shminux comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Tags: seq_epistemology metaethics fairness

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Comment author: shminux 10 December 2012 04:00:55PM *  2 points [-]

Scott Adams on the same subject, the morning after your post:

fairness isn't a real thing. It's just a psychological phenomenon that is easily manipulated.

[...]

To demonstrate my point that fairness is about psychology and not the objective world, I'll ask you two questions and I'd like you to give me the first answer that feels "fair" to you. Don't read the other comments until you have your answer in your head.

Here are the questions:

A retired businessman is worth one billion dollars. Thanks to his expensive lifestyle and hobbies, his money supports a number of people, such as his chauffeur, personal assistant, etc. Please answer these two questions:

  1. How many jobs does a typical retired billionaire (with one billion in assets) support just to service his lifestyle? Give me your best guess.

  2. How many jobs should a retired billionaire (with one billion in assets) create for you to feel he has done enough for society such that his taxes should not go up? Is ten jobs enough? Twenty?

Comment author: drnickbone 12 December 2012 09:33:51PM *  1 point [-]

I suppose one obvious response to this is "however much utility the billionaire can create by spending his wealth, a very much higher level of utility would be created by re-distributing his billions to lots of other people, who need it much more than he does". Money has a declining marginal utility, much like everything else.

Naturally, if you try to redistribute all wealth then no-one will have any incentive to create it in the first place, but this just creates a utilitarian trade-off on how much to tax, what to tax, and who to tax. It's still very likely that the billionaire will lose in this trade-off.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 04:59:20AM 1 point [-]

fairness isn't a real thing. It's just a psychological phenomenon that is easily manipulated.

I could replace "fairness" with "truth" in that sentence and come up with equally good examples.

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