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On the definition of fairness
Debate Information
(Hop right to the Analysis section if you are not feeling like reading the entire wall of text.)
Consequently, such words as "freedom", "liberty" and "pluralism" nearly disappeared from the political vocabulary, being instead replaced by "security", "equality" and "justice". The concepts that fundamentally separated the Western civilisation from the rest of the world are no longer taken very seriously, and our language became closer to that of the traditional communal society.
I am not here to complain about this phenomenon; countless books have been written on it, and countless opinions exist on whether it is a positive or a negative one. I also will not claim that it is a novel phenomenon; it was described even by Cicero, over 2,000 years ago, and even Ancient Greek philosophers pointed it out 500 years before that.
I instead want to explore the logical and philosophical implications behind this shift. Mainly, I am interested with how much it aligns with the goals which its proponents and perpetuators tend to mention in political debates.
The idea that the Ancient Greek state-builders came up with, and that consequently gave rise to the Western civilisation as we know it, was that both chaos and order were needed. Chaos provided growth and evolution, while order provided stability and foundation. The idea was that the society should be inherently chaotic, but allow for a small degree of order on top of which individuals could build their own versions of order. The individual became a craftsman of their own life, and the society merely provided the platform for the craft to be performed on.
The question then naturally arose: "How can we assure that the inherent systematic order does not start either growing or shrinking over time?" The system the Greek developed was called Democracy, which was essentially the rule of the majority. People voted for various proposals, as well as for their representatives, hence enforcing the degree of order that they preferred.
The main issue of the system was the fact that the minority was not in any way protected from the tyranny of the majority. If 90% Greek voted for killing the other 10% Greek, for example, then the slaughter would occur legally. If 80% Greek were persuaded by a person with horrible policies, but outstanding charisma, then dictatorship could ensue - and it did many times.
The Romans improved the system by preventing this from happening. The system they designed was called Republic, and it protected the individuals by the majoritarian tyranny by granting every Roman citizen with a group of rights that, at least in theory, could never be taken away. Interestingly, we do not know many details of the exact electoral process - but we do know that the government was essentially in the hands of rich aristocrats, and people voted for the most part not for the actual governmental officials, but for those who then appointed those officials. It was somewhat similar to the electoral college system we have in the US, albeit in a much more primitive and naive form.
In the end, the separation of aristocrats for common citizens led to the fall of the republic, as Julius Caesar riled the crowds and hijacked the government, casting the corrupt officials away. This precedent gave rise to the Roman Empire, which no longer featured strong electoral elements, and the dictator, the emperor, ruled the Rome, his/her power merely slightly limited by the Senate. Nonetheless, citizens still had the rights that could not be taken away legally, and although they often were nonetheless, some semblance of individual rights still remained, up until the fall of the Empire in the 5th century AD.
The question has always been on how far those rights should go. Proponents of strong human rights appealed to the importance of the individual expression of free will, while their opponents appealed to the needs of the community over the needs of the individual. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, inspired by the Roman Republic, but not satisfied with its performance and longevity, chose the former path and proposed a system of unalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution that far outgrew any other such system in human history. The idea of unalienable rights later became an inspiration for all modern systems based on the Western model. However, you will find that what those rights should be and how far they should go differs significantly between the systems. And, as always, the individual interests battle against those of the collective, and the result of this battle determines which ones are prioritised.
However, even the collective interest is founded on the interest of the individual, since the individual is a part of the collective, and, to an extent, the well-being of the collective determines the well-being of the individual. When the collective is strong and prosperous, it can take care of the distressed individuals. And in contrary, when the collective is weak and impotent, the individuals do not have a solid framework to rely on and have to tend for themselves.
The collective is very strong in Japan, and as a consequence the nation barely knows any crime, as acting against the interest of the collective goes very contrary to the predominant ideology of people raised in that environment. The collective is extremely weak in, say, Ethiopia, and as a consequence, people are not concerned with the damage their actions inflict on others, and crime and corruption thrive in that environment.
The question then can be asked: how do we cultivate a strong collective? And to add to it: how do we do it in a way that does not disrupt the essential individual rights and freedoms? And here we come to the dichotomy which is often characterised in terms of "left-right" political compass.
Why fairness, you ask? Well, fairness is what lets us judge which individuals of the collective "deserve" what. If the collective obtains an apple pie, how will it split the pie between its members? The concept of fairness addresses exactly this question. It determines what is expected of each individual, and what each individual gets in return.
