Abstract

Fairness has been one of the eternal topics throughout human history, and it is also a simple but most confusing concept to most people as well. This book is not a book about what is fair and what is not fair; rather it is a book of analysis on the dynamics of fairness and its significant role in human civilization by and large. In this book some hidden natures behind the common concept of fairness would be uncovered, and their impact on various aspects of human social life would be discussed, which includes the meaning of fairness from a deconstructive view, the objective and subject natures of fairness, some social dynamics driven by fairness, the relationship between fairness and justice, the tricky relationship between cheating and fairness and how to fight against cheating, the significance of fairness in socio-eco system, philosophy about the subtle relationship between current welfare and future prosperity including how to view and handle risks in our life, cosmic view of the meaning of fairness in term of scientific knowledge, and general denial of fairness and its impact on human life.

Prologue:

Fairness has been one of the eternal topics throughout human history, and it is a simple but most confusing concept to most people as well. Fairness operates at every level of social activity, from the trivial daily activities of individuals to serious international events, and thus we could feel its influence in every aspect of human social life. Without fairness we cannot talk about freedom because in a socially interactive world, the freedom of one person may come at the cost of the freedom of another; without fairness we cannot talk about democracy since democratic practice in principle should be a fair representation of public interests; without fairness no rewarding and punishment system would work properly; without fairness we cannot talk about team-work since team-work is dependent upon fair utilization of talents and mutual respect between team members; without fairness there would be no meaningful politics or governing practices since, at least, among politicians and those in the governing class fairness would be demanded throughout daily events; without fairness trading and business transactions would be meaningless; without fairness we even cannot have basic interpersonal trust, and thus any social community would cease to function properly.

The world in which we are living is a complicated multi-layer dynamic system. The lowest layer is the physical world, and on top of the physical world is our social world constructed, which itself is another complicated multi-layer dynamic system. The lowest layer of the social world is a network of people connected by human languages, and on top of this layer is the cultural system constructed (within this cultural system are the economic system, political system, educational system, and many other systems, along with all the cultural artifacts accumulated throughout the history), and fairness is one of the fundamental elements of this cultural system. By studying the dynamic feature, we could acquire a better understanding of the mechanism by which the cultural system functions. In fact, Intellectual quest on fairness could be traced back to ancient Greek times. Countless works on the topic could be found from library. However, the main stream understanding on fairness is still quite rudimentary. Many basic features of fairness still need to be unveiled, so does the dynamic impact of fairness on socio-eco systems.

Fairness is a duality of objectiveness and subjectiveness. Under many particular circumstances we could find out or agree upon objective standards of fairness, while the judgment on what is fair and what is not fair is always a subjective process. Historically the main interest of the quest on fairness has been focused on searching for its objective foundation; however, the subjectiveness of fairness might play a much more profound role in our civilization, which is the main subject of this book.

Very often when we talk about fairness we might refer to social equity. This intrinsic relationship between fairness and equity has been a philosophical topic for thousands of years, but the relationship between fairness and inequity is still not very well aware of among most people. In this book I would not only review the relationship between fairness and equity, but also discuss how fairness could create and maintain social inequity. Other issues covered in this book would include how to identify falsified fairness as a part of evil devices, how to understand the process of social selection, how to balance current welfare and future prosperity, and why the study of fairness is important, and more.

This book would be organized into following chapters:

Chapter 1: The Meaning of Fairness. This chapter would provide an in depth analysis of the nature of fairness, including the objective and subjective natures of fairness.

Chapter 2: Fair Games. This chapter would demonstrate, by analysis of games, some basic characteristics of how fairness functions.

Chapter 3: Fair Choice. This chapter would examine the effect of fairness from a more fundamental point of view of personal choice, and would discuss how this personal choice for fairness would influence the process of social selection.

Chapter 4: Entropy of Fairness. This chapter would discuss an important social dynamics driven by fairness.

