An ongoing debate between M.Planck and myself:
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MCP:
I think fairness is a human concern; it does not occur naturally (and thus government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness). One of the problems I have with the libertarian perspective is that it assumes that fairness does occur naturally, that the natural outcome is the definition of fair. I don't believe this position can withstand scrutiny (although it can pass a casual examination, which accounts for why there are so many proto-libertarians about).
At a similar level, I define justice as fairness; to me, the two concepts are largely indistinguishable. A fair act is a just one, and vice versa.
Is there anything here you disagree with?
EMC:
Indeed there is, but let’s begin with what is not so much a disagreement as a problem. What is fairness? We cannot really debate the applicability, characteristics, or even the coherence of a concept without at least a rough-and-ready definition. It is interesting but not really sufficient to just say that justice and fairness are synonymous.
If one resorts to the relevant Oxford definition, one sees:
Fair 1.
treating people equally without favouritism or discrimination:
the group has achieved fair and equal representation for all its members
a fairer distribution of wealth
Just or appropriate in the circumstances:
to be fair, this subject poses special problems
it’s not fair to take it out on her
Is this a sufficient definition for our discussion or would you like to propose a different one that better captures your intent?
MCP:
This definition is close, if one understands that favoritism includes favoring one's self.
I use fairness in the Rawlsian sense. John Rawls describes the Original Position: you have to decide on the outcome of a dispute before you know which party of the dispute you belong to. Imagine being asked to allocate starting resources to team Red and team Blue before you know which team you will be playing on.
This imaginary exercise is how humans determine fairness. While it can be difficult to pretend to be blind to one's own identity, it is not impossible; indeed, the ability to do so is what defines us as social beings. "Theory of Mind" is the ability to imagine being someone else, and everyone but autistics has it (sociopaths have it too; they can imagine acting or thinking like someone else, they just can't feel like someone else).
So all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement (of rules, resources, etc.) is fair, in the sense that they would be equally happy accepting any portion of that arrangement. A formal definition is useful, but only while keeping in mind that determining fairness is a semantic process, like language, rather than a syntactical operation, like math. As is sometimes claimed of art, you know it when you see it.
Of course, people have to look out for their own best interests; but that is a statement about actions, not about metaphysical determinations. It just so happens that fairness generally favors our best interests (but of course, this is not a surprise, since we evolved our ability to determine fairness precisely because such an ability favored our best interests!)
EMC:
Thank you for providing us with a working definition. While I don’t want to get mired down in a debate about the merits of the definition itself, I will observe that the definition on offer is essentially Kant’s categorical imperative with the word “moral” scratched out and the word “fair” penciled in. (It is apparently a valid philosophical project to find new and elaborate ways of restating the golden rule periodically -- but that is definitely a digression.) Let us now return to the original topic.
You stated in your first set of assertions:
“I think fairness is a human concern; it does not occur naturally (and thus government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness).”
Then, in the elaboration of your chosen definition, you stated:
“…So all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement (of rules, resources, etc.) is fair…”
This is contradictory on its face. If all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement is fair, then fairness occurs in nature. What else could “innately” mean? It may be that fairness is not applied uniformly or necessarily, but you cannot hold the second position without negating the first.
One possible difference between our views is that I believe that the very categories of a natural realm and a human realm cause a great deal of mischief. Humans are a part of nature and thus everything we do is natural. What one achieves by making the distinction is little more than a sort of vestigial Cartesian dualism, where the world is one thing, and our mental activity quite another. My position, to apply this idea to the present topic, is that government itself is just another process that arises spontaneously from a certain kind of organism under certain circumstances. We perceive governmental organization and policies as the products of conscious planning, but it is self evident that much of what happens as the result of such organization and policies is unintended and surprising.
Your view that “government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness” is wholeheartedly normative rather than descriptive. It is what you want government to be, rather than what government actually is. Even the most cursory look at history will show that governments are not fair by necessity. Indeed, by almost any definition of fairness most governments are unfair. From a purely descriptive perspective, government is best viewed as that institution within a society which maintains its internal and external stability through a relative monopoly on the application of force. While governments can do many other things as well, they must all preserve themselves and a substantial fraction of the population over which they are sovereign. Those that fail at this task cease to exist. While fairness may be a very laudable thing, plenty of states have prospered without making it a central theme.