Freedom, on the other hand, does away with the concept of fairness. Freedom allows me to bake a pie for myself and eat it alone, without others forcing me to share the pie with them.
As we can see, fairness and freedom are, in a way, mutually exclusive concepts.
Returning to the initial notion on the political vocabulary, we can attribute the popular terms to these two groups as follows:
Freedom:
I will argue that among multiple possible definitions of fairness, one leads to a healthier society.
We had this idea that giving and taking came in one package (by the way, you will find that a similar idea - reciprocity - is still used in many primitive societies, and, historians argue, was almost universal many thousands years ago). What did it mean?
Suppose another kid has a toy I really want to play with. I ask that kid, "Can I play with your toy?" The kid might say, "No, I want to play with it myself", and then I was out of luck and could not do much, other than trying to somehow persuade him. The kid also might say, "Yes, but then you should give me your toy so I could play with it". Finally, the kid could just say, "Yes, sure", and hand the toy over to me - but the implication was that I would eventually return the favor somehow. We did have the idea of charity, but we also had the idea of individual responsibility: if someone did something nice to me, I would want to do something nice to them, and I would feel indebted to them until then - even if they were okay with me not returning the favor.
Similarly, when I asked my parents to get me a bicycle, they would say, "Okay, but promise to be a good boy and wash dishes regularly". I would think it mean, I would think it exploitative, I would think it unpleasant - but I would never think it unfair. My parents are doing something for me, and I should do something for them in return; it was natural.
When I grew up and went to school, however, I learned that the world did not always work that way. I learned a new definition of fairness, one that sent shivers down my spine: that what is fair does not depend on the principle of mutual gain, but depends on who can secure that gain by force. When I had a toy, and a group of kids wanted to play with it, they would not offer anything in exchange; instead, they would corner me after school and threaten to beat me up if I do not give them the toy. That, in my view, was extremely unfair; I could not understand how people can do that to each other. I still do not.
I also learned a softer version of it: I would lend a toy to some kid who would promise to return it next day, only to never return it. That was also unfair, but that taught me something else: that blind trust is naive, that unless you have good reasons to trust someone based on your knowledge of them, such deals should be secured. While seeing it as unfair, I felt that somehow it was an essential part of the world, a good learning experience. On the other hand, I never learned anything from the kids who would beat me up to take away my toy, other than the fact that I should take some martial arts lessons to be able to resist them. Where trickery seemed unfair and toxic, but somewhat understandable, brute force seemed plain evil to me.
In the 3rd grade, I started studying history. As I read a history handbook, I came across the concept of tributes: lords of the past would send their soldiers to their lands to collect tribute. That seemed extremely evil and unfair to me and reminded me of the school group beating-up experience strongly. At the time, I attributed it to the fact that the people of the past were very uncivilised and preferred to solve their problems by force. We, modern people, must be above that, right?
It was with great surprise that a couple years later I learned how the tax system works. We were still ruled by lords collecting tribute by force, collecting the product of our hard work by threatening to throw us in prison for tax dodging! It was obviously unfair, and it was something that would have felt very alien to us, little kids, years ago.
Soon, I decided that, perhaps, I was too young to understand the complexity of the system. Maybe I was missing something crucial? Maybe it was not the same as the bullies taking away my toys? Or maybe it was, but it was somehow necessary? While the notion of its unfairness was ingrained deep in my world view, I thought that, perhaps, this unfairness somehow prevented an even worse alternative from occurring. Yes, back then I was quick to trust adults who I thought to be very wise and knowledgeable... My innocence was in for a lot of surprises in the future.
From nationalists:
Now, again, in my innocence I believed that it was just us, a society of uncivilised barbarians, that had such a silly view on the world. It was us who thought it was fair to exploit others and to give up on our freedoms for the sake of some abstract constructs, such as the nation, the race, the society, etc.
When I started debating foreigners online around 2009, way before I immigrated to the US, it was to my incredible surprise that the notion of fairness there, in the world of freedom and democracy, was strange as well. To be fair, it did seem to stem from genuine good intentions - but how perverted it was! I would often hear something like this:
Psychologically, I knew it had a lot to do with envy and desire for instant gratification. But, at the same time, people seemed genuinely concerned about others. They honestly wanted the members of their society to be well off. I could not quite untangle this knot.
Eventually, I got it. I understood fairness in the context of individual action. Someone does something, someone else does something in response, and the actions compensate each other - this is fair. Someone helped me out, I helped them out - this if fair. Someone greeted me with a smile, and I returned the greeting and the smile - this is fair.
