What is fair?
The definition of fairness often revolves not being biased, lack of discrimination, or lack of favoritism.
Intuitively, fairness seems like a simple and easy to understand concept. If someone wins a race from their own efforts, then they have won “fair and square”. However, if you dig a little deeper, you might point out genetics and upbringing differences that contributed to the outcome. You might argue that life itself granted more benefits to this person that was “biased”.
Someone else may point out that it is impossible to live in a purely fair world in which everyone starts out the same as it would mean requiring everyone to be the exact same copy of each other and growing and training in the exact same conditions, so the definition of fairness should not based on effort, but rather based on something else.
Someone may take this and run very far with this prior argument. They may define fairness in terms of equal outcomes rather based on effort. In a truly fair world, then everyone would win the race.
So who is right? That depends on how you think about fairness. The first argument defines fairness in terms of what influenced the outcome. If an outcome happens that is influenced by forces outside, then it’s really not one’s own effort. The second argument, however, pokes a hole in how we define fairness in terms of influence because there can never be a perfect starting point that makes things purely without advantage. How, then would you define fairness if you can never truly untangle the messes of genetic, socioeconomic, ancestry, and upbringing lotteries from personal effort? How much personal effort is needed? How can we decide what is personal effort and what is not? To what extent is anything personal effort? We can think about clear cases of unfairness, but how about the gray? The third argument abandons this question entirely as it is a lost cause to argue about what is personal effort when it is so deeply entangled with what is not personal effort. Instead, it posits that fairness is about looking at equal outcomes.
The word “advantage“ automatically implies undue benefit that allows someone to achieve an outcome easier than someone else. Abstracting away from this loaded term, we can think of certain circumstances that may have influence on someone that can be seen as unfair.
Considering that we live in such a complex world in which the simple rules that govern fairness are often ignorant of this complexity, one could argue that having certain circumstances that lend greater likelihood of a certain consequence is fair simply because diversity and unfairness is embedded into our universe. Unfairness is fair. No one was intentionally discriminated against, and as a part of an imperfect world, there will always be advantages. One could even argue that these advantages are even a good thing because they imply diversity that otherwise would not be there. Not only would a lack of diversity doom the species evolutionarily, but diversity is to be celebrated as everyone has something advantageous or un-advantageous over others, so everyone can play different roles.
If we define fairness in terms of an outcome in which all are equally likely to reach, then we would be talking about equity. In equity, some individuals would get more benefits to compensate for those innate or circumstantial differences. Fairness in this definition would see any circumstances that leads to a difference in outcome (whether beneficial or not) as a sign of unfairness. This position may seem extreme at first, but consider other scenarios more acceptable to this idea such as securing basic needs like food. Is it fair if someone has a greater advantage in securing the bare necessities because they were born lucky? People who think the world is fairly unfair might say that this is fine, but people who argue for equity see fairness in making sure that all individuals have the bare necessities.
How we define fairness may even need to change depending on the context of the issue we are discussing. While racing may be more compatible with a fair unfair world concept, securing basic necessities may not. There might not be a “right” answer to what constitutes fair because, at its core, it is a moral judgement about what is right and what is wrong. While some contexts are easily seen as unfair or unjust, such as comparing a child to an adult runner, other situations are not so clear. Just like the famous trolley problem, there can be many different interpretations, justifications, and gut feelings that govern why someone may think a situation is fair or not, but there is no “right” answer. It’s an area of gray that underlies most complex moral questions.
As unsatisfying as it is, if you asked me whether or not advantages can be fair in some situations, my answer would be: it depends. Tell me more, and then we can discuss.