I get confused when people use language that talks about things like “fairness”, or whether people are “deserving” of one thing or another. What does that even mean? And who or what is to say? Is it some kind of carryover from religious memetic influence? An intuition that a cosmic judge decides what people are “supposed” to get? A confused concept people invoke to try to get what they want? My inclination is to just eliminate the whole concept from my vocabulary. Is there a sensible interpretation that makes these words meaningful to atheist/agnostic consequentialists, one that eludes me right now?
Here are some things people might describe as “unfair”:
Someone shortchanges you. You buy what’s advertised as a pound of cheese, only to find out at home that it’s only four-fifths of a pound; the storekeeper had their thumb on the scale to deliberately mis-weigh it.
Someone passes off a poor-quality item as a good one. You buy a sealed box of cookies, only to find out that half of them are broken and crumbled due to mishandling at the store.
Someone entrusted with a decision abuses that trust to their advantage. The facilities manager of a company doesn’t hire the landscaping company that makes the best offer to the company, but instead the one that offers the best kickback to the facilities manager.
Someone uses a position of power to take something that isn’t theirs; especially when the victim can’t do anything about it. A boy’s visiting grandmother gives him $50 to buy a video game for his birthday; but as soon as the grandmother has left, the boy’s mother takes the money away and uses it to buy liquor for herself.
Someone abandons a responsibility, leaving it to others to cover. Four people go out to dinner together; and the bill comes to $100. One person excuses himself “to go to the restroom,” but doesn’t come back, so the others have to pay his share of the bill as well as their own.
Someone takes advantage of a person’s weak or ignorant position. A taxi driver, knowing that a tourist doesn’t know the city, takes a deliberately circuitous route to run up the meter.
Someone uses asymmetrical information to deprive others of a stronger negotiating position. An employer tells each of her employees individually that they are poor performers, easily replaceable, and unlikely to get a raise; so that they do not realize that together they are not easily replaceable and that by collective bargaining they could negotiate for higher wages.
Someone breaks agreed-upon rules to take something of value. A poker player uses a trick to put a card into play that wasn’t dealt to him — the classic “ace up the sleeve” — in order to win money that another player would have won.
Someone entrusted to do a good job instead does a bad job in order to gain an advantage some other way. A star sports player deliberately plays poorly so his team will lose a game they are strongly favored to win, allowing people who have bet against his team to win big.
Someone gets away with breaking the rules by making outside arrangements with those responsible for enforcing them. By donating to the “police charitable fund,” you get a bumper sticker that makes it less likely the police will pull you over if you break the traffic laws.
What sorts of things do you see in common among these situations?
What sorts of things do you see in common among these situations?
Your list seems a bit… biased.
Let’s throw in a couple more situations:
A homeless guy watches a millionaire drive by in a Lamborghini. “That’s not fair!” he says.
An unattractive girl watches an extremely cute girl get all the guys she wants and twirl them around her little finger. “That’s not fair!” she says.
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. “That’s not fair!” he says.
A union contractor is undercut on price by a non-union contractor. “That’s not fair!” he says.
While people say “That’s not fair” in the above examples and in these, it seems there are two different clusters of what they mean. In the first group, the objection seems to be to self-serving deception of others, particularly violation of agreements (or what social norms dictate are implicit agreements). Your examples don’t involve deception or violation of agreements (except perhaps in the case of eminent domain), and the objection is to inequality. I find it strange that the same phrase is used to refer to such different things.
I think you could say that in both groups, people are objecting because society is not distributing resources according to some norm of what qualities the resource distribution is supposed to be based on.
In the first group of examples, people are deceiving others and violating agreements, and society says that people are supposed to be rewarded for honest behavior and keeping agreements.
For the second group of examples:
The homeless person example is a bit tricky, since there are multiple different norms that they might be appealing to, but suppose that the homeless person used to be a hard worker before he got laid off and lost his home. The homeless person may then be objecting that society is supposed to reward a willingness to put in hard work, whereas he doesn’t perceive the millionaire as having worked equally hard. Or, the homeless person may think that society should provide some minimum level of resources to everyone, and the fact that he has nothing while another person has millions demonstrates a particularly blatant violation of this rule.
There’s a social ideal saying that people should be rewarded for their “internal” characteristics (like honesty) rather than “external” ones (like appearance), so the unattractive girl is objecting to the attractive girl being rewarded for something she’s not supposed to be rewarded for.