MCP:
Doh.
“This is contradictory on its face. If all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement is fair, then fairness occurs in nature. What else could “innately” mean? It may be that fairness is not applied uniformly or necessarily, but you cannot hold the second position without negating the first.”
I don't understand this objection. It's like warmth; humans innately understand what warmth means, they require it at some level for survival and at another level for comfortable survival; occasionally the natural world provides the right amount of warmth; but it is not much of an exaggeration to say that human technology exists to provide warmth when nature fails to do so. In exactly the same way, fairness is a state of being that humans generally have to provide for themselves.
The ability to comprehend warmth (i.e. the difference between too much heat and too little) does not guarantee the existence of warmth; imagining ideal states of existence, and then working to create them, is what human beings do. The pursuit of warmth and the pursuit of fairness look very much alike; as we get better at the technology, we succeed at producing it more reliably.
“One possible difference between our views is that I believe that the very categories of a natural realm and a human realm cause a great deal of mischief. Humans are a part of nature and thus everything we do is natural.”
This cannot be a source of difference, as I reject the notion of non-naturalism even more resolutely than most philosophers (even to the point of asserting that ideas do not exist unless they are instantiated by physical matter, such as neuronal arrangements).
“My position, to apply this idea to the present topic, is that government itself is just another process that arises spontaneously from a certain kind of organism under certain circumstances. We perceive governmental organization and policies as the products of conscious planning, but it is self evident that much of what happens as the result of such organization and policies is unintended and surprising.”
Yes; in fact, the same is true of human activity at every level, right down to making dinner. You've just described how the brain works to create personality.
“Your view that ‘government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness’ is wholeheartedly normative rather than descriptive. It is what you want government to be, rather than what government actually is.”
It's like saying "fire-making is best viewed as a human institution designed to create warmth." It's what we want from fire-making; it's why we invented it; the fact that it occasionally fails, falls short, or does something else does not really detract from the essential definition.
When something is an artificial construct - that is, a part of the self-feedback loop between observed reality and the model of reality humans create in their head - I think a normative description is appropriate. Government does not exist "in nature;" that is to say, like fire-making, it is an activity that relies on uniquely human mental constructs. (Even this is a simplification; it could be argued that some animals form limited governments, just as some animals make and use simple tools. But for general discourse the distinction between artificial and natural basically means people vs. everything else). (This also differentiates between government and eusocial arrangements; chimps might have a form of government; ants do not.)
"Even the most cursory look at history will show that governments are not fair by necessity. Indeed, by almost any definition of fairness most governments are unfair."
Now we come to a legitimate difference: you assert that governments are not fair by necessity, and I completely disagree. They are fair by necessity; they exist solely to create that fairness. So, how can I square this assertion with the plainly observable facts of history?To deal with the lesser point first: by an exacting definition of warmth, most people are not. The vast bulk of the planet is either too cold or too hot much of the time. But no one would deny that warmth is necessary and that fire-making serves a crucial function in the production of warmth; nor would anyone deny that we are markedly better at making warmth than we used to be. In the same way, governments have become generally more fair. The fact that none of them are ideally fair is no more significant than the fact that few households are ideally warm.
As for necessity: the entire point of government is to produce fairness between parties. When every agent operates off of pure, immediate strength, you have anarchy, which is an inherently unstable state. Eventually the most powerful agents reach some kind of agreement, which includes allocating resources, adjudicating disputes, and punishing transgressors of the agreement. Viola - government! And a government of fairness, insomuch as the various parties to the agreement have entered into it voluntarily, viewing it as the best possible arrangement for a future in which they are not certain which role they will play. Of course, they fully expect to still possess the powers of an agent; but they may not be of the same strength they are now, or allied with the same factions, etc. So they want an arrangement that preserves their position even in the face of minor changes.
