George Rebane
From the dictionary:
- Fairness: “the state, condition, or quality of being fair, or free from bias or injustice: evenhandedness.” “the quality of making judgments that are free from discrimination.”
- Justice: “the quality of being fair and reasonable”
- Legal: “appointed, established, or authorized by law; deriving authority from law; permitted by law; lawful.
We all a hear a lot about things like ‘fair share’ and ‘social justice’ today. How many people using or listening to these notions really have any, and I do mean any, understanding of what they mean in the greater scheme of our society. From my experience and the daily round, the answer is a firm NO. Since in these pages I and most of our readers have a penchant for more semantical precision in their lexicon, I want to expand on what I believe are the utilitarian ways to think about and use such words.
First of all, each of these notions – fair, just, legal - must have meanings that justify their being composed of distinguishable literal strings. Else why have them if they mean the same thing? Here we’re interested in meanings that maximally distinguish, and thereby support a richer capacity to think, analyze, and express.
Before unpacking some more precise semantics, we again recall nobelist Kenneth Arrow who showed a long time ago that when there are more than two alternatives from which to choose that satisfy certain criteria, then there is no ideal or fair way to select among such alternative solutions (or candidates) that are guaranteed to satisfy, say, three people, let alone a group. Arrow identified the criteria in his Impossibility Theorem (more here). Subsequently, economist Amartya Sen identified the ‘liberal paradox’ which holds that in the distribution of goods and services within a society/economy there is always conflict between any such distribution policy and individual freedom. This paradox was explained by Frederic Bastiat in his Triangle of Rights to security, liberty, and property, the weakening of any one immediately weakens the other two.
Fairness involves the division or allocation of something that is seen as existentially limited. In this sense the above dictionary definition is worthless. The recipients of a fair act are also seen to deserve their share of what is to be divided or allocated according to their previous actions, conditions they find themselves in, and/or membership in some deserving group. And, of course, those dividing, allocating, or judging such divisions and allocations all have different beliefs and knowledge about the designated recipient(s). So everyone comes to a fair division problem with their own subjective sense of what would be fair.
Further complications in applying fairness arise if the recipients have some degree of say in how the division or allocation takes place. This level of agency can range from absolute power to send the fair-minded granters back to the drawing board, all the way to being powerless supplicants for the valued resource to be divided or allocated. The former case calls for the parties to either negotiate, mediate, arbitrate, or adjudicate, and raising therein any notion of ‘fairness’ becomes just a procedural ploy. It’s the latter case of powerless recipients that interests us, and calls for a deeper understanding of fair, especially if we seek to satisfy some identifiable culture-dictated morality norms. In other words, we should understand the fluid vs absolute nature of fairness, and be willing to proceed with the division or allocation policy only when a mutually accepted/known standard of fairness can be applied (cf. fair division algorithms, here and here).
Therefore, anyone who claims that there is some unstated yet absolute standard of fairness, to which at least they are privy, is either ignorant or corrupt/evil. This is especially evident when such people, of power or usurping it, declare their fair division or allocation result without reference to any overarching standard that would give it some or any legitimacy.
A relevant example of such goings on is the claim by perfidious politicians in the area of taxing. In this case, how can any ‘fair share’ tax policy be fashioned when contending solutions are barely known and their number is uncountable. Not only that, but no one really knows how various forced wealth transfers affect wealth creation. All tax policies are introduced under the palatable banner of fairness, and then imposed by the power of the government gun when the fraud becomes apparent. (more here)
Bottom line: Don’t appeal to unalloyed concepts of fairness in your arguments and decision processes if you are the distributor of some largess. If you are the recipient of same, then by all means, present your best ‘fair share’ argument to maximize that share. And if someone claims that they are a fair-minded person, watch yourself. It should be clear that third party impositions of ‘fairness’ are power plays to control/dictate targeted people’s actions, assets, and aspirations.
Justice also has a useless definition in most dictionaries where it is confused with fairness. Fairness and justice should not be confused with the other. When we invoke, impose, or interpret justice for some past or future event/action we definitely imply that such event/action has been in some sense erroneous or even outrageous. Then the adjudication (either formally or informally) of the unjust is assumed to conform to and/or derive its legitimacy from some identifiable and accepted code – usually citable laws and regulations that apply in a given jurisdiction (but not necessarily in another). In this sense it is clear that a fair division or allocation need not be just, nor something that is demonstrably just need not be fair. Examples abound.
With this understanding, the resort to the high-sounding ‘social justice’ as justification for some existing or proposed policy or action is most specious. The reason is that, while lacking a precise or uniformly accepted definition, it appeals to a non-existent code or norm that is somehow implied to be even above the current laws of the land. And with that thrust, the accompanying demand for rectification is that today’s socially just assessments must needs become codified as laws so that the socially unjust can be appropriately dealt with by more than vilification in the public forum.
The appeal to justice, rather than fairness, to correct something erroneous is perhaps even more subjective and stands on shaky ground. Moreover, even if the matter is correctly adjudicated, the judgment may come as a very unpleasant or even disastrous surprise to the plaintiff. This reminds me of the wise counsel Santa Monica HS Coach Dick Beede gave many years ago to his adrenalin and hormone laced players, protesting an ‘unjust’ call by the referee, during intense competitions – ‘Never seek justice, only mercy.’
Legal. Appealing to the law should be the easiest of all to define, yet it is perhaps the most slippery of all, having been made so over the millennia by the legal profession in order to gratuitously line their own pockets with filthy lucre. Today in America such takings have reached an historical pinnacle. It is lawyers who carefully write the inscrutable laws that then require more lawyers to make them variously scrutable, while spending hours upon billable hours and collecting contingent fees to ferret out justice, or bluff the opponent about the tendentious effects of its adjudicated arrival. And the final blow from the legal industry comes from knowing that what was legal then is not now, and what was adjudicated in your favor today can be reversed tomorrow by the same system. We return again to the wisdom of Coach Beede.
[3mar20 update] And in today’s Union we see a perfect example of garbled thought when the semantics of fair, just, and legal are neither differentiated nor well understood. In a column – ‘Is it fair?’ - by local David Wallace, is a muddled mix. There he also injects the notion of “Is it right?”, which he defines in terms of traditions and religious teachings. Fair enough, but then he attempts shed light on the whole matter of fairness through a jumbled rehash of the Senate’s recent impeachment trial – and it goes nowhere. Finally, he throws up his hands and advises the reader that “‘Is it fair?’ is best answered in the same way that we make it fair.” Huh?
Comments