That’s not fair! ….is it?
Fairness as seen from differing perspecives.
Ever heard someone saying “That’s not fair!”. I’m sure we all have.
Fairness, according to Collins Dictionary, is “the quality of making judgments that are free from discrimination”. Fair derives from the Old English word fæger, meaning “pleasing, attractive.” This is why fair is also used as a description of beauty. So if fairness, which derives from pleasing and beautiful, means judgements that are free from discrimination….is that fair?
Each person has their own scale of fairness. Take for instance these two stories:
Story 1: Two buses happen to breakdown within meters of each other on a lonely road, miles from the nearest city. The bus-drivers radioed for help, only to be told that there was only a single backup bus that could be sent over in the next few hours. Since the first bus held critically insane patients, they would be taken first, to minimize the risk of any of them escaping.
Story 2: You are on your way to a job interview in a city four hours away from home. Your bus leaves the station delayed. You left some buffer time for mishaps so you still might make it on time. You’ve been out of a job for 5 months. Every interview you got turned you down because you didn’t have the necessary skill set. But you finally managed to progress to the final interview of one of the places you applied to. This one. You’ve been skipping meals to make ends meet, but last night, you had to cut back on your kids meals because there was just no cash and no one to borrow from. You smiled and told your kids that things will turn out just fine; to make sure they said their prayers. You cried yourself to sleep. This job was important.
You were lost in thought when suddenly your bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Fear grips you. Your stomach churns as you realize that you might not make this interview. The driver mentions about a backup bus on the way. But then you find out that there is another bus that had broken down some distance away and that the backup bus is only going to take on the passengers from the other bus; just because they are critically insane patients. Critically insane patients who don’t have anywhere to be.
Story 1 might have sounded fair on the first pass, right? Story 2 did not seem fair. But when your mind adjusted to the context of the two stories, the chances are that you adjusted your perception of what you determined to be fair too. This happens to us all. We perceive fairness from a scale that is biased to us. So we naturally find it difficult to see fairness in the larger picture. And if individuals find it difficult to see the big picture, communities will find it very difficult to move past their collective view of fairness; even thought it maybe biased. And if communities find it difficult to see fairness, maybe what we perceive to be fair in general and what has been taught to us over recent decades, might not necessarily be a complete and unbiased “fairness”.
So then, what does it mean to be fair? There is no fixed definition. The only solid truth is, given a two-body problem, we cannot claim to know fairness without trying to put ourselves in the other persons shoes.
