#46: It's Fair! No, it's not! Yes, it is! Isn't!!

“Fairness” is the catch word of the “social justice” types; it’s the word that always crops up when people are arguing for the governmental redistribution of citizen wealth. Taking money from people by force is normally considered theft, so when the government is used to do it, it has to be under the cover of some kind of “moral” narrative: either the people who have the money, really have no “right” to it or the equivalent, the people who do not have the money do have a “right” to it. Just as the French need perfume to conceal the odor of their lackluster grooming, so the “social justice” crowd need a perfume to cover the smell of state-sponsored theft. And the “social justice” perfume is “fairness.” Everyone loves fairness, but what is it?

Fairness is a matter of “distributive” justice. It is a question of who is to get what and how much of it. But what is a “fair” distribution of the goodies?

Our intuitions are actually several and often incompatible. Here are the basic choices:

D1: Fairness, for example, could be giving everyone exactly the same amount, regardless of what they need or deserve (are able to acquire by dint of work and talent).

D2: Or, it could be giving everyone just however much they need.

D3: Or, it could be giving everyone whatever they “deserve”.

I ignore, for simplicity’s sake, the question of what it is that “fairness” demands of each individual.

Deciding among these competing intuitions is a difficult and perhaps impossible task since the decision would seem necessarily to suppose some kind of moral “foundation” or ultimate justification. But if, as I have argued earlier, such a foundation can be no more than a pathetic and fatuous fantasy, that all there is is human preference, then there is little hope of using “morals” to defend the selection of a criterion of “fairness.”

It’s really even worse than this suggests. The “system” of morality that has proven historically to be the most popular, Utilitarianism, is famously and conspicuously lacking a way of deciding “fairness” of distribution. The doctrine originates with the philosopher and legislator Jeremy Bentham, who was looking for a rational method of selecting laws. An heir to the enlightenment, he naturally sought a “scientific” and quantitative method. Noting that everyone quite naturally prefers pleasure over pain, he proposed that those laws should be enacted that maximize the net number of pleasure units (“hedons”) over pain units (“dolors”). He called this decision procedure the “Hedonic Calculus.” Choosing the best law and, by extension, the best act, in the Benthamite universe, is simply a matter of accounting: subtract the negative dolors from the positive hedons for each possible action, and then compare the resulting remainders. The act with the largest positive remainder is the “right” or “good” act. Quite apart from some obvious problems of application, there is the enormous issue of “fairness.” The reason is very simple.

Consider two possible actions for a sample population of 1000 agents, the first of which yields one hedon (and no dolors) to each agent, the second of which yields 1001 hedons (and no dolors) to a single agent (the rest receiving none). Since the second action yields a net number of hedons larger than the first, the second act is the right one, regardless of the fact that it delivers all of the hedons to a single person. Many people find this result to be counter to their intuitions because they feel that any arithmetically unequal distribution is wrong (they cleave to D1). But, lest one think that the calculus is politically skewed because of this example, let me hasten to note that the problem can be made to recur in such a way as to offend the political sensibilities of “the other side.”

Consider the same situation as above, but with the following proviso: all the hedons are being produced by 100 of the 1000 agents. Now consider that one act distributes 1000 hedons among the 100 who produced it, but another act distributes 1001 hedons among the parasitic 900. according to the calculus, it is the second act that is the “right” one, but this outcome clearly will offend the population that cleaves to D3.

What to do? What to do? If you can’t find an acceptable fairness decision procedure in Utilitarianism, where can you go for it?

The only other available moral theory is that of Immanuel Kant, a theory based on the notion of “categorical” obligation. A “categorical” obligation is just one that we have “no matter what,” an obligation without “ifs, ands, or buts.” It is, to put it in plainer English, “unconditional.” How many such obligations does Kant stick us with? It’s hard to say, because while he refers to it in the singular, he gives more than one formulation of it, and the formulations don’t seem to be equivalent. One statement is: “treat every man as an end in himself (not a means to an end)”. Another is: “act only in such a way that you would wish the ‘maxim’ or principle behind your act to be a law of nature.” Perhaps yet another is that one should act as if one did not know how our action would affect ourselves.

And what is it that makes these our categorical imperatives? According to Kant, it is that if we were entirely rational entities (more Mr. Spock-like than Spock himself), we would quite automatically act according to these principles. The reason, he argues, is that the Categorical Imperative actually “flows” from the very nature of Reason itself: moral behavior is nothing other than purely rational behavior. But if this is the case, you might ask, why is it that such rational people as ourselves often have moral quandaries, often do what could be called “evil” acts?