But some people defined fairness in the context of a state of affairs. Someone was born in North Korea, someone else was born in South Korea - and it is unfair to the North Korean, because he got a much worse deal off the bat. Someone was born in a rich family, someone else was born in a poor family - and it is unfair to the latter, because he was destined for a less cheerful childhood.
In other words, it is not the action that was unfair in their eyes. It was the situation that was unfair. And as a consequence, failure to act in order to remedy that situation was also unfair.
This was, and still is, a very alien concept to me. Let us talk about it in more detail.
One would likely make an argument that these things are natural. The first is a consequence of laws of physics, the second is a consequence of natural evolution, and the third is a consequence of difference in our innate and cultivated abilities.
But in the eyes of many people the conclusion changes once we start talking about the general individual's life. One might not see it as unfair that one person is better, say, at cooking than another person - but they do see it as unfair that one person is better at money-making than another person. Or they might see it as unfair that one person has better health than another person.
More so, they will claim that, in the interest of fairness, one person should help another person out and expect nothing in return.
And more still, they will say that it is reasonable for the collective to force such help.
The premise of the tax system is that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and we must combine our strengths in order to cover the weaknesses. I may have a skill set that is in a very high demand on the market, but someone else might not, and hence I should share some of my money with the government which then will transfer the product of that money to them. On the other hand, that someone else might have a perfect health, while I might have a couple of serious illnesses, and hence that someone else must share their money with me to improve my health.
The concept of action-based fairness, however, requires mutual compensation after these operations. For example, I share my money with someone who's income is less than mine - and now that someone has to return the favor in some way. Maybe that someone can work for me. Maybe they can send me some gifts. Maybe they can lend me their car or home.
The concept of state-based fairness, on the other hand, does not. It sees me giving my money to someone with a lower income as the way to address the inherent unfairness between our personal situations.
We can see that the state-based fairness is practiced very hypocritically for the most part. People seem to arbitrarily decide which inequalities require equalisation and which do not. The difference in incomes between two people generally leads to advocacy of equalisation - but, say, the difference in cooking skills does not. Nobody says, "Person A is a better cook than person B, so person B should be given more cooking ingredients to equalise the outcome". In fact, people will say the opposite, "Person A will put these ingredients to a better use than person B, so he/she better have more of them".
Why does this reasoning not apply to everything? Why do we not give more money to people who are good at converting money into quality products, and take it away from those who waste it? The cooking logic when applied to the taxes would either lead to a regressive tax system (the richer the person is, the less money the government takes away from them), or to a discriminatory tax system (the poor pay taxes that are transferred to the rich). But this does not sit right with people. The idea that someone who is already doing well is going to do even better at the expense of those who are doing poorly has some obvious drawbacks.
Moreover, not all differences are a result of the state of the matter. Many differences are a result of active action. If someone worked harder than someone else and, as a result, secured higher income, then it would be wrong to attribute the resulting difference of income to some innate unfairness - and, hence, collecting a larger tax from the latter person would go against fairness.
In short, it seems to me that people using the state-based definition of fairness are pretty confused in what it is they stand for. They let emotions decide where they stand on a given issue; they lack consistency in their logical approach.
Now, to be fair (pun intended), the concept of fairness is not the only defence people offer for fixing societal outcome inequalities. There are a few more lines of defence, but all of them seem just as shaky, at best:
Many answers can be given. What I would say is that, at the very least, we must be honest and logical about our claims. If we are to keep the tax system, we should stop trying to justify it by appealing to "fairness", "compassion", "justice" and other ambiguous and easy to misinterpret concepts. We should recognise the cold truth and call things what they are. We should admit that the tax system is based on robbery. We can say that this robbery is necessary, but we should not call it "fair" or "justified", because it is not. There is a large gap between the necessary evil and the good, and trying to bridge that gap in order to feel better about ourselves is intellectually and emotionally dishonest.
There is a lot of violence and brutality in this world. One lion can kill hundreds animals over its lifetime. This is the harsh reality. We like to pretend that we are above that, but are we really? Our violence is still violence, however glorified and civilised its form is. When we take away someone's money to fund someone else's healthcare against their consent, we do, in essence, the same forceful act as the lion does when it chases a wounded antelope, intending to eat it against its will. We are not "fair" or "just"; we never were. Some of us can be, but as a society we are not.
I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject!