When mobsters get together to settle a turf war, they talk about strength; but they also talk about fairness. Merely being the strongest mobster is not enough to convince the others to allow you open license; after all, if they combined, they would form a stronger force. However, they prefer not to combine as it would diminish each of them. So the discussion is not purely about numbers of gunmen; it is about an arrangement that allows for some flexibility but not too much. And if you watch these discussions as a fly on the wall, you will see fairness repeatedly introduced as a deciding principal in disputes between equals.
The reason you perceive government as so wildly unfair is because you are measuring government as a tool for creating fairness for people. This is not what it does; it creates fairness for agents, i.e. the active participants of the government.
However, the story of democracy has been the story of the ever-expanding franchise, including more and more groups as agents in the political process. And this form of government has repeatedly won in real-world struggles against smaller franchises (though not necessarily smaller societies).
So, given the history of broad-based franchises defeating narrow-based ones (Lincoln freeing the slaves to raise manpower for defeating the South, for example), it is not unreasonable to conclude that governments have all the fairness necessary to their survival; and that this creates a feedback loop that leads to expanding quantities of fairness. Plenty of states prospered with limited fairness, but only until they were faced with competition from more fair states.
And biologically speaking, humans are basically equal. Thus the broadest possible franchise is political equality for everyone. This is why we are not doomed to a future of tyranny; all forms of government are not equal, high levels of fairness make stronger societies which defeat weaker societies, thus raising the average level of fairness. It's like a technological arms race, because it is.
EMC:
Fairness is not like warmth. Warmth is ultimately reducible to neat, reasonably precise, physical terms. We can say a human being will be comfortable within a certain range of temperatures and can survive within a somewhat greater range, making allowances for individual differences on the margins. Fairness is a moral rather than a physical entity. It is physical in the important sense that it requires the existence of a relationship between at least two physical beings to exist, but it is non-physical in the sense that you cannot build a fairness meter out of hardware or build a machine to fission fairness into smaller parts. (I believe that this is also the difference between ideas and technologies, but I don’t want to digress into a side debate over that issue.)
By your definition, fairness quite subjective. Having helped yourself to the “you know it when you see it” caveat, you can hardly deny this. I will not disagree. Consider the example of affirmative action. If one believes that affirmative action is fair, then one believes that one’s membership in a certain historically disadvantaged group merits a countervailing dispensation on, for example, civil service exams. If one believes that affirmative action is unfair, then one believes that civil service exams should be blind to the matter of group affiliation. Both of these positions are fair in the Rawlsian sense you outlined earlier – a hypothetical individual might hold either as an acceptable universal law – but the two positions are quite incompatible. If we argue about whether 72 or 68°F is the ideal temperature, we are at least arguing about the same ontological stuff, whereas in the affirmative action example we are not.
Even putting this objection aside, following your analogy back to your original statements would imply you meant the following:
Although human beings are innately capable of assessing whether or not a situation is fair, they are incapable of acting fairly as individuals.
If they could act fairly as individuals, then, again, fairness would exist in nature. The only way I can see out of this trap is to make the definitional claim that fairness can only exist at some social level above the individual. You might want to go there, but it was not a part of your proposed definition. But let’s move on.
Your position that government is fair by necessity rests on an assumption that the resolution of a conflict by any means other than the direct application of force is an instance of fairness. This is a false assumption. Among human beings, as among most animals, the actual application of force among near equals is relatively rare. An even fight is a dangerous thing for both players. Rather, barring desperate conditions or psychotic participants, conflicts are usually settled with accommodations taking relative power onto consideration, but not relying on overt force. The stronger prevail, generally, but not at an intolerable cost to the weaker. Nothing in this process requires fairness.
Consider your negotiating mobsters. If their accommodations were based on fairness as you originally defined it, any subsequent fluctuations in one’s ability to apply force would be irrelevant. Motivated by fairness, a newly dominant mobster would not exploit a temporarily weaker one. They would behave as good Kantian moral agents, at least toward one another. If, on the other hand, their accommodations were based merely on immediate relative capacities, they would renegotiate in response to changing conditions, or possibly even resort to force if they could do so without risk. In the real word, the latter is the norm rather than the exception. Treaties are broken, small states abused, weaker parties exploited, etc. – not always and necessarily, but with unsurprising regularity. That which looks like fairness is, as often as not, nothing more than a temporary balance of opposing strengths. It is not only possible, but common, to construct elaborate institutions, including governments, on exactly such a basis.