For Kant, the problem lies (as it has for so many figures of the philosophical persuasion) with what the phil establishment has always called “the inclinations.” They haven’t liked “the inclinations”. What are these “inclinations”? They are our emotions and our appetites, but, more to the heart of it, they are what give us individuality, what make one of us different from all the others. For the main-stream-philosophical industry, these “inclinations” are and have been the source of immorality and evil in the world. The inclinations “incline” us away from the purely rational act. Thus, the bad news is that there are inclinations and, therefore, there is evil. The good news, however, according to Kant, is that the inclinations are really not “us” at all.

For each of us, the real “me” is limited to our “reasoning engine.” It’s not difficult to see the implication. In a world inhabited only by agents unencumbered by inclinations, each agent is indistinguishable from every other. In fact, not only are all moral agents identical, there is, in fact, no evil at all. In this world, the “Kingdom of Ends,” as Immy dubs it, there is in a sense no morality at all, either; the reason is that evil simply cannot exist there – morality is the natural law of human behavior in the Kingdom of Ends.

But I digress, this is no place for Kant-bashing!

How can this silly theory help with regard to distributive justice? Well, I don’t know that it can help, but it has been invoked by one of the lead supporters of the social justice crowd, John Rawls. In particular, he has appealed to the Kantian notion of acting from behind the veil of ignorance.

Just as we expect Justice to be “blind” to the identities of the people before it in order that she not be influenced by anything other than the law, so, reasons Kant and Rawls after him, each of us should will a system of distribution without knowing where we ourselves are placed. The reason is that we can’t really rely on being unaffected by the inclinations as long as we know what our “short-term” advantages are. Since we can’t quite literally divest ourselves of our inclinations, the next best thing is to keep them from knowing what the best ways of achieving their disgusting objectives are. If a person doesn’t know Who he is in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that he has revolting inclinations (they won’t know which laws will advantage them!).

Thus, Kant and Rawls proceed this way: What law of distribution would I will, they ask, if I didn’t know whether I was actually a homeless person, a middle class entrepreneur, or a captain of industry? Well, the answer seems to be, I would choose a system of distribution that minimizes the risk to myself, that assures that I would do reasonably ok regardless of where I actually placed.

Sounds good, you say? Sounds reasonable, you say? But is that actually the case, I say.

Whether Kant or Rawls, the reasoning belongs to the same kind: the appeal to the “thought experiment.”

So much of philosophy, especially recent philosophy, has utilized the “thought experiment,” but I think this is a methodology that is highly suspect. If this method is to be used, then it must necessarily be made subject to one important rule: our intuitions with regard to the experiment must be VERY powerful.

I will not digress here to challenge the methodology of the “intuitive counter-example” that has been in general use for so long (though I am very leery of it!). Let’s just have a brief look at the Kant/Rawls use of the trick.

What laws would we pass, they ask, if we didn’t know our place in the society governed by them?

Well, before we can answer that question, we should know exactly what is and what is not being assumed about us in this non-actual world.

Do we know nothing at all about ourselves? Do we know, for example, what our inclinations with respect to fairness are, which of the alternative D1-D3 we prefer? What our political preferences are? Do we know whether we are loners or family people? Do we know what kind of society it is in which we live?

Actually, I think we are assumed to know none of these things at all. In fact, we are asked to assume that we are Kantian purely rational agents being asked a kind of game-theory puzzle. But here is the rub:

If I am assuming that I am a purely rational Kantian agent, I confess that I have not the remotest idea of what I would will or decide under those conditions!

I don’t know what it is like to be a purely rational agent, nor do I have any idea at all what a purely rational agent would or would not do. There are no “purely rational agents,” these are nothing more than philosophical fictions (not unlike the computer model assumptions of some economists).

The Kant-Rawls thought experiment fails the crucial requirement I have set: we must have strong intuitions yielding the experimental outcome (if there is any) before that outcome can be used to determine anything.

The bottom line is this, then:

There are competing and conflicting intuitions about “fairness” of distribution principles or rules AND there is no theoretical/philosophical/conceptual way of deciding among them. These, like all other matters “moral,” are simply matters of psychology, of preference.

And if this is true, the social justice appeal to “fairness” reduces to being the call or demand of one part of a society for a system of distribution it happens to prefer. We must deal with the fact that this preference, just like all preferences, is ultimately arbitrary.

It does not, DOES NOT, follow from this arbitrariness that the social justice engineers are somehow less entitled to agitate, pressure, persuade, or beg for the kind of distributive system that makes them happy. BUT, and this is a big BUT, the very same applies to the groups who prefer the alternative theories of distribution. None of these groups occupies a conceptually privileged, none is more “justified” than the others, but this is not a defect in the theories, it is just the nature of the beast: de gustibus non est disputandum. There is no (rational) way of deciding among theories of “fair” distribution.