Yancy: “If someone wants to murder me, and the two of us are alone, then I am still in the right and they are still in the wrong, even if no one else is present.”
So the trick here is to realize that fairness is defined with respect to an expected or typical observer—when you try to murder me, and I scream “Foul play!”, the propositional content of my cry is that I expect any human who happens to pass by to agree with me and to help stop the murder. If nobody passes by this time, well, that’s just my bad luck, and I can go to my grave with the small comfort that whatever behavior of mine that led to my being murdered by you was at least marginally more adapative than a behavior that would to our fellow tribespeople thinking that you were justified in murdering me, because then I would have had no chance of survival, as opposed to having my survival depend upon having the good luck of being observed in a timely fashion.
On the other hand, if it were impossible for a disinterested party to pass by, because you and I were the only two intelligent beings in the known world, or because all known intelligent beings would have a political reason to pick one side or the other in our little tiff, then fairness would have no propositional content, and would be meaningless. That seems like a small bullet to bite—it seems plausible to think that fairness norms really did evolve—and that people continue to make a big deal about the concept—because there were and often are disinterested third parties that observe two-party conflicts (or disinterested fourth parties who observe three-party conflicts, and so on). If there weren’t any such thing as disinterested parties, it really wouldn’t make any sense to talk about “fairness” as an arrangement that’s distinct from “equal division”.
So the trick here is to realize that fairness is defined with respect to an expected or typical observer—when you try to murder me, and I scream “Foul play!”, the propositional content of my cry is that I expect any human who happens to pass by to agree with me and to help stop the murder. If nobody passes by this time, well, that’s just my bad luck, and I can go to my grave with the small comfort that whatever behavior of mine that led to my being murdered by you was at least marginally more adapative than a behavior that would to our fellow tribespeople thinking that you were justified in murdering me, because then I would have had no chance of survival, as opposed to having my survival depend upon having the good luck of being observed in a timely fashion.
On the other hand, if it were impossible for a disinterested party to pass by, because you and I were the only two intelligent beings in the known world, or because all known intelligent beings would have a political reason to pick one side or the other in our little tiff, then fairness would have no propositional content, and would be meaningless. That seems like a small bullet to bite—it seems plausible to think that fairness norms really did evolve—and that people continue to make a big deal about the concept—because there were and often are disinterested third parties that observe two-party conflicts (or disinterested fourth parties who observe three-party conflicts, and so on). If there weren’t any such thing as disinterested parties, it really wouldn’t make any sense to talk about “fairness” as an arrangement that’s distinct from “equal division”.