The house owner is objecting because we usually think that people should be allowed to keep the property they have worked to have, and the eminent domain claim is violating that intuition.
The union contractor is complaing because he thinks that being unionized provides benefits for the profession as a whole, and that the non-union contractor is getting a personal benefit while defecting against the rest of the profession.
Regardless of what your ideal society looks like, creating it probably requires consistently maintaining some algorithm that rewards certain behaviors while punishing others. Fairness violations could be thought of as situations where the algorithm doesn’t work, and people are being rewarded for things that an optimal society would punish them for, or vice versa.
You could also say that in both groups, there is actually an implicit agreement going on, with people being told (via e.g. social ideals and what gets praised in public) that “if you do this, then you’ll be rewarded”. If you buy into that claim, then you will feel cheated if you do what you think you should do, but then never get the reward.
Of course, the situation is made more complicated by the fact that there is no consistent, univerally-agreed upon norm of what the ideal society should be, nor of what would be the optimal algorithm for creating it. People also have an incentive to push ideals which benefit them personally, whether as a conscious strategy or as an unconscious act of motivated cognition. So it’s not surprising that people will have widely differing ideas of what “fair” behavior actually looks like.
As Bart Wilson mentions here, a century ago the word “fairness” referred exclusively to the first cluster. However, due to various political developments during the past century it has drifted and now refers to a confused mix of both.
That’s odd … I was specifically trying to choose examples that would be relatively uncontroversial — cases of cheating, betrayal of trust, abuse of power, and so on; as opposed to cases of mere inequality of outcome.
Wow, and here I thought I’d be dinged for including such mildly politicized examples as the police one and the collective-bargaining one. Instead, I get dinged for not including a bunch of stuff likely to provoke a political foofaraw about class, gender, or eminent domain? Weird.
Okay, this is getting excessively meta. I’m done here.
Instead, I get dinged for not including a bunch of stuff likely to provoke a political foofaraw
Maybe you should have been more concerned with figuring out how stuff really works and less with the possibility of provoking a political foofaraw on an internet forum...
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. “That’s not fair!” he says.
Is similar to one of fubarobfusco’s examples:
Someone uses a position of power to take something that isn’t theirs; especially when the victim can’t do anything about it. A boy’s visiting grandmother gives him $50 to buy a video game for his birthday; but as soon as the grandmother has left, the boy’s mother takes the money away and uses it to buy liquor for herself.
There is a subtle, but important difference. Many people (here and elsewhere) would consider the exercise of eminent domain powers by the state to be ethical and correct application of state powers for the betterment of society—a few suffer but for the greater good.
Yes, and if the example had involved a road or other public works project, as opposed to immediately selling the land to a developer, your objection would have been appropriate.
Oh, but the developer will provide jobs, and serve as an attractor for other businesses, and generally lift the area economically, and pay taxes into state coffers, and there will be gallivanting unicorns under the rainbows, and the people will look at the project and say “This is good”.
So whether that example fits with the first set depends on whether the state’s claim that the project is good is true, and thus whether this example it is perceived as fitting with them depends on whether the perceiver believes the claim. Similarly, the Lamborghini example fits if one accepts the Marxist theory about the origin of income inequality.
Now we come to your example of the two girls. It’s hard to make it an example of “fraud or abuse of power” (although it might be possible with enough SJ-style rhetoric about how beauty is an oppressive social construct). Notice that it is similar to the Lamborghini example otherwise, in particular it seems like the kind of thing that fits in the category whose archetypical member is the Lamborghini example.
So we can now reconstruct a history of the meaning of “unfair”. Originally, i.e., about a century ago, it meant basically “fraud, cheating, or abuse of power”. As Marxism became popular it expanded to include income inequalities, which fit that definition according to Marxist theory. Later as differences of income became one of the archetypical examples of “unfairness” and as the theory underlying its inclusion became less well-known, more things such as the two girls example came to be included in the category. See the history of verbs meaning “to be” in Romance Languages for another (less mind-killing) example of how semantic drift can produce these kinds of Frankencategories.
I think it’s simpler, without getting Marxism involved. The key word is “entitlement”. If you feel entitled to something, then if you don’t have it, someone is cheating you out of your right—it’s unfair! Doesn’t really matter who, too—nowadays people point at the universe and shout “Unfair!” :-/
The general principle seems to be that there’s an expectation of certain behavior, but one person acts deceptively in a way that harms the other people.
