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!

[warriorsavant]

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

[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.