Chapter 5: Social Justice. This chapter would discuss the relationship between justice and fairness.

Chapter 6: Fighting against Cheating. This chapter would provide some insight into the tricky relationship between cheating and fairness, and would discuss how to fight against cheating.

Chapter 7: Fair Trading. This chapter would provide some analysis on the significance of fairness in socio-eco system.

Chapter 8: Fairness for the Future. This chapter would discuss the philosophy about the subtle relationship between current welfare and future prosperity, based on the understanding of fairness, including how to view and handle risks in our life.

Chapter 9: Original Denial of Fairness. This chapter would discuss some general denial of fairness and its impact on human life.

In the final closing epilogue of this book, I would summarize the ideas presented in this book, and would also review some of my personal experience in writing this book and in my own philosophical life as well.

Over the past several decades people have been confused about how to name this contemporary historical time. With different ideas in mind, people have been using “modern”, “postmodern”, “postmodernist”, or “postmodernity” to name this historical era we are living through. The reason that contemporary people are feeling compelled to give a special name to this era is not because they are too much proud of it, but because they have witnessed very distinguishing characteristics in today’s global culture compared to several decades ago. However, what most people have not been aware of, or have been reluctant to pay attention to is the philosophical challenge this so called postmodern time has brought us to face to. Unlike any of our precedent times in history, all the driving forces behind human civilization have moved us to a time of philosophically second order logic, which means superficial straight common sense way of thinking would not be enough to meet our daily social life challenge.

Originated from ancient Greece, the western philosophical thinking has always been characterized as starting from some basic concepts with clear meanings, and then by applying some logic reasoning reaching the final conclusion. This typical western way of thinking has very successfully led our civilization to the great scientific achievement and economic productivity.  However, after we entered the postmodern era, people started to realize that the so called basic concepts might not be so pure and independent as we might have thought before. The meanings of those basic concepts normally mingle with the use of languages, which could evolve as time goes by. As a result, we might not be able to give a clear definition to some word that is widely used as a basic concept in many contexts. Fairness is a typical case of this situation. After thousands of years of using fairness in everyday vocabulary, we would find that giving a general definition of fairness could be a difficult work. For example, one dictionary definition of fairness is “conformity with rules or standards”, but we might find that in real life this is not always agreeable because the explanations of and the processes of applying the rules and standards are not always fair and also because from time to time the fairness of the rules and standards themselves could be questionable.

The above mentioned defect in our philosophical thinking system might sound quite trivial previously. But the broader awareness of equal rights of all people among all nations, the rapid growth of educated population, the burst of information technology, and the economic globalization have all elevated human cultural sensitivity to a new level. Ambiguity in formerly considered clear concepts might lead to lack of harmony when cooperation between people of broad range of cultural background is warranted. Meanwhile, the development of human civilization, especially in postmodern sciences, has enabled us to look more deeply into the relational mapping between our conceptual perceptions and our cultural practices, and thus we might acquire some more profound understanding of the dynamics in our cultural system from bottom up. This brings a great challenge to us: how should we re-organize our philosophical thinking system so that we could have a fundamentally consistent cultural system for human civilization by and large, which requires a methodological breakthrough at the high end philosophy side so that it could then be brought to our low end everyday life practices.

Just like at the turn of last century when we were facing the need to look into the natural world in a mathematically nonlinear way, this time we have to look into the social life we are living through day by day in a philosophically non-trivial way. The approach employed to study the nature and the dynamics of fairness in this book provides an example of how social analysis might be done in this new philosophical era. Hope this book would bring some enjoyable reading time to philosophy-loving readers.

Chapter 1. The Meaning of Fairness (Sample Paragraphs)

In my first physics class at college about thirty years ago, the teacher told us a story about a starving donkey. There was a hungry donkey standing between two piles of hay. The distance from each pile to the donkey was exactly the same, the size of each pile was exactly the same, and the quality of the hay in each pile was exactly the same. Hungry though the donkey was, it could not make up its mind for which pile to go. It just stood there crying and starving to death.