It’s not a theistic concept—if anything, it predates theology(some animals have a sense of fairness, for example). We build social structures to enforce it, because those structures make people better off. The details of fairness algorithms vary, but the idea that people shouldn’t be cheated is quite common.
I am with Stanislaw Lem—it’s hard to communicate in general, not just about fairness. I find so many communication scenarios in life resemble first contact situations..
Not lynching rich bankers means choosing to cooperate. Having a social landscape that’s peaceful and without much violence isn’t something to take for granted.
We sort of have an informal agreement of the proletarians not making a revolution and hanging the rich capitalists in return for society as a whole working in a way that makes everyone better of.
Rich bankers not fulfilling their side of working to make everyone in society better of is defecting from that agreement.
We sort of have an informal agreement of the proletarians not making a revolution and hanging the rich capitalists in return for society as a whole working in a way that makes everyone better of.
Marx argued that a revolution is the only way to create meaningful social change. That’s not what I’m saying in this instance.
Political power is justified in continental Europe through the social contract. Hobbes basically made the observation that every men can kill very other man in the state of nature and that we need a sovereign to wield power to prevent this from happening.
Even British Parliamentary Style debate that’s not continental in nature usually doesn’t put the same value on freedom as a political value as people in the US tend to do.
As far as the US goes the American dream is a kind of informal agreement. You had policies like the New Deal to keep everyone in society benefiting from wealth generation.
Then in the last 3 decades most of the new wealth went to the upper class instead of being distributed through the whole society as it had been in the decades before that point.
Marx argued that a revolution is the only way to create meaningful social change.
Marx argued for a lot of things. The particular thing that I have in mind here is his position that the society consists of two classes—a dispossessed (“alienated”) proletariat and fat-cat capitalists, that these two classes are locked in a struggle, and that the middle class is untenable and is being washed out. This is the framework which your grandparent comment relied on.
The notion of “middle class” is involves having more than two sides. People calling themselves “upper-middle class” is a very American thing to do. In the US ideal a person of middle class is supposed to own his own home and therefore own capital.
Workers do organize in unions and use their collective bargaining power to achieve political ends in the interests of their members. When a union makes a collective labor agreement with industry representatives you do have two clearly defined classes making an agreement with each other.
In the late 19th century a bunch of unions did support the communist ideal of revolution but most of them switched.
Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce do have political power. Money of capitalists funds a bunch of think tanks who do determine a lot of political policy. Do you think that the Chamber of Commerce isn’t representing the interest of a political class of capitalist?
Yes, individual people might opt out of being part of politics. We aren’t like the Greek who punished people by death for not picking political sides.
Lastly, I would point out that I speak about political ideas quite freely and without much of an attachment. It might be that you take a point I’m making overly seriously.
Lastly, I would point out that I speak about political ideas quite freely and without much of an attachment. It might be that you take a point I’m making overly seriously.
The usual way groups of girls deal with this is to call the girl who actually twirls around a lot of guys around her little finger a slut.
The punishment isn’t physical violence but it’s there.
The sense of fairness evolved to make our mental accounting of debts (that we owe and are owed) more salient by virtue of being a strong emotion, similar to how a strong emotion of lust makes the reproductive instinct so tangible. This comes in handy because humans are highly social and intelligent and engage in positive-sum economic transactions, so long as both sides play fair… according to your adapted sense of what’s fair. If you don’t have a sharp sense of fairness other people might walk all over you, which is not evolutionarily adaptive. See “The Moral Animal” or “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, or the chapter “Family Vaules” in Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works.”
This sense of fairness may have been co-opted at other levels, like a religious or political one, but it’s quite instinctual. Very young children have a strong sense of fairness before they could reason to it, just as they can acquire language before they could explicitly/consciously reason from grammar rules to produce grammatical sentences. It’s very engrained in our mental structure, so I think it would take quite an effort to “wipe the concept.”
So, as I’ve heard Mike Munger explain it, fairness is evolution’s solution to the equilibrium outcome selection problem. “Solution to the what?” you ask. This would be easy to explain if you’re familiar with the Edgeworth box.