You go on:
“The reason you perceive government as so wildly unfair is because you are measuring government as a tool for creating fairness for people. This is not what it does; it creates fairness for agents, i.e. the active participants of the government.”
This makes hash of your already weak definition. If you can be fair -- just not to politically inconsequential people – then the Nazis were fair and slavery was fair. I understand the distinction you are making sociologically (and have pointed it out myself in other contexts) but linking this sense of fairness with your earlier definition is incoherent. What sense does it make to say: “…you have to decide on the outcome of a dispute before you know which party of the dispute you belong to” – except that you know you won’t be among the weakest parties? Stripped of the concept of a universal law, the categorical imperative is not worth uttering.
Finally, we have your hypotheses of the self-expanding franchise and the primacy of democratic states. For the latter proposition I could offer numerous counter examples, as well as arguments showing why the picture is not that simple, but suffice to say for now that I interpret history differently. We can return to this latter if you wish. On the matter of the self-expanding franchise I also disagree in several ways, but will limit myself, for now, to the most obvious.
Meaningful democratic participation is not simple matter of having the right to vote. It is not a matter of flipping a switch, like the democracy technology in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. Rather, meaningful democratic participation requires a polity which is both educated enough to understand what they are voting for and engaged enough to take the process seriously. Voting for candidate X because he is the coolest or because you feel in your heart that he loves you more than candidate Y is not meaningful participation in government -- it’s a testimony to the power of advertising. Read a few pages of the Lincoln-Douglas debate or de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America then watch a few minutes of campaign commercials or a modern presidential “debate” and you will see just how stark the contrast is. While we (speaking here specifically of the US) have expanded the franchise considerably in the last 150 years, the political consciousness of the electorate has degenerated along with the rest of the culture. Whether one approves of democracy as a system of government or not, one must surely concede that it is only meaningful if the electorate is politically conscious, not only of their own interests but also of the basic requirements of the system itself. When people begin to feel that their own interests are best served by signing their liberties away to smarter people they neither know nor influence, the breadth of the franchise becomes a rather pathetic joke.
MCP:
Hmm. I did not expect so much difficulty in establishing such a basic premise; that is, that fairness exists, is obtainable, desirable, and the basis for good government.
Perhaps language is a better metaphor than warmth: Fairness exists in nature in exactly the same sense that language does; that is, it is a biologically driven behavior that assists human survival. Like language, it is innate, universal, and something we've gotten better at over time. Language is experienced subjectively, but it also has an objective component: not any collection of sounds constitutes a language.
Of course the mobsters are unfair to the rubes and marks; their Rawlsian decisions are made by deciding disputes between mobsters; i.e. essentially equal parties. Farmers can construct fair agreements without concerning themselves about the rights of the cows. Fairness was a huge concern for slave owners - as evidenced by the lawsuits they brought against each other. They just didn't extend political franchise (and hence fairness) to the slaves. They did not consider them worthy of political franchise.
The freedom we enjoy today is a direct result of extending the political franchise to wider circles. Our democracy is better educated and more responsive than any that has gone before it; the Athenian farmers were no wiser than our country bumpkins, and the Athenian polity was as addicted to cheap theater as ours. But literacy, mathematics, basic science, are all more widely disseminated today than ever before. And most important, the idea that all humans are essentially equal - that women are as deserving of fairness as men, for instance - is more widespread than ever in history. This leads to governments that consider all of their subjects to be citizens, not just some of them. (Hence my claim that freedom is impossible without equality.)
It is true that there is no perfect fairness, and that the amount of fairness in the world ebbs and flows. Nonetheless, it is a simple matter to determine that more people are treated more fairly now than the century before (the mere matter of women's emancipation settles the issue instantly, as it concerns 50% of the human population), and that this statement is true almost no matter what century of recorded history you live in.