Donkeys might be very stubborn, but in real world no donkey would starve to death while two piles of nice hay are nearby. What the teacher was trying to demonstrate through that story was one of the fundamental natural principles of balance: symmetrical balance. In the physical world, in order to cause a system to change its status we need some unsymmetrical inducing factors. For example, if we put 100 gram salt in the left pan of an old fashion mechanical balance, and put a reference weight of 100 gram in the right pan, then the beam holding those two pans would be in equilibrium horizontal position; but if we add more salt into the left pan without increasing the weight in the right pan, the equilibrium of the system would be broken. This principle of symmetrical balance is nothing new to us because we are experiencing the work of this principle in everyday life. The reason I am telling the story of the starving donkey here is because the reflection of the principle of symmetric balance in our social life is what we called Fairness, which is the topic of this whole book.

Chapter 2. Fair Games (Sample Paragraphs)

Life is a game in many senses. Human civilization is a grand social game throughout history and across all geographical boundaries. In our daily life the word game is mainly referred to various structured activities for enjoyment. Even though the game of life by and large and the games we play for fun at leisure time (hereafter it would be called normal game or game) bear very different meanings for most of us, they do share some common features and thus it could help us to understand the role of fairness in general by analyzing games of limited scope.

In spite of the entertaining nature of games, people would usually have much stricter demand of fairness in games than in many other everyday activities. No matter in intellectually oriented board games, physically intensified sport games, or even in random luck based gambling games, fairness is almost always the utmost concern for all the players or even all the viewers. It would normally be an unhappy or outrageous moment when cheating is caught even during a very casual game between acquaintances.

Chapter 3. Fair Choice and Social Selection (Sample Paragraphs)

Every single movement we make in our everyday life is a result of choice. Some choice is easy to make and some is hard depends on whether available options are equally attractive or not. As we have seen in the starving donkey example, fairness in fact always plays a very fundamental psychological role during any process of choice making. This low level influence of fairness on all the movements we are making daily would inevitably have impact on every single higher level social activity.

About one and half centuries ago, Darwin published his theory on Natural Selection. Since then many people including Darwin himself have attempted to apply similar idea to human society. However, unlike its prototype in natural science, the so called Social Darwinism has not been successful in explaining the social evolution process, no matter locally or globally. An important reason behind this failure is because so far none of the existing versions of the Social Darwinism has paid attention to the reverse selection of those being selected. In this Chapter we would reexamine the social selection issue from a different angle, a fair choice based non-Darwinist angle.

Chapter 4. Entropy of Fairness (Sample Paragraphs)

Entropy is a vocabulary used in natural science to describe the chaotic degree of disorder in a physical system. In this Chapter I am borrowing this vocabulary to describe the chaotic effect of fairness on social status of a group of people, as well as its significance in human social life by and large.

Social order and fairness both are essential to a civilized society. They both in general sound positive. However, they do not always serve to each other in simple sense. In fact, the demand of fairness could increase the difficulty to build up a social order, no matter for good or for bad. Human history has witnessed a great number of events where the demand of fairness was the main driving force behind positive social changes; but human history has also witnessed too many cases of negative political turmoil due to power struggle in name of fairness between different interest groups.

Chapter 5. Social Justice (Sample Paragraphs)

Justice is the corner stone of any human civilization, across all nations, all languages, all historical development, all cultural background, and all social groups. Even though human exercises of justice always involve subjective judgment, most people believe that there would be ultimate objective justice in this world. In fact, in any human society, people always ascribe the absoluteness of justice which is free of subjective relativity to divine authority, even if the society is dominated by atheist materialist culture. This is because mankind could only acquire absolute authority from supernatural or divine power superior to all human power. As a result, divine justice has been the foundation of all human justice in this world.