In a simplified economy consisting of two people and two goods, where the two people have some combination of different tastes and different initial baskets of things. Suppose that you have 20 oranges and 5 apples, and that I have 3 oranges and 30 apples, and that we each prefer more even numbers of fruits than either extreme. We can trade apples and oranges to make each of us strictly better off, but there’s a whole continuum of possible trades that make us better off. And with your highly advanced social brain, you can tell that some of these trades are shit deals, like when I offer you 1 apple for 12 of your oranges. Even though we’d both mutually benefit, you’d be inclined to immediately counteroffer with something a closer to the middle of the continuum of mutually beneficial exchanges, or a point that benefits you more as a reprimand for my being a jerk. Dealing fairly with each other skips costly repeated bargaining, and standing up to jerks who deviate from approximate fairness preserves the norm.
This is the sort of intuition that we’re trying to test for in the Ultimatum game.
Either it’s, basically, a signal of attitude—to call something “fair” is to mean “I approve of it”—or it is a rhetorical device in the sense of a weapon in an argument.
I think that people generally have gut ideas about what fairness entails, but they are fuzzy, bendable, and subject to manipulation, both by cultural norms and by specific propaganda/arguments.
It might be that “fairness” is part of our ingrained terminal values. Of course it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t violate “fairness” when the violation is justified by positive utility elsewhere. However, beware of over-trusting your reasoning.
Tracing the memetic roots back, you could say that ‘fairness’ derives from the assumption that all humans have equal inherent worth, which I suppose you could link back to religious ideals. Natural rights follow from this same chain, but it’s not obvious to me what concepts came first and caused the others (never mind what time they were formalized).
If you want to strike it from your thinking, keep in mind that fairness is a core assumption of our social landscape, for better or worse. It can be worth keeping solely because people might hate you if you don’t.
The word “fairness” has been subject to a lot of semantic drift during the past century. Here is a blog post by Bart Wilson, describing the older definition, which frankly I think makes a lot more sense.
I get confused when people use language that talks about things like “fairness”, or whether people are “deserving” of one thing or another. What does that even mean? And who or what is to say? Is it some kind of carryover from religious memetic influence? An intuition that a cosmic judge decides what people are “supposed” to get? A confused concept people invoke to try to get what they want? My inclination is to just eliminate the whole concept from my vocabulary. Is there a sensible interpretation that makes these words meaningful to atheist/agnostic consequentialists, one that eludes me right now?
Here are some things people might describe as “unfair”:
Someone shortchanges you. You buy what’s advertised as a pound of cheese, only to find out at home that it’s only four-fifths of a pound; the storekeeper had their thumb on the scale to deliberately mis-weigh it.
Someone passes off a poor-quality item as a good one. You buy a sealed box of cookies, only to find out that half of them are broken and crumbled due to mishandling at the store.
Someone entrusted with a decision abuses that trust to their advantage. The facilities manager of a company doesn’t hire the landscaping company that makes the best offer to the company, but instead the one that offers the best kickback to the facilities manager.
Someone uses a position of power to take something that isn’t theirs; especially when the victim can’t do anything about it. A boy’s visiting grandmother gives him $50 to buy a video game for his birthday; but as soon as the grandmother has left, the boy’s mother takes the money away and uses it to buy liquor for herself.
Someone abandons a responsibility, leaving it to others to cover. Four people go out to dinner together; and the bill comes to $100. One person excuses himself “to go to the restroom,” but doesn’t come back, so the others have to pay his share of the bill as well as their own.
Someone takes advantage of a person’s weak or ignorant position. A taxi driver, knowing that a tourist doesn’t know the city, takes a deliberately circuitous route to run up the meter.
Someone uses asymmetrical information to deprive others of a stronger negotiating position. An employer tells each of her employees individually that they are poor performers, easily replaceable, and unlikely to get a raise; so that they do not realize that together they are not easily replaceable and that by collective bargaining they could negotiate for higher wages.
Someone breaks agreed-upon rules to take something of value. A poker player uses a trick to put a card into play that wasn’t dealt to him — the classic “ace up the sleeve” — in order to win money that another player would have won.
Someone entrusted to do a good job instead does a bad job in order to gain an advantage some other way. A star sports player deliberately plays poorly so his team will lose a game they are strongly favored to win, allowing people who have bet against his team to win big.
Someone gets away with breaking the rules by making outside arrangements with those responsible for enforcing them. By donating to the “police charitable fund,” you get a bumper sticker that makes it less likely the police will pull you over if you break the traffic laws.