To view every human interaction as merely a contest of strength is to fundamentally misread human nature. Humans voluntarily limit the exercise of their power out of a consideration for unknown futures, the value of reputation, and an innate sense of moral duty. This is what makes us social animals, and not solitary predators. Nietzsche wrote morality for tigers, not humans; he was a fantasist more than a philosopher. The mere act of making the kind of calculations of strength you describe is itself sub-optimal, insomuch as it is a vast expenditure of energy for the chance to make a fatal miscalculation. People don't do that; instead, they operate off of heuristic principles that make broad assumptions and cover a wide variety of general cases. I.e., fairness.
EMC:
I can see that some clarifications are in order. To begin with, I am not disputing the existence of a Rawlsian sense of fairness, nor am I disputing that real human beings can, and sometimes do, act in conscious accordance with that principle. What I am disputing is the assertion that government is Rawlsian by necessity – or, frankly, that it is even Rawlsian typically. I am also disputing that fairness itself is a sufficiently stable and robust concept to survive serious scrutiny.
Let me address the latter first. My position is that there really is no workable objective standard of fairness, and that the Rawlsian formulation, like the golden rule and categorical imperative before it, ultimately yields little more than a projection of the cultural values of the individual implementing the rule.
Consider a 17th century witch burning. If we accept that the beliefs and intentions of the officials who conducted such executions were as they themselves stated, they were being entirely fair by Rawlsian standards. They believed that the witch’s soul might saved in the course of this horrible process, and would not have granted themselves any special exemption from it. There were, in fact, several cases in which judges who had condemned witches to the flames were themselves burned for witchcraft. Are we prepared to say that deliberately burning a person alive might be fair under certain circumstances? More, it would be incorrect to assume witch burning is merely an odd exception to our rule – a special case of ignorant religious fanaticism. The Soviets of the late 20th century and, I believe, the Chinese of today have both been prepared to treat political dissent as a form of mental illness in some instances, treatable with heavy medication and behavioral therapy. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was also treated with drugs and behavioral therapy – not in a totalitarian state, but in the U.S. I have no reason to believe that the majority of the people who were carried out such treatments were not being Rawlsian fair – which is to say, that they believed that they were subjecting others to treatments that they themselves would have been reasonably liable to under the same circumstances. One always assumes one’s own values are correct, thus, in a Rawlsian sense, it is always fair to compel another to adhere to them for his or her own good.
My other claim – that governments are not fair by necessity – would hardly seem to need proof. Still, since you have specified that by fair in the context of government you only mean fair within the sphere of government’s own agents, not fairness toward the governed, perhaps we do need a few additional comments to cover this very attenuated sense of fairness.
I believe it self-evident to any American, whichever side of the political divide he or she happens to be on, that the present Congress is not driven chiefly by considerations of mutual fairness. Fairness may be expressed in the actions of individual members in individuals instances, but the dominant theme in Congress is now, and historically usually has been, one of struggle between opposing forces. A power struggle, mediated by law and custom but not by moral sentiment. To call this ongoing wrangling over power an instance of fairness is like calling a hurricane an expression of God’s love. If you actually see it that way, we do indeed have a difference.
It is also evident that we draw very different lessons from history, and that dispute would probably be endless. I am not disagreeing that universal suffrage is a fine achievement, but I am disputing that it trumps all other considerations. The Soviets had as broad a suffrage as we do. Virtually every adult in the Soviet Union had the right to vote -- for or against the party’s proposed head of state. Perhaps for regional leaders to, though I am less sure of this. However, I would not call what actually happened in the Soviet Union meaningful participation in government. There is a difference between involvement in government in a real sense and in a ritual sense, and there is a continuum of possibilities between the two extremes.
You said:
“…the Athenian farmers were no wiser than our country bumpkins…”
Having lived and worked in a rural area for many years I find this particular offhand prejudice noxious and unjustified. You could hardly have invented a better instance of the cultural subjectivity of fairness. Fairness, in practice, rarely extends much further than the edges of one’s own culture – in this case, an urban culture that takes its own superiority as a given.
MCP:
Ironically, your position seems to be the classic Leftist position - that human nature is merely a product of culture, infinitely malleable, a tabula rasa. This has been scientifically demonstrated to be false. There is a sense of fairness - and many other facets of human nature - that transcend culture, arising as they do from a biological substrate.
