I aim to address this weighty competition between two concepts from an engineer’s perspective. And before we discuss further, we note that neither fairness nor justice are inherently “good” or “bad”, they are just some moral arguments people make when they have too much time on their hands. We further assume that we subscribe to egalitarianism, the notion that each human should have exactly equal rights. Here is one definition of these two concepts in two sentences by people more learnt than I am,
In evaluating any moral decision, we must ask whether our actions treat all persons equally. If not, we must determine whether the difference in treatment is justified.
Velasquez, M., et al., Justice and Fairness, Ethics, V3 N2, 1990.
While seemingly trivial, we will see that it is infeasible to quantify this “equality” in a manner acceptable to all. We are humans with limited brain capacity, and we tend to consider only a snapshot of the current state of affairs when we are tasked to make policy / personal decisions that require us to consider fairness. We implicitly adopt a Markov-like decision process, whereas to be truly fair, we must take into account all that has happened in the past. As a thought experiment, I propose that if we are able to account for all the past injustices and retribute in someway to these past injustices when making our decisions, we are allowed to consider fairness as the only criteria.
Clearly this is infeasible since we forget things, and we probably cannot agree on how to account for these past events. What we do know is, what has happened in the past hasn’t been entirely fair. In fact, it has been very unfair. So we come up with the notion of justice, to lump these historical unfairness and try to even the playing field in some way. These retributive policies may be unfair but are just.
Put it in other words, a human is born with innate unfairness ingrained in them. This is partly from historical injustices, and partly from their genetic lottery. Further unfairness are put upon them during their life time, be it winning a lottery (in the extreme case), or losing a job because of economic downturns or a deadly pandemic. Simply, there are many factors that we cannot predict or control, so we can only attribute them to forms of luck, be it good or bad. Because these lucks are not consequences of our own actions, it would be justified that we be compensated for their impact. To summarize, we use the justice and/or fairness argument as rationales to determine our response to the element of “luck”.
The Covid19 is a good example of bad luck. We collectively as a society has suffered hardship that we did not cause. Justifiably, we are monetarily assisted by the government should we be laid off or temporarily furloughed. Is it fair? Not at all. Can we quantify the personal element that led to one person being laid off and the other not? No chance. Conversely, the elites with investments have done surprisingly well over these past two years, often seeing their portfolio doubling. Is it fair that they benefit without any recourse? Yes, it is. It would be impossible to quantify their involvement in causing Covid19, but it is safe to say, minimally. It is justifiable they they get to keep this added wealth? Probably not, but we have no mechanism of taking it away.
Using progressive tax as another example. It is a type of taxation in which the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases. One could argue that this is not fair, or that a more fair type of policy may be to tax everyone an equal percentage. At the other extreme, a notion of justice may be to set the tax rate at one’s deviation from the median net worth. So the ones making more than the median would be taxed until they reach the median, and the ones making less would get a tax refund to that exact amount. (We will need to ensure that this system is over damped so there is no oscillation of course). The intended consequence being to equalize everyone’s monetary worth as per egalitarian ideal. We don’t have a definitive answer to the question “How come person A has more money than person B”, though we can reasonably claim that it is partly due to their inherited advantage, and partly due to their ability and hardwork. We make this claim because we have counter-examples. We hear of princes and princesses of wealthy kings and queens who end up in penury. We also know self-made millionaires who legitimately started with absolutely nothing. Note that even in such cases, we cannot quantify the factor luck plays into their ascent to wealth. We probably agree that it would be unfair and unjust to “penalize” the ones who made their fortune by working hard with a higher taxation. Conversely, it would be fair and just to tax that “luck factor”. The progressive tax may be one way to do that.
I just finished reading the “The Genetic Lottery” by Kathlyn Harden. She basically summarizes a series of papers that show that there is a genetic component to intelligence, just as there are genetic components that dictate one’s height, weight, color, etc. This book caused a great uproar mostly in the liberal circles, for reasons that I think are mostly self-serving and facetious. She states that
No one earned his or her DNA sequence, yet some of us are benefiting enormously from it.
Harden, K., Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education, NYTimes, 2018
We often move gifted kids to advanced classes and devote more resources to accelerate their success. We also agree that at a young age, this “giftedness” is largely by luck (of their DNA). By doing this, we effectively neglect the less gifted students, even through neither groups have done a thing to deserve such treatments. This tactic is neither fair nor just, yet it is something we routinely do. It would be more fair to have all kids receive the same education. It would be more just to devote more resources to the less gifted one so they can be at the same level field.
I personally have benefited from being lucky at all stages of my life, starting with being born in a large city, to emigrating to Canada which led to more opportunities. At age 12 and being quite unremarkable, I certainly did not have a hdand in applying for a visa! I possess so many innate advantages that I cannot possibly quantify. What I can do is to be more just in my decisions, and in my support of progressive policies.
Staying Afloat 