What sorts of things do you see in common among these situations?
Your list seems a bit… biased.
Let’s throw in a couple more situations:
A homeless guy watches a millionaire drive by in a Lamborghini. “That’s not fair!” he says.
An unattractive girl watches an extremely cute girl get all the guys she wants and twirl them around her little finger. “That’s not fair!” she says.
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. “That’s not fair!” he says.
A union contractor is undercut on price by a non-union contractor. “That’s not fair!” he says.
While people say “That’s not fair” in the above examples and in these, it seems there are two different clusters of what they mean. In the first group, the objection seems to be to self-serving deception of others, particularly violation of agreements (or what social norms dictate are implicit agreements). Your examples don’t involve deception or violation of agreements (except perhaps in the case of eminent domain), and the objection is to inequality. I find it strange that the same phrase is used to refer to such different things.
I think you could say that in both groups, people are objecting because society is not distributing resources according to some norm of what qualities the resource distribution is supposed to be based on.
In the first group of examples, people are deceiving others and violating agreements, and society says that people are supposed to be rewarded for honest behavior and keeping agreements.
For the second group of examples:
The homeless person example is a bit tricky, since there are multiple different norms that they might be appealing to, but suppose that the homeless person used to be a hard worker before he got laid off and lost his home. The homeless person may then be objecting that society is supposed to reward a willingness to put in hard work, whereas he doesn’t perceive the millionaire as having worked equally hard. Or, the homeless person may think that society should provide some minimum level of resources to everyone, and the fact that he has nothing while another person has millions demonstrates a particularly blatant violation of this rule.
There’s a social ideal saying that people should be rewarded for their “internal” characteristics (like honesty) rather than “external” ones (like appearance), so the unattractive girl is objecting to the attractive girl being rewarded for something she’s not supposed to be rewarded for.
The house owner is objecting because we usually think that people should be allowed to keep the property they have worked to have, and the eminent domain claim is violating that intuition.
The union contractor is complaing because he thinks that being unionized provides benefits for the profession as a whole, and that the non-union contractor is getting a personal benefit while defecting against the rest of the profession.
Regardless of what your ideal society looks like, creating it probably requires consistently maintaining some algorithm that rewards certain behaviors while punishing others. Fairness violations could be thought of as situations where the algorithm doesn’t work, and people are being rewarded for things that an optimal society would punish them for, or vice versa.
You could also say that in both groups, there is actually an implicit agreement going on, with people being told (via e.g. social ideals and what gets praised in public) that “if you do this, then you’ll be rewarded”. If you buy into that claim, then you will feel cheated if you do what you think you should do, but then never get the reward.
Of course, the situation is made more complicated by the fact that there is no consistent, univerally-agreed upon norm of what the ideal society should be, nor of what would be the optimal algorithm for creating it. People also have an incentive to push ideals which benefit them personally, whether as a conscious strategy or as an unconscious act of motivated cognition. So it’s not surprising that people will have widely differing ideas of what “fair” behavior actually looks like.
However looking at reality, the phrase is used in all these ways, isn’t it?
As Bart Wilson mentions here, a century ago the word “fairness” referred exclusively to the first cluster. However, due to various political developments during the past century it has drifted and now refers to a confused mix of both.
Indeed it is, which is evidence for the two different types of situations feeling similar to people.
That’s odd … I was specifically trying to choose examples that would be relatively uncontroversial — cases of cheating, betrayal of trust, abuse of power, and so on; as opposed to cases of mere inequality of outcome.
That’s a bias, isn’t it? :-)
If you’re choosing examples to construct a definition from, already having a definition in mind makes the exercise pointless.
If you choose examples of fraud and abuse of power you essentially force the definition of “unfair” be “fraud and abuse of power”.
Wow, and here I thought I’d be dinged for including such mildly politicized examples as the police one and the collective-bargaining one. Instead, I get dinged for not including a bunch of stuff likely to provoke a political foofaraw about class, gender, or eminent domain? Weird.
Okay, this is getting excessively meta. I’m done here.
Maybe you should have been more concerned with figuring out how stuff really works and less with the possibility of provoking a political foofaraw on an internet forum...
