What is fair? What is equality? Are they always good? We're hearing a lot about it, what with the cuts. But can we make much sense of the words? It's a tough one. I think that part of the problem has to do with the link between fairness, equality and another difficult concept: society.
Take fairness. In a meritocracy such as ours, the market decides what people are worth. So using a word like fairness means little more than what you can get away with: it's fairly empty. This would contrast with a family, say, which is not a meritocracy. So, a mother can say to her younger child, yes it is fair that you get less pocket money.
So fairness carries weight when you consider location and role in society. But that sets up a tension, because we don't like the idea that we are so constrained: that itself seems unfair - meaning against our freedom as individuals. But the social dimension does make sense of, say, why it's reasonable to ask whether a banker's pay is fair. Banking is a service in the community: it is supposed to be a means to an end - wealth generation for the common good - and that means fairness must operate.
On the other hand, it doesn't make much sense to ask whether a footballer's pay is fair, if the implication is that they get paid too much. We want footballers to have an individual skill and ability. Their location and role in society is copiously to display it. And they get well paid because they do so, and many people want to see them. It's fair.
When it comes to equality, it's worth asking when is inequality good? An obvious example is in relation to friendship.
One definition of friendship might be that friends say, I'm going to treat you differently from, and better than, strangers and mere acquaintances. This is why Immanuel Kant thought friendship was amoral: it undermines moral rules that can be applied to all. It's why we become suspicious of friendship in the public square, calling it nepotism or cronyism. Friendship cocks a snook at democracy, and in that most subversive way; by suggesting there are human values democracy actually devalues - our desire to treat some people as special.
Which suggests that a truly equal society, and a rigorously fair one, would, actually, be an inhuman one. It'd be one in which people couldn't treat other as their friends, and couldn't reward footballers for talent. The rhetoric of fairness and equality has achieved much, but here's two cheers for difference as well.
Mark Vernon’s new book is The Good Life (Hodder). See www.thegoodlifequiz.com
Image: MDI Digital
If we lived in a perfect meritocracy then perhaps 100% inheritance tax and the abolition of private education would be a start towards fairness.
On the other hand is it fair to deny rich people the right to use their wealth to help their offspring to get a step ahead of the rest?
Obviously it is the questions like this which ensure we never will live in a perfect meritocracy, which would of course be a remarkably cruel and inhumane world. But then we must accept that the present arrangement will never produce a fair or equal society.
I guess the commitment towards perfect equality could also become inhumane, as the 1970s events in Cambodia proved.
Where does this leave us in our quest for defining a 'fair society'?
It'd be good to have the time to look into the concepts of anarchism and even benign dictatorship to find some answers.
Posted by: Rory | November 17, 2010 at 06:03 AM
"In a meritocracy such as ours". Do you really think our society is a meritocracy? You don't think that those at the 'top' might have been just a tiny bit lucky?
Posted by: Matt | November 10, 2010 at 01:05 PM