fubarobfusco comments on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Here are some things people might describe as "unfair":
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:
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:
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.
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.