One very funny consecuence of defining “fair” as “that which everyone agrees to be “fair”“ is that if you indeed could convince everyone of the correctness of that definition, nobody could ever know what IS “fair”, since they would look at their definition of “fair”, which is “that which everyone agrees to be “fair””, then they would look at what everyone does agree to be fair, and conclude that “that which everyone agrees to be “fair” is “that which everyone agrees to be “fair”″”, and so on!
An, I have no idea what you are saying here.
If a deal is fair when all participants freely agree to the deal, then there you are.
Are you saying that everybody has to agree to this definition of fairness before anybody can use it? I don’t see why. People use the word “fair” when they are talking about deals. We don’t all have to agree on the meaning of a word before any of us can use the word in conversation. If that was necessary, what would we say?
If some people freely agree to a deal but they still say it isn’t fair—perhaps it isn’t fair to God, or to the pixies, or to somebody in Mali who isn’t a party to the deal anyway—then they can say that. Whether or not we all agree that the deal is fair, still we have a deal we all agree to.
What point is there to build an infinite regress of definitions? What is it good for?
One very funny consecuence of defining “fair” as “that which everyone agrees to be “fair”“ is that if you indeed could convince everyone of the correctness of that definition, nobody could ever know what IS “fair”, since they would look at their definition of “fair”, which is “that which everyone agrees to be “fair””, then they would look at what everyone does agree to be fair, and conclude that “that which everyone agrees to be “fair” is “that which everyone agrees to be “fair”″”, and so on!
An, I have no idea what you are saying here.
If a deal is fair when all participants freely agree to the deal, then there you are.
Are you saying that everybody has to agree to this definition of fairness before anybody can use it? I don’t see why. People use the word “fair” when they are talking about deals. We don’t all have to agree on the meaning of a word before any of us can use the word in conversation. If that was necessary, what would we say?
If some people freely agree to a deal but they still say it isn’t fair—perhaps it isn’t fair to God, or to the pixies, or to somebody in Mali who isn’t a party to the deal anyway—then they can say that. Whether or not we all agree that the deal is fair, still we have a deal we all agree to.
What point is there to build an infinite regress of definitions? What is it good for?