Your examples do not detract from Rawlsian fairness. They simply point out that superior understanding of the real world allows a better approximation of fairness; thus, the knowledge that there are no witches improves Salem society. But this is the heart of my thesis - that increased knowledge leads to more fairness!
I also take issue with your Marxist (again, the irony!) reading of Congress. It has not been merely a dialectical power struggle for most of history. Both of us are actually old enough to remember when the major complaint about American politics was that there was only one party; that the Ds and Rs were essentially identical in their policies. Both of us have lived through the increasing polarization of politics, and a realistic assessment shows that the partisanship is much more on one side than the other. There was a time when Ds & Rs routinely came together for the perceived good of the nation; an event as recent as the Iraq war was a largely bi-partisan affair. The gentleman's agreements that held vis-à-vis cabinet appointments (up until the Reagan era), the fact that the now dysfunctional Senate was once functional with the same rules, and so on, all point to a time when the idea of a united struggle - dare I call it patriotism - was the norm.
And I don't understand your final comment. I was merely pointing out that the hoi polloi of humanity has not biologically changed (nor, it should be taken as given, the aristocracy). Interpreting some kind of prejudice in my statement strikes me as not only unnecessary, but wholly bizarre.
I do not understand how you square your position with the biological facts of human nature or my assertion that government is designed to produce fairness - as understood by its members - between its members. Nor do I understand why you keep returning to fairness as an ideal for all parties when I keep specifically limiting it to an arrangement between powers. If the Salem judges would have submitted to the same treatment, then yes, they were being fair. The only sin they committed was being wrong about the state of the world. Our liberty is a product of both innate fairness and earned wisdom.
EMC:
Again, I am not asserting that fairness, in some Rawlsian sense, does not exist – nor that human beings are infinitely malleable. I completely agree that human beings have certain genetic underpinnings that hold their malleability within certain limits. Neither am I asserting that fairness, as we have defined it, does not play a significant role in human behavior. I am asserting, quite specifically, that your claim that government is essentially and necessarily fair is false. My point about Congress was that, if you believe it is necessarily fair – then you must believe it is operating fairly now. Clearly, you don’t. I grant that Congress has fluctuations of cooperation and opposition (though I disagree that the Iraq war resolution is an exemplar of fairness) – but that is not the point. If it is substantially unfair now, it cannot be fair by necessity.
I agree, with equal amusement, that my support of what are generally conservative principles proceeds from a species of Marxist analysis. It is perhaps just as amusing, though, that your leftist position is grounded on Kantian idealism! Ironic though this all might be, philosophical jokes do not get many laughs. Such distinctions leave most people cold.
More telling than my witch trial example are, I think, the Soviet and Chinese dissident examples. There we have Rawlsian cases which we would clearly see as abusive, but which we cannot explain away by any straightforward lack of simple concrete facts. Rather, in the Soviet-Chinese cases, we are dealing with actions based on ideological presumptions. While I don’t think it’s possible to save a witch’s soul (since I don’t believe that souls exist) I do think it is possible to change person’s ideology with drugs and behavioral therapy. In some cases, I’m sure the Communists “cured” their “patients.” The point here is that it is possible to force others to conform to one’s own particular cultural standards – whatever they might be – by law and other coercive means, and be completely Rawlsian fair. The problem is, at that point, practically anything short of direct exploitation is admitted into the realm of fairness. So long as you consider a person as a person this definition gives you license to remake him, or her, in your own image.
“…Interpreting some kind of prejudice in my statement strikes me as not only unnecessary, but wholly bizarre.”
I am reasonably sure that you would not use the terms “fag,” “nigger,” or “kike” to describe human beings. That you are comfortable using the term “bumpkin” is an indicator that you are confident that “bumpkins” are not part of your culture, and that you can assume without reflection that no one in your culture will be offended by the slur. It is by no means a unique or an interesting prejudice, but it is an apt example of the kind of prejudice that devolves from cultural allegiance. Since I believe the problem with Rawlsian fairness is that it merely echoes one’s own cultural values, an instance of cultural prejudice is entirely relevant in demonstrating that weakness.
