Philosophical Questions: Fairness

[ysabetwordsmith]

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

Why do people expect a universe full of randomness to be fair?


1) Cognitive bias. The human brain is designed to perceive patterns, because doing that improves survival odds; but the system is so determined to find patterns that it imagines them where none exist.

2) Life is not fair. The purpose of civilization is to make life more fair.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

When people complain life is not fair, what they mean is that it's not unfair in their favour.

Also, if the purpose of civilisation is make life fairer, we damn well seem to have lost sight of that nowadays!! It should be... but there are some people who are pressing their thumb down on those scales as hard as they can!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> When people complain life is not fair, what they mean is that it's not unfair in their favour. <<

Sometimes, but not always. I don't think it's fair that rich people are hogging almost all the resources; I think the working class deserves fair wages for their labor. And so on.

>>Also, if the purpose of civilisation is make life fairer, we damn well seem to have lost sight of that nowadays!! It should be... but there are some people who are pressing their thumb down on those scales as hard as they can! <<

America is a failure of a civilization and much of the West is not doing a lot better. Scandinavia has done well in many regards though. Some other civilizations do much better at fairness. Frex in Native American cultures, typically if someone is poor, that shames the tribe not the poor person: you're supposed to take good care of all souls on board. So they had customs like potlatches where people would give away goods, and that helped keep a fair distribution of resources.

[warriorsavant]

Fair and Random are not antonyms. If it is random for everyone equally, that is fair.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

True in a mathematical sense, but not necessarily in a social sense where you're trying to keep people from starting fights over resources.

There are different ways of looking at what "fair" means too.

Re: Well ...

[warriorsavant]

Which is to say everyone thinks the “fair” thing is for them to get what they want.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Not necessarily. That's a popular perspective but not the only one.

Some people want more fairness across groups. That includes people interested in fairness generally, people who see some benefit even if it's not their personal group getting a direct improvement, and others who are aware that widespread fairness makes a better and safer world for everyone.

So for instance, people think that economic inequality is too wide, and would prefer to see wealth more evenly distributed, though not exactly the same across all levels.

Another example is greenspace in cities, which is unfair in many places. More greenspace would benefit everyone, and for best results it needs to focus on places with the least. Many people are agitating for this, even if they don't live in a neighborhood that lacks trees.

Re: Well ...

[warriorsavant]

Ok. More precisely, everyone wants what they want (to happen). As you say some people feel fair would be for other people to get what they want, but I think for the majority people, it means they get what they want to get. I find often, It depends which side of the table you’re sitting on

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's why it's important to have mixed groups, for a wider perspective; and why it's important to teach things like history, socioeconomics, and psychology. People need to know how not to saw off the branch they're standing on -- which looking at the world today, is knowledge in short supply. That doesn't mean it can't be done.

Re: Well ...

[warriorsavant]

Not entirely sure what that has to do with the subject, but okay.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

People think about fairness in different ways. If they are actually thinking about selfishness -- which is common -- then that causes problems. Teaching people to think about what is fair to others also is important to a healthy society. It's better if they know enough to talk about different types of fairness and their uses.

Re: Well ...

[warriorsavant]

We seem to each be just repeating our arguments in different words. Definitely not meeting of minds, but I don't actually expect the world to always agree with me. Good night.

[prixmium]

I just finished writing some meta about a fandom that had me thinking about the Hobbesian view of humans and its opposite/opposing viewpoints.

From a sort of spirituality-minded perspective, what if there is something about human nature that causes us to seek the good/fair that is innate but corrupted/corruptible?

I'm saying this as someone who did one of my uni majors in philosophy, so I argued back and forth about this with the more cynical a lot.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I just finished writing some meta about a fandom that had me thinking about the Hobbesian view of humans and its opposite/opposing viewpoints. <<

Cool. Are you into marchmetamatterschallenge?

>> From a sort of spirituality-minded perspective, what if there is something about human nature that causes us to seek the good/fair that is innate but corrupted/corruptible? <<

That matches my observations, and also, scientific research about morality and selfishness, which appear in species other than humans. Drives can be ambivalent, that is, different principles pull in opposite directions. So for instance, hogging resources gives immediate gain and that extra boost might make the difference in survival. But cooperation and sharing enables survival against obstacles and individual could not withstand alone. The fact that we see both patterns in nature means that both work. However, both individual and species strategies vary, with some preferring to share and others to hoard.

Mathematically, the Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates that cooperation is the most robust strategy in an iterated relationship, and among multiple strategies; but not all circumstances are like that, and in non-iterated situations the more selfish and aggressive ones have a slight edge. Consider that humans used to live in iterated relationships (i.e. societies where you stayed with mostly the same people) but now most have more non-iterated relationships (i.e. mobile societies where people interact mostly with strangers and relationships run shorter). That's changing the balance of interactions.

>> I'm saying this as someone who did one of my uni majors in philosophy, so I argued back and forth about this with the more cynical a lot.<<

Rhetoric and Women's Studies here, but I'm fascinated by philosophy and psychology. A favorite exercise when I was younger was taking a list of philosophies, looking at a current event, and deriving what each one would say to do about it.

Cynicism and optimism are both outgrowths of human pattern-spotting ability. This diagram helps a lot by showing correct distrust and correct trust, along with under-trusting and over-trusting. If a person responds to the current circumstances, they'll be highly accurate. But if someone grows up in one situation then switches to a very different one, it's hard to adapt and they'll be off-kilter for a while, or even forever. A cynic in a nasty environment is right; an optimist in a good environment is right; but switch their locations and they're both wrong. It's not about what you believe will happen; it's about how accurate that is as a predictor of outcomes in your situation.

When you're looking at people, though, they're messy and complicated. They have both positive and negative motivations. Most folks are a mix, but there are also extremes -- people who are consistently good or evil regardless of environment. You have to account for that. And one of the keys comes not from philosophy but from engineering: Design for the users you have, not the users you wish you had.