I still fail to see how anybody will be better by interpreting fairness as an emotion. What are you going to do: excommunicate those from society that are not ‘true’ to the ‘right’ standard? Who’s going to judge and by what guideline? Some new version of the 10 commandments? Probably I am the idiot here for failing to see any rationality in what Cohen on CT is described to hold – an idiot that is dangerous to fairness and that ultimately will have to be shut up for the good of the egalitarian society.

(yes that was hyperbole, I do not believe for a moment the last sentences are your position, but I’d be much interested to hear how the hyperbole can be avoided on your account …)

But tolerating substantial degree of unfairness (and we all are) is a far cry from insisting that pointing out to this unfairness is unfair. I don’t think it’s anything like a slower motion version of the idiot in the article.

For all your big fancy words ‘n’ all (oh, did you misspell ‘tu quoque’?), “fair” is a plaint for the playground, too slippery to apply to adult society. Sure we strive for equality under the law but that’s as far as we can realistically take it. It’s ultimately pointless to debate fairness, because the list of exceptions includes, well, practically everything. Tooth and claw, anyone?

John, these analyses that you make sometimes work — e.g. Donner Party conservatism, even though that’s not your preferred phrase — but often they don’t. When they don’t, it’s usually because you overinterpret someone’s rhetorical flourish. Sometimes someone happens to use a word of philosophical interest within a context that really doesn’t mean anything about the word in any serious sense.

I don’t think that this person is really saying anything about fairness. Or rather, if you do take it to be about fairness, you immediately get the bomb with the one second fuse. He’s saying something about social norms. You could rephrase it as a Burkean argument, say: “Yes, society is unfair, and rewards are out of all proportion to the quality of work, education needed, or the effects of the work. But that’s how society is set up. Who knows what would happen if we tried to rationalize it [Burkean boilerplate etc.]”.

He doesn’t really say that. He puts in “Our whole moral compass has shifted about what’s acceptable or not acceptable”, which is just fatuous nonsense, flattering people about the good old days — America always was sympathetic to great wealth, no matter how acquired. And he doesn’t have the explicitly Burkean bit. But when he writes “But I don’t think it’s fair to say Wall Street is paid too much”, the only way that makes sense is as an appeal to an existing social norm. And as such, it sort of works, or at least it works better than your caricature does. He’s not defending something about fairness, really. He’s saying something like “I can see how it’s really unfair to keep gay people from marrying each other. But that’s always how it’s been.”

Fair in poker and fair in chess are different, and fairness isn’t even an important value in games like hide the poker.

Henri, Wall Street has been paid too much for decades. Social inequality is going up in the U.S., yes, so they are even more overpaid, but really, they have been throughout the working life of anyone working there. And society, other than a few grumbles, has never done anything about it. Nor does society really seem to care in many other cases in which people are overpaid.

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.

Actually, it sounds like one of those things where you shouldn’t criticize X unless you condemn Y and Z. In this case it’s Julia Roberts and ex-presidents.

Actually studios complain about inflated actors’ salaries all the time, it’s a big factor in budgets, but he’s correct in that the average Joe seems to be just fine with that. Similarly, I could care less if there are people in this world with a net worth of a 100 or even 10.000 times that of mine, as long as they do their jobs right, their wealth doesn’t translate directly into power and I’m able to make a decent living – money isn’t everything. The trouble is, that the current crisis was at least partially caused by the hunt for ever bigger profits and bonuses and that this had a direct effect on the economic circumstances of the average citizen – a fact that the guy from Wall Street conveniently overlooks.

“Wall Street people are not moral idiots” See. Let’s not make this too complicated. The world financial system, and many of the people who operate it, have been corrupted. We don’t need to know what perfect justice (or “fairness”) is to improve matters.

would you rather live in a completely fair society, where no-one prospers, or a completely unfair society, where everyone prospers?

I would argue that “everyone prospers” is inherently very fair: for such a society to manage to be unfair, there must be some unbelievably traumatizing problems incurred, e.g. gross and untenable violations of personal liberty, in which case, no thanks.

Ted @ 15:

Think about it this way: would you rather live in a completely fair society, where no-one prospers, or a completely unfair society, where everyone prospers? If you answered the latter, then you’re admitting that fairness has no reality.

How on earth does that follow? Surely you’re only admitting that prosperity is more important to you than fairness.

More facetiously:
Would you rather lose all your friends or all your limbs? If you choose the later, then you’re admitting your friends have no reality. (i.e. you only have imaginary friends?)

And there’s always the possibility of designing a world that’s deliberately and inconsistently randomly unfair. It can be done: see Borges’ The Lottery of Babel, where misfortunes and fortunes alike were legislated to go by the throw of the dice.

Rich at #9 and arc at #24 are onto something–the Wall Street guy really isn’t talking about fairness. And John (#26) is entitled to use that idiot’s comment as a springboard for his theories of fairness. But I think that Wall Street guy is worth parsing on his own terms: not for what he has to say about fairness, but because I think he is unconsciously illustrating an important facet of human psychology.

I read WSguy as saying that he is no Iago twirling his mustachios because evil is fun. He says, in justification, that he is merely conforming to prevalent social norms. And his statement of fact is correct. But what he is saying is not justificatory. There are very few Iagos: many fewer Iagos than criminals. Maybe Dick Cheney is an Iago (although I doubt it); certainly Jeffrey Dahmer and likely Roy Cohn. Not many others. I’ve dealt with financial criminals; many are nice enough fellows who were merely doing what their peers were doing and just happened to have gotten caught. It’s particularly sad when the criminal is very young, and has no work experience outside of his rotten shop.
But although sad, that is no justification.

“Nice people do it:” a common moral idiocy.

Just stating
“No one complains when Julia Roberts pulls down $25 million per movie or A-Rod has a $300 million guarantee. ”
doesn’t make it so. There are plenty of people in the world who complain about these facts.

I like this post very much. Everyone is born into a world with unequal conditions and there is no ability to reach an end state in which all of those conditions are equalized, other than the equality that follows death. Inequality is inevitable. No one who argues for reducing inequality has come up with either proof that it can be eliminated or a coherent proof of what level of inequality is the just one. I have not even seena coherent account of what inequality is. Fundamentally, moral arguments about distribution are just tools in a battle between two groups within the upper half of society that have different tastes and preferences and desires for relative status, prestige and power. One will have a better chance at establishing a theory of justice based on liberty than on equality.

One will have a better chance at establishing a theory of justice based on liberty than on equality.

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

Boy, I’m hesitant to speak up in this gathering of intellectual lights … but here goes.

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

MarkT @ 31
Why is it necessary to prove that(1) inequality can be eliminated or (2)establish what level of inequality is just, or (3) provide a ‘coherent’ (and presumably also precise, and therefore probably extensive) account of it before trying to address it, at least in cases where it’s severe and eg? Presumably you’re not going to argue that we are completely in the dark about inequality – as though it could turn out quite to our surprise that everyone in, say, India actually does have material equality. It’s as evident as anything can be that if there are large numbers of people living in slums without any money and scarce sanitation, and smaller numbers of people who own companies, several cars and houses, that individuals in the society in question do not have material equality with one another.

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 )

my comment @ 37, lines 3-4, was supposed to read ‘at least in cases where it’s severe and egregious?’

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.

Ted:

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.