The Fairness Fixation
These days, we are all playthings of a benevolent state which thinks it knows best
One of the signs of an intellectually lazy society such as ours is default assumptions about what constitutes “fairness”.
Yet “fairness” — at least in the abstract — is fast becoming the core ideal of Western political and philosophical thought. “We want to make our society more fair,” is invariably one of the fundamental objectives of governments across our part of the planet. For the time being, fairness is considered an ultimate good; sacrosanct, inviolable, and therefore a commonly held objective for public policy. It is a rallying call intended to unite.
But what does it actually mean?
In fact, people go out of their way to avoid defining it, or they rely on a tautological circumlocution like “fairness means fairness” in the style of former Prime Minister Theresa May’s surprisingly effective “Brexit