Introduction
In the last decade I have noticed a strong shift in the dominating Western social thought. Where the primary idea used to be the creation of an environment which allows the society to naturally evolve, it was replaced with achieving a certain evolutional outcome. The focus shifted from the path to the destination. From the opportunity to the outcome. From the process of work to the achieved reward. From the freedom to act to the result of action.Consequently, such words as "freedom", "liberty" and "pluralism" nearly disappeared from the political vocabulary, being instead replaced by "security", "equality" and "justice". The concepts that fundamentally separated the Western civilisation from the rest of the world are no longer taken very seriously, and our language became closer to that of the traditional communal society.
I am not here to complain about this phenomenon; countless books have been written on it, and countless opinions exist on whether it is a positive or a negative one. I also will not claim that it is a novel phenomenon; it was described even by Cicero, over 2,000 years ago, and even Ancient Greek philosophers pointed it out 500 years before that.
I instead want to explore the logical and philosophical implications behind this shift. Mainly, I am interested with how much it aligns with the goals which its proponents and perpetuators tend to mention in political debates.
Historical background
One of the biggest societal issues is and has always been balancing out the freedom of the individual to act and the responsibility of the individual before other individuals. When the former is absolute and the latter is non-existent, the society becomes chaotic and volatile. When the latter is absolute and the former is non-existent, the society becomes rigid and static. When there is no responsibility, people can do whatever they want, and the society is barely different from how animals in the African savanna live. When there is no freedom, people cannot do anything other than follow the commands of the society, and the society is barely different from a slaver's plantation.The idea that the Ancient Greek state-builders came up with, and that consequently gave rise to the Western civilisation as we know it, was that both chaos and order were needed. Chaos provided growth and evolution, while order provided stability and foundation. The idea was that the society should be inherently chaotic, but allow for a small degree of order on top of which individuals could build their own versions of order. The individual became a craftsman of their own life, and the society merely provided the platform for the craft to be performed on.
The question then naturally arose: "How can we assure that the inherent systematic order does not start either growing or shrinking over time?" The system the Greek developed was called Democracy, which was essentially the rule of the majority. People voted for various proposals, as well as for their representatives, hence enforcing the degree of order that they preferred.
The main issue of the system was the fact that the minority was not in any way protected from the tyranny of the majority. If 90% Greek voted for killing the other 10% Greek, for example, then the slaughter would occur legally. If 80% Greek were persuaded by a person with horrible policies, but outstanding charisma, then dictatorship could ensue - and it did many times.
The Romans improved the system by preventing this from happening. The system they designed was called Republic, and it protected the individuals by the majoritarian tyranny by granting every Roman citizen with a group of rights that, at least in theory, could never be taken away. Interestingly, we do not know many details of the exact electoral process - but we do know that the government was essentially in the hands of rich aristocrats, and people voted for the most part not for the actual governmental officials, but for those who then appointed those officials. It was somewhat similar to the electoral college system we have in the US, albeit in a much more primitive and naive form.
In the end, the separation of aristocrats for common citizens led to the fall of the republic, as Julius Caesar riled the crowds and hijacked the government, casting the corrupt officials away. This precedent gave rise to the Roman Empire, which no longer featured strong electoral elements, and the dictator, the emperor, ruled the Rome, his/her power merely slightly limited by the Senate. Nonetheless, citizens still had the rights that could not be taken away legally, and although they often were nonetheless, some semblance of individual rights still remained, up until the fall of the Empire in the 5th century AD.
The question has always been on how far those rights should go. Proponents of strong human rights appealed to the importance of the individual expression of free will, while their opponents appealed to the needs of the community over the needs of the individual. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, inspired by the Roman Republic, but not satisfied with its performance and longevity, chose the former path and proposed a system of unalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution that far outgrew any other such system in human history. The idea of unalienable rights later became an inspiration for all modern systems based on the Western model. However, you will find that what those rights should be and how far they should go differs significantly between the systems. And, as always, the individual interests battle against those of the collective, and the result of this battle determines which ones are prioritised.
However, even the collective interest is founded on the interest of the individual, since the individual is a part of the collective, and, to an extent, the well-being of the collective determines the well-being of the individual. When the collective is strong and prosperous, it can take care of the distressed individuals. And in contrary, when the collective is weak and impotent, the individuals do not have a solid framework to rely on and have to tend for themselves.
The collective is very strong in Japan, and as a consequence the nation barely knows any crime, as acting against the interest of the collective goes very contrary to the predominant ideology of people raised in that environment. The collective is extremely weak in, say, Ethiopia, and as a consequence, people are not concerned with the damage their actions inflict on others, and crime and corruption thrive in that environment.
