Lake comments on The Bedrock of Fairness - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 July 2008 06:00AM

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Comment author: Lake 03 July 2008 08:23:06PM 0 points [-]

Eliezer: Are you looking for a new definition of "fairness" which would reconcile the partisans of existing definitions? Or are you just pointing out that this is a sort of damned-if-you-do, damned if-you-don't problem, and that any rule for establishing fairness will piss somebody or other off? If the latter, from the point of view of your larger project, why not just insert a dummy answer for this question - pick any definition that grabs you - and see how it fits with the rest of what you need to work out. Or work through several different obviously computable answers.

As fair as it goes, it seems plausible-ish that fairness has to do with equality of *something* - resources, or opportunity, or utility, or whatever - but I doubt whether there's any general agreement over what should be equalised, and I don't see the value of descending to a meta level of discussion to sort the question out. Meta-discussions would have to be answerable to fairness anyway, if they were to be fair, and that looks circular. So why not cut the knot and pick whatever answer is nearest to hand?