Besides the divine justice, there are another two general categories of justice: natural justice and social justice. By natural justice I am referring to the application of natural logic or knowledge when exercising justice. For example, we all know that forcing people to work under dangerous environment or poor conditions could be harmful to them, or cutting a person with knife could kill him. This kind of common knowledge could be accepted among people without any modern scientific education when making judgment about justice.

The last major category of justice is the social justice, i.e. the exercise of justice based on various cultural values, human experiences and personal interests. In reality, the process of exercising justice would normally be a combination of all three major categories mentioned above, and thus divine justice, natural justice and social justice are three different factors in a holistic process of exercising justice. Even though divine justice and natural justice are more fundamental in any justice process, human efforts are mainly involved in the factor of social justice, and fairness is always a central concern in any social justice.

Chapter 6. Fighting against Cheating (Sample Paragraphs)

Normally people would not relate cheating with fairness because the former is evil by nature and the latter is just by nature. However, if we take a close look at most cheating processes happened in the past, we might find that fairness has been frequently used as an excuse to cheat or even to defend the action of cheating. So much often the cheater would induce the victim to fall into the preset trap voluntarily so that even if later on the victim could realize that he/she had been cheated, the cheater would claim what happened was a fair deal.

Unveiling the tricky relationship between cheating and fairness could help to provide an in depth understanding of how cheating operates in our life, and thus help ordinary people to fight against cheating more efficiently.

Chapter 7. Fair Trading (Sample Paragraphs)

In Chapter 2 we have seen the similarity between real life and games. In this Chapter we would investigate a particular real life activity that is closest to games in terms of rules and the principle of fairness, which is trading. Like in games, trading would normally require clear rules and high standard of fairness.  

The main difference between games and trading is that games in general could yield losers and winners while trading would not necessarily do so. However, violations of rules or unfair exercises in trading could be much more outrageous than in games since any malpractice in trading could cause real life financial losses or other damages. Accordingly, for games, people normally would only care about whether all players are treated fairly according to the preset rules,  but for trading people would also care about whether the rules themselves are fair to all the parties or not.

Chapter 8. Fairness for the Future (Sample Paragraphs)

Should we live for today or for tomorrow? This is a question that might sound simple but hard to get a clear answer.  The deceptive feature of the issue is that since tomorrow has not come yet, we might just give a happy answer that we live for both today and tomorrow. But in fact, this might not be a good answer practically as it might sound charismatically. This is because on one hand the consumption of resources including time for today might not be easily make up after today, but on the other hand the prosperity of tomorrow would also depend on the productivity of today, which would demand some consumption of resources.

Therefore, the question becomes a logically complicated issue of fairness between today and tomorrow, and some profound philosophical thinking is warranted in order to acquire a better solution to the question. Throughout human history, enormous man-made disasters were caused by erroneous treatment of current expenses and future interests. Two commonly known related issues are the issue of profitability and the issue of risk management.

Chapter 9. Original Denial of Fairness (Sample Paragraphs)

Fairness is the ultimate demand of human beings all over the world, but ironically life is ultimately unfair all over our globe. We are living in a naturally and socially uneven world. Not only are the resources distributed unevenly on the earth, but also are the access rights to the resources severely unequal among people in different social classes. As a result, our demand of fairness is constantly denied, individually and collectively, for various reasons all through our life. Therefore, the significance of fairness upon our civilization could be fully appreciated only if we have a better knowledge of how fairness is denied in our everyday life.

It is quite fair to say that human history is a history of the dynamic interaction between demand and denial of fairness in all levels of the society. In this Chapter we will examine the social impact of this dynamic interaction on human civilization from a few different social perspectives.

Epilogue (Sample Paragraph)

This book is an English re-writing of my Chinese version “Fair Life” that I published four and half years ago. In the past four and half years, some new ideas surfaced up concerning what fairness is about and how I should present the content to the readers. Starting from the beginning of this year I have had a very strong desire to rewrite the original Chinese version “Fair Life” in English so that I could present this new philosophy about fairness to main stream readers in western countries.