Fairness for me, but not for thee - a prolegomenon to any paraconsistent theory of justice
But there is one conceptually interesting point hereabouts that relates, perhaps, to issues that have come up in our recent discussions of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality.
Let’s start with a simple thought. Most people are ok with a spot of unfairness around the place, even ideally. Ideally? Surely not! No, I think so. Trying to blueprint a perfectly ‘fair’ society is an interesting and educational exercise. But it’s important to see, not just that the blueprint is ‘ideal’ – with all the difficulties that entails: politics the art of the possible and all – but that, even if we could have this ideal, we might prefer something else. How so? There are lots of values (of competition and risk and achievement, for example) that are only plausibly realizable in an environment in which there is some unfairness (for some values of ‘unfair’). To take a trivial example: it isn’t unreasonable to prefer poker to chess, even though there’s more room for luck in poker; hence it is, in at least one sense, less ‘fair’ as games go. Cohen emphasizes a different angle. The ‘paying off the kidnapper’ cases, which turn out to be distressingly analogous to the difference principle cases (if you buy Cohen’s argument.) Paying a kidnapper may be the prudent thing to do, in certain circumstances (think piracy cases ripped from the headlines). That doesn’t make it just or fair. Maximizing (or optimizing) the good may involve tolerating unfairness.
I’m pretty impressed by Cohen’s argument that Rawls’ Theory of Justice – justice as fairness – is really justice as unfairness. Or even: unjust unfairness that yet might (even just on paper) be preferable to any just, fair arrangement you could blueprint as an alternative. So it turns out that the objection to Rawls may run in most paradoxical fashion: the problem with justice as fairness is that we might actually want justice and fairness. Hence the alleged need for ‘rescuing’, per Cohen’s title.
But that’s not actually what I want to talk about today (although it’s sort of the reason why it’s interesting to me): it’s hard to be sort of fair. It’s like pregnant. You are or you aren’t. Well, that’s not quite right. You can be roughly fair. Fair, unlike pregnant, can be vague. But you can’t just say ‘hey, life is unfair and that’s ok’ and also, convincingly, complain when life is unfair to YOU. Or anyone else. Even altruistic kvetching about someone else’s unfair misfortune, once you’ve cheerfully tossed fairness to the winds of affirming the thrillingness of risk, or whatever, rings pretty hollow. Fairness can’t be substantially ad hoc and capricious. Because then it isn’t fair. It’s something else.
A competition in which a panel of judges has subjective leeway for scoring competitors can be roughly fair. But a competition in which the judges randomly judge half the competitors based on performance, and assign scores based on random coin flips to the other half is not even roughly fair. You might say it is para-meritocratic, or something like that. But that’s not the same as ‘fair’.
Suppose suddenly the rules change! (Possibly due to further coin-flip.) Randomly, some of the previous coin-flips will be reversed! Eh. That doesn’t really make things worse, fairness-wise. From here on out it’s Calvinball all the way down, so far as ‘fairness’ is concerned.
Now, the reason this is interesting is that, in my tolerance for a certain degree of unfairness – my feeling that there are other values that are important, too – I am not tolerating mere ‘rough’ fairness but a substantial degree of capricious ad-hocery in life’s rewards and punishments. I am like a slower motion version of the idiot in the article, in other words, so it isn’t so obvious I’m a complete moral idiot. I basically have nothing like a paraconsistent theory of fairness. But that’s what I really need.
I suppose what people mostly do is just anchor at some point, giving them some basis for calling departures from it ‘unfair’. And then invent some story about how that point had some utilitarian merits, even though that would be hard to prove or disprove. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
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