The question then can be asked: how do we cultivate a strong collective? And to add to it: how do we do it in a way that does not disrupt the essential individual rights and freedoms? And here we come to the dichotomy which is often characterised in terms of "left-right" political compass.
Model and terminology
Let us define two fundamental concepts: freedom and fairness. The former is an embodiment of sole individual interest, and the latter emphasises the collective interest.Why fairness, you ask? Well, fairness is what lets us judge which individuals of the collective "deserve" what. If the collective obtains an apple pie, how will it split the pie between its members? The concept of fairness addresses exactly this question. It determines what is expected of each individual, and what each individual gets in return.
Freedom, on the other hand, does away with the concept of fairness. Freedom allows me to bake a pie for myself and eat it alone, without others forcing me to share the pie with them.
As we can see, fairness and freedom are, in a way, mutually exclusive concepts.
Returning to the initial notion on the political vocabulary, we can attribute the popular terms to these two groups as follows:
Freedom:
- Individualism
- Liberty
- Rights
- Private property
- Pluralism
- Diversity
- Equality of opportunity
- Unique individuals
- Collectivism
- Social interest
- Privileges
- Guarantees
- Public property
- Statism
- Equality of outcome
- Groups of individuals
I will argue that among multiple possible definitions of fairness, one leads to a healthier society.
Personal background
When I was a little kid, I understood well what fairness was - and so did other kids. We did not have many opinions on this, we just felt that how we understood it was right.We had this idea that giving and taking came in one package (by the way, you will find that a similar idea - reciprocity - is still used in many primitive societies, and, historians argue, was almost universal many thousands years ago). What did it mean?
Suppose another kid has a toy I really want to play with. I ask that kid, "Can I play with your toy?" The kid might say, "No, I want to play with it myself", and then I was out of luck and could not do much, other than trying to somehow persuade him. The kid also might say, "Yes, but then you should give me your toy so I could play with it". Finally, the kid could just say, "Yes, sure", and hand the toy over to me - but the implication was that I would eventually return the favor somehow. We did have the idea of charity, but we also had the idea of individual responsibility: if someone did something nice to me, I would want to do something nice to them, and I would feel indebted to them until then - even if they were okay with me not returning the favor.
Similarly, when I asked my parents to get me a bicycle, they would say, "Okay, but promise to be a good boy and wash dishes regularly". I would think it mean, I would think it exploitative, I would think it unpleasant - but I would never think it unfair. My parents are doing something for me, and I should do something for them in return; it was natural.
When I grew up and went to school, however, I learned that the world did not always work that way. I learned a new definition of fairness, one that sent shivers down my spine: that what is fair does not depend on the principle of mutual gain, but depends on who can secure that gain by force. When I had a toy, and a group of kids wanted to play with it, they would not offer anything in exchange; instead, they would corner me after school and threaten to beat me up if I do not give them the toy. That, in my view, was extremely unfair; I could not understand how people can do that to each other. I still do not.
I also learned a softer version of it: I would lend a toy to some kid who would promise to return it next day, only to never return it. That was also unfair, but that taught me something else: that blind trust is naive, that unless you have good reasons to trust someone based on your knowledge of them, such deals should be secured. While seeing it as unfair, I felt that somehow it was an essential part of the world, a good learning experience. On the other hand, I never learned anything from the kids who would beat me up to take away my toy, other than the fact that I should take some martial arts lessons to be able to resist them. Where trickery seemed unfair and toxic, but somewhat understandable, brute force seemed plain evil to me.
In the 3rd grade, I started studying history. As I read a history handbook, I came across the concept of tributes: lords of the past would send their soldiers to their lands to collect tribute. That seemed extremely evil and unfair to me and reminded me of the school group beating-up experience strongly. At the time, I attributed it to the fact that the people of the past were very uncivilised and preferred to solve their problems by force. We, modern people, must be above that, right?
It was with great surprise that a couple years later I learned how the tax system works. We were still ruled by lords collecting tribute by force, collecting the product of our hard work by threatening to throw us in prison for tax dodging! It was obviously unfair, and it was something that would have felt very alien to us, little kids, years ago.
Soon, I decided that, perhaps, I was too young to understand the complexity of the system. Maybe I was missing something crucial? Maybe it was not the same as the bullies taking away my toys? Or maybe it was, but it was somehow necessary? While the notion of its unfairness was ingrained deep in my world view, I thought that, perhaps, this unfairness somehow prevented an even worse alternative from occurring. Yes, back then I was quick to trust adults who I thought to be very wise and knowledgeable... My innocence was in for a lot of surprises in the future.