Nickpick: Your third example:
Is similar to one of fubarobfusco’s examples:
There is a subtle, but important difference. Many people (here and elsewhere) would consider the exercise of eminent domain powers by the state to be ethical and correct application of state powers for the betterment of society—a few suffer but for the greater good.
Yes, and if the example had involved a road or other public works project, as opposed to immediately selling the land to a developer, your objection would have been appropriate.
Oh, but the developer will provide jobs, and serve as an attractor for other businesses, and generally lift the area economically, and pay taxes into state coffers, and there will be gallivanting unicorns under the rainbows, and the people will look at the project and say “This is good”.
If you believe what the state will tell you.
So whether that example fits with the first set depends on whether the state’s claim that the project is good is true, and thus whether this example it is perceived as fitting with them depends on whether the perceiver believes the claim. Similarly, the Lamborghini example fits if one accepts the Marxist theory about the origin of income inequality.
Now we come to your example of the two girls. It’s hard to make it an example of “fraud or abuse of power” (although it might be possible with enough SJ-style rhetoric about how beauty is an oppressive social construct). Notice that it is similar to the Lamborghini example otherwise, in particular it seems like the kind of thing that fits in the category whose archetypical member is the Lamborghini example.
So we can now reconstruct a history of the meaning of “unfair”. Originally, i.e., about a century ago, it meant basically “fraud, cheating, or abuse of power”. As Marxism became popular it expanded to include income inequalities, which fit that definition according to Marxist theory. Later as differences of income became one of the archetypical examples of “unfairness” and as the theory underlying its inclusion became less well-known, more things such as the two girls example came to be included in the category. See the history of verbs meaning “to be” in Romance Languages for another (less mind-killing) example of how semantic drift can produce these kinds of Frankencategories.
I think it’s simpler, without getting Marxism involved. The key word is “entitlement”. If you feel entitled to something, then if you don’t have it, someone is cheating you out of your right—it’s unfair! Doesn’t really matter who, too—nowadays people point at the universe and shout “Unfair!” :-/
The general principle seems to be that there’s an expectation of certain behavior, but one person acts deceptively in a way that harms the other people.
It’s not a theistic concept—if anything, it predates theology(some animals have a sense of fairness, for example). We build social structures to enforce it, because those structures make people better off. The details of fairness algorithms vary, but the idea that people shouldn’t be cheated is quite common.
I am with Stanislaw Lem—it’s hard to communicate in general, not just about fairness. I find so many communication scenarios in life resemble first contact situations..
It’s a cultural norm. If someone constantly defects in prisoner dilemma he’s violating the norm of fairness and deverses to be punished for doing so.
Except that in a lot of accusations of “unfairness” there is no obvious prisoner-dilemma-defection going on.
Not lynching rich bankers means choosing to cooperate. Having a social landscape that’s peaceful and without much violence isn’t something to take for granted.
That is not a prisoner’s dilemma.
We sort of have an informal agreement of the proletarians not making a revolution and hanging the rich capitalists in return for society as a whole working in a way that makes everyone better of.
Rich bankers not fulfilling their side of working to make everyone in society better of is defecting from that agreement.
No, we don’t have anything of that sort.
Marx was wrong. He is still wrong.
Marx argued that a revolution is the only way to create meaningful social change. That’s not what I’m saying in this instance.
Political power is justified in continental Europe through the social contract. Hobbes basically made the observation that every men can kill very other man in the state of nature and that we need a sovereign to wield power to prevent this from happening.
Even British Parliamentary Style debate that’s not continental in nature usually doesn’t put the same value on freedom as a political value as people in the US tend to do.
As far as the US goes the American dream is a kind of informal agreement. You had policies like the New Deal to keep everyone in society benefiting from wealth generation.
Then in the last 3 decades most of the new wealth went to the upper class instead of being distributed through the whole society as it had been in the decades before that point.
Marx argued for a lot of things. The particular thing that I have in mind here is his position that the society consists of two classes—a dispossessed (“alienated”) proletariat and fat-cat capitalists, that these two classes are locked in a struggle, and that the middle class is untenable and is being washed out. This is the framework which your grandparent comment relied on.
It was wrong and is wrong.
I don’t think saying “That is not a prisoner’s dilemma” is a useful way of communicating “those players don’t exist.”
Also, the topic at hand is what do people mean by “fair,” not whether the situations they do or do not call fair are real situations.
