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:
A homeless guy watches a millionaire drive by in a Lamborghini. “That’s not fair!” he says.
An unattractive girl watches an extremely cute girl get all the guys she wants and twirl them around her little finger. “That’s not fair!” she says.
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. “That’s not fair!” he says.
A union contractor is undercut on price by a non-union contractor. “That’s not fair!” he says.
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:
The homeless person example is a bit tricky, since there are multiple different norms that they might be appealing to, but suppose that the homeless person used to be a hard worker before he got laid off and lost his home. The homeless person may then be objecting that society is supposed to reward a willingness to put in hard work, whereas he doesn’t perceive the millionaire as having worked equally hard. Or, the homeless person may think that society should provide some minimum level of resources to everyone, and the fact that he has nothing while another person has millions demonstrates a particularly blatant violation of this rule.
There’s a social ideal saying that people should be rewarded for their “internal” characteristics (like honesty) rather than “external” ones (like appearance), so the unattractive girl is objecting to the attractive girl being rewarded for something she’s not supposed to be rewarded for.
The house owner is objecting because we usually think that people should be allowed to keep the property they have worked to have, and the eminent domain claim is violating that intuition.
The union contractor is complaing because he thinks that being unionized provides benefits for the profession as a whole, and that the non-union contractor is getting a personal benefit while defecting against the rest of the profession.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instead, I get dinged for not including a bunch of stuff likely to provoke a political foofaraw
Maybe you should have been more concerned with figuring out how stuff really works and less with the possibility of provoking a political foofaraw on an internet forum...
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. “That’s not fair!” he says.
Is similar to one of fubarobfusco’s examples:
Someone uses a position of power to take something that isn’t theirs; especially when the victim can’t do anything about it. A boy’s visiting grandmother gives him $50 to buy a video game for his birthday; but as soon as the grandmother has left, the boy’s mother takes the money away and uses it to buy liquor for herself.
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”.
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!” :-/
Your list seems a bit… biased.
Let’s throw in a couple more situations:
A homeless guy watches a millionaire drive by in a Lamborghini. “That’s not fair!” he says.
An unattractive girl watches an extremely cute girl get all the guys she wants and twirl them around her little finger. “That’s not fair!” she says.
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. “That’s not fair!” he says.
A union contractor is undercut on price by a non-union contractor. “That’s not fair!” he says.
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:
The homeless person example is a bit tricky, since there are multiple different norms that they might be appealing to, but suppose that the homeless person used to be a hard worker before he got laid off and lost his home. The homeless person may then be objecting that society is supposed to reward a willingness to put in hard work, whereas he doesn’t perceive the millionaire as having worked equally hard. Or, the homeless person may think that society should provide some minimum level of resources to everyone, and the fact that he has nothing while another person has millions demonstrates a particularly blatant violation of this rule.
There’s a social ideal saying that people should be rewarded for their “internal” characteristics (like honesty) rather than “external” ones (like appearance), so the unattractive girl is objecting to the attractive girl being rewarded for something she’s not supposed to be rewarded for.
The house owner is objecting because we usually think that people should be allowed to keep the property they have worked to have, and the eminent domain claim is violating that intuition.
The union contractor is complaing because he thinks that being unionized provides benefits for the profession as a whole, and that the non-union contractor is getting a personal benefit while defecting against the rest of the profession.
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.
Maybe you should have been more concerned with figuring out how stuff really works and less with the possibility of provoking a political foofaraw on an internet forum...
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!” :-/