The issue
What I found is that how we, kids, used to understand fairness was very different from how many adults understand it. Growing up in a post-Soviet society that had very collectivist views, with socialists and nationalists together forming an overwhelming majority of the population, I would often hear arguments along these lines.From nationalists:
- You grew up in this nation, so you must work hard on improving it.
- You are white, and your duty is before the white people.
- Immigrants move here with our permission, hence they should serve our interests or be gone.
- Do not criticise our president. He works hard to make your life better, and you owe him praise.
- You grew up in this society, so you must work hard on improving it.
- You are a worker, and your duty is before other workers.
- Enterpreneurs live here with our permission, hence they should serve our interests or be gone.
- Do not criticise our president. He works hard to make your life better, and you owe him praise.
Now, again, in my innocence I believed that it was just us, a society of uncivilised barbarians, that had such a silly view on the world. It was us who thought it was fair to exploit others and to give up on our freedoms for the sake of some abstract constructs, such as the nation, the race, the society, etc.
When I started debating foreigners online around 2009, way before I immigrated to the US, it was to my incredible surprise that the notion of fairness there, in the world of freedom and democracy, was strange as well. To be fair, it did seem to stem from genuine good intentions - but how perverted it was! I would often hear something like this:
- It is unfair that Bill Gates has $85 billion, while his workers have $85 thousand.
- It is unfair that my neighbour's children were born in a rich family, while my children were born in a rusty barn.
- It is unfair that corporations outsource their work, depriving our people of jobs.
- It is unfair that farmers do not receive large subsidies while working hard, as their incomes crumble.
Psychologically, I knew it had a lot to do with envy and desire for instant gratification. But, at the same time, people seemed genuinely concerned about others. They honestly wanted the members of their society to be well off. I could not quite untangle this knot.
Eventually, I got it. I understood fairness in the context of individual action. Someone does something, someone else does something in response, and the actions compensate each other - this is fair. Someone helped me out, I helped them out - this if fair. Someone greeted me with a smile, and I returned the greeting and the smile - this is fair.
But some people defined fairness in the context of a state of affairs. Someone was born in North Korea, someone else was born in South Korea - and it is unfair to the North Korean, because he got a much worse deal off the bat. Someone was born in a rich family, someone else was born in a poor family - and it is unfair to the latter, because he was destined for a less cheerful childhood.
In other words, it is not the action that was unfair in their eyes. It was the situation that was unfair. And as a consequence, failure to act in order to remedy that situation was also unfair.
This was, and still is, a very alien concept to me. Let us talk about it in more detail.
Analysis
When two clouds of gas collapse and form two stars, one heavier when the other, is this discrepancy unfair? When a tiger chases and kills an antelope who obviously cannot fight as well, is this difference in abilities unfair? When one chess player is better at chess than another chess player, hence winning more games, is this unfair?One would likely make an argument that these things are natural. The first is a consequence of laws of physics, the second is a consequence of natural evolution, and the third is a consequence of difference in our innate and cultivated abilities.
But in the eyes of many people the conclusion changes once we start talking about the general individual's life. One might not see it as unfair that one person is better, say, at cooking than another person - but they do see it as unfair that one person is better at money-making than another person. Or they might see it as unfair that one person has better health than another person.
More so, they will claim that, in the interest of fairness, one person should help another person out and expect nothing in return.
And more still, they will say that it is reasonable for the collective to force such help.
The premise of the tax system is that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and we must combine our strengths in order to cover the weaknesses. I may have a skill set that is in a very high demand on the market, but someone else might not, and hence I should share some of my money with the government which then will transfer the product of that money to them. On the other hand, that someone else might have a perfect health, while I might have a couple of serious illnesses, and hence that someone else must share their money with me to improve my health.
The concept of action-based fairness, however, requires mutual compensation after these operations. For example, I share my money with someone who's income is less than mine - and now that someone has to return the favor in some way. Maybe that someone can work for me. Maybe they can send me some gifts. Maybe they can lend me their car or home.
The concept of state-based fairness, on the other hand, does not. It sees me giving my money to someone with a lower income as the way to address the inherent unfairness between our personal situations.