The notion of “middle class” is involves having more than two sides. People calling themselves “upper-middle class” is a very American thing to do. In the US ideal a person of middle class is supposed to own his own home and therefore own capital.
Workers do organize in unions and use their collective bargaining power to achieve political ends in the interests of their members. When a union makes a collective labor agreement with industry representatives you do have two clearly defined classes making an agreement with each other.
In the late 19th century a bunch of unions did support the communist ideal of revolution but most of them switched.
Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce do have political power. Money of capitalists funds a bunch of think tanks who do determine a lot of political policy. Do you think that the Chamber of Commerce isn’t representing the interest of a political class of capitalist?
Yes, individual people might opt out of being part of politics. We aren’t like the Greek who punished people by death for not picking political sides.
Lastly, I would point out that I speak about political ideas quite freely and without much of an attachment. It might be that you take a point I’m making overly seriously.
Ah. OK then.
How would you apply that to Lumifer’s second example?
The usual way groups of girls deal with this is to call the girl who actually twirls around a lot of guys around her little finger a slut. The punishment isn’t physical violence but it’s there.
The sense of fairness evolved to make our mental accounting of debts (that we owe and are owed) more salient by virtue of being a strong emotion, similar to how a strong emotion of lust makes the reproductive instinct so tangible. This comes in handy because humans are highly social and intelligent and engage in positive-sum economic transactions, so long as both sides play fair… according to your adapted sense of what’s fair. If you don’t have a sharp sense of fairness other people might walk all over you, which is not evolutionarily adaptive. See “The Moral Animal” or “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, or the chapter “Family Vaules” in Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works.”
This sense of fairness may have been co-opted at other levels, like a religious or political one, but it’s quite instinctual. Very young children have a strong sense of fairness before they could reason to it, just as they can acquire language before they could explicitly/consciously reason from grammar rules to produce grammatical sentences. It’s very engrained in our mental structure, so I think it would take quite an effort to “wipe the concept.”
So, as I’ve heard Mike Munger explain it, fairness is evolution’s solution to the equilibrium outcome selection problem. “Solution to the what?” you ask. This would be easy to explain if you’re familiar with the Edgeworth box.
In a simplified economy consisting of two people and two goods, where the two people have some combination of different tastes and different initial baskets of things. Suppose that you have 20 oranges and 5 apples, and that I have 3 oranges and 30 apples, and that we each prefer more even numbers of fruits than either extreme. We can trade apples and oranges to make each of us strictly better off, but there’s a whole continuum of possible trades that make us better off. And with your highly advanced social brain, you can tell that some of these trades are shit deals, like when I offer you 1 apple for 12 of your oranges. Even though we’d both mutually benefit, you’d be inclined to immediately counteroffer with something a closer to the middle of the continuum of mutually beneficial exchanges, or a point that benefits you more as a reprimand for my being a jerk. Dealing fairly with each other skips costly repeated bargaining, and standing up to jerks who deviate from approximate fairness preserves the norm.
This is the sort of intuition that we’re trying to test for in the Ultimatum game.
“Fairness” generally means one out of two things.
Either it’s, basically, a signal of attitude—to call something “fair” is to mean “I approve of it”—or it is a rhetorical device in the sense of a weapon in an argument.
I think that people generally have gut ideas about what fairness entails, but they are fuzzy, bendable, and subject to manipulation, both by cultural norms and by specific propaganda/arguments.
According to Moral Foundations Theory, fairness is one of the innate moral instincts.
According to Scott Adams, fairness was invented so children and idiots can participate in arguments.
I think we have a fairness instinct mostly so we can tell clever stories about why our desire for more stuff is more noble than greed.
It might be that “fairness” is part of our ingrained terminal values. Of course it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t violate “fairness” when the violation is justified by positive utility elsewhere. However, beware of over-trusting your reasoning.
Tracing the memetic roots back, you could say that ‘fairness’ derives from the assumption that all humans have equal inherent worth, which I suppose you could link back to religious ideals. Natural rights follow from this same chain, but it’s not obvious to me what concepts came first and caused the others (never mind what time they were formalized).
If you want to strike it from your thinking, keep in mind that fairness is a core assumption of our social landscape, for better or worse. It can be worth keeping solely because people might hate you if you don’t.
The word “fairness” has been subject to a lot of semantic drift during the past century. Here is a blog post by Bart Wilson, describing the older definition, which frankly I think makes a lot more sense.