We can see that the state-based fairness is practiced very hypocritically for the most part. People seem to arbitrarily decide which inequalities require equalisation and which do not. The difference in incomes between two people generally leads to advocacy of equalisation - but, say, the difference in cooking skills does not. Nobody says, "Person A is a better cook than person B, so person B should be given more cooking ingredients to equalise the outcome". In fact, people will say the opposite, "Person A will put these ingredients to a better use than person B, so he/she better have more of them".
Why does this reasoning not apply to everything? Why do we not give more money to people who are good at converting money into quality products, and take it away from those who waste it? The cooking logic when applied to the taxes would either lead to a regressive tax system (the richer the person is, the less money the government takes away from them), or to a discriminatory tax system (the poor pay taxes that are transferred to the rich). But this does not sit right with people. The idea that someone who is already doing well is going to do even better at the expense of those who are doing poorly has some obvious drawbacks.
Moreover, not all differences are a result of the state of the matter. Many differences are a result of active action. If someone worked harder than someone else and, as a result, secured higher income, then it would be wrong to attribute the resulting difference of income to some innate unfairness - and, hence, collecting a larger tax from the latter person would go against fairness.
In short, it seems to me that people using the state-based definition of fairness are pretty confused in what it is they stand for. They let emotions decide where they stand on a given issue; they lack consistency in their logical approach.
Now, to be fair (pun intended), the concept of fairness is not the only defence people offer for fixing societal outcome inequalities. There are a few more lines of defence, but all of them seem just as shaky, at best:
- "Compassion is a virtue, hence we should all share with the needy." - While true, this merely advocates for charity, that is voluntary help to the needy. It does not support forced help in any way.
- "When the weakest members of the society are better off, the society as a whole is better off." - True, but it does not say anything about how best to make the weakest members of the society well off. Nothing indicates that forced help by the stronger to the weaker members is a good way to achieve that.
- "The society has created opportunities for you which you used to become richer, and now you must give back." - The problem here is that the vast majority of people who have created those opportunities are long dead, and I cannot give anything back to them. In addition, people who I give my money have just as much benefited from those opportunities as me, so the score is already settled.
- "If you are richer, then you can afford to spare more, so you must spare more." - This one I never understood. "Can afford to do" and "must do" are completely different things, having little to do with each other. I can afford to buy approximately 1.1 tons of wine per monthly salary, but this hardly compels me to any action.
- "You have a responsibility before this society because you were raised by it." - Holding one accountable for something that is beyond their control is illogical. Besides, one who were raised by the society and found a job is already benefiting that society by their work, paying the "debt" back.
Conclusion
Now, given all that, what is the logical follow-up? What should we do? Should we abolish the tax system? Should we abolish the government as a whole? Should we somehow enforce some abstract notion of fairness, such as one based on the principle of reciprocity, and make it the cornerstone of our legal system?Many answers can be given. What I would say is that, at the very least, we must be honest and logical about our claims. If we are to keep the tax system, we should stop trying to justify it by appealing to "fairness", "compassion", "justice" and other ambiguous and easy to misinterpret concepts. We should recognise the cold truth and call things what they are. We should admit that the tax system is based on robbery. We can say that this robbery is necessary, but we should not call it "fair" or "justified", because it is not. There is a large gap between the necessary evil and the good, and trying to bridge that gap in order to feel better about ourselves is intellectually and emotionally dishonest.
There is a lot of violence and brutality in this world. One lion can kill hundreds animals over its lifetime. This is the harsh reality. We like to pretend that we are above that, but are we really? Our violence is still violence, however glorified and civilised its form is. When we take away someone's money to fund someone else's healthcare against their consent, we do, in essence, the same forceful act as the lion does when it chases a wounded antelope, intending to eat it against its will. We are not "fair" or "just"; we never were. Some of us can be, but as a society we are not.
I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject!
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I agree that it is dependent both on the context and on the individual system of beliefs. At the same time, I do think that certain definitions are problematic and somewhat illogical.
Regardless of our views, we all have to accept certain realities of this world. For example, gravity exists, and trying to connect moral judgment to the effects of gravity would not be very practical. A person loving skydiving may see it as unfair that gravity is too strong for him/her to jump off a plane with no equipment and walk away unharmed, but such a judgment would be purely rhetorical: whether it is fair or not, it is not going to change. We might as well accept it as an inherent part of the environment and look for fairness and unfairness in those parts of it which we can affect instead.
Similarly, we cannot do anything about the fact that some people are born in Switzerland, while others are born in North Korea. We cannot do anything about the fact that some children have parents that teach them a lot, while others have parents who do not contribute to their child's development in a meaningful way. As such, seeing these and related facts as unjust, facts that are a result of the inherent properties of nature and not human action, seems unreasonable to me.
On the other hand, in your example, where I am searching through the garbage in order to feed myself and my children, there are arguments to be made in favor of my situation being a result of other people's unfair treatment of me. One could say, for example, that their formidable skills were not understood and appreciated by the society, and as a result they could not find a more civilized way to feed themselves, not because they themselves were flawed, but because their potential clients were. This is a much more grey area than something that is just how it is and cannot be changed.
Beyond that though, as you pointed out, fairness is strongly dependent on the individual system of values and the context. Even the logical fairness can be debated, to an extent. For example, quite often in chess obviously stronger players choose to play with a handicap (such as starting a light piece down) in order to even the odds and give the other player a chance. There are even semi-official tournaments like that, where the discrepancy between the players' ratings is compensated for by a handicap enforced on the stronger player, and the handicap grows as the discrepancy grows. This can be seen as fair if the goal of the tournament is not a harsh skill-based competition, but a friendly relaxed atmosphere in which everyone has a chance, everyone is having fun, and no one feels horribly outclassed.
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Every person on Earth is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages. Strong or weak, wealthy or poor, tall or short, fast or slow, even just female or male, are all traits that vary with everyone. But this is nature. Nature contains no ability whatsoever to appraise moral questions. And most of all, nature does not act with the intention to produce or not produce a particular outcome. While we can complain about nature, and nevertheless apply the concept of fairness to it, I am strongly opposed ascribing a moral character to nature. Nature just happens.
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The universe categorically follows its own well defined system of natural law. Any variance from its laws has consequences. I’ve summarized its system of laws and reduced them down to one general law of moderation. Any variance from moderation likewise has consequences. In fact the universe will change, prevent, or destroy any excessive variance from moderation. In a sense that makes absolutely everything fair, or expected at least
The problem is timing. The universe doesn’t always equalize itself immediately to balance out the moderation equation. Similarly to the way that numerous subtle effects can amount to eventual catastrophic consequences, an imminent catastrophe often falls on the unsuspecting observer, and therefore requires time to repair or change afterward (unless entirely destroyed)
Example: the mass slaughter of Native Americans estimated by many accounts to be in the millions. Certainly, the slaughter was a result of unsuspecting Natives without time to prepare or advance technologically to prevent that catastrophic series of events from happening. Also, most people would likely agree that it was unfair to treat human beings that way. But was it?
I don’t mean to argue its morality here, just it’s macroscopic fairness. A volcano kills countless humans and the blame would be on who exactly? A volcano is a force of nature, true, but what of murderous men? Are they also not a consequence of nature? Could it be that the sum of all events prior to the mass extermination of Natives was in the positive and required a massive negative to balance it out? Or was it a lack of conflict and therefore a lack of development in Native culture which demanded a shock to accelerate their culture? Evolution occurs most rapidly in the harshest conditions after all
On to inherent skills, lucky/unlucky genetics, income inequality now. Is it unfair to be born a way without any choice? Nope. Is it unfair that some should be financially rewarded proportionally to the effort they put forth? Nope. Is it unfair that some were unfortunately meant to serve as examples or as subjects to advance medical science by being born prone to cancer or predisposed to drug addiction? No. Because all those events, tragic as they may be, are meant to be our inspiration to advance as a species
Can everyone be wealthy? Nope. Let’s say you’re given enough frosting to ice a cake with a depressingly thin layer across the entire cake. Everyone can have basically nothing. It’s fair, sure, but why even bake that cake? Capitalism is the same. Without the option to become wealthy, why even give a damn about production? Is it fair that there are billionaires while the poverse starve and live like ? Yes it is, because without the wealthy option there’d be little to no motivation for us to compete or advance in the first place
I say the saying “all is fair in love and war” extends to absolutely every corner of reality since survival and life can be viewed as a constant struggle (similar to conflict/war) and a series of opportunities to satisfy one’s inherent desires (similar to love).
Again, I’m not insinuating that there’s no place for morality in this equation. I’m basically saying that everything that happens, no matter how awful, was meant to. The reasons unfold over time due to natural law (I consider physical law and natural law the same) and are not always discernible to us. Some are so subtle they may as well not even exist at all, but likely are noticed and cause changes to occur somewhere by someone eventually
I’d also like to point out that the universe tends to kill as many birds with the same stone as it possibly can. All events are therefore precisely necessary for all other events to occur and fair in the grand scheme of things. Some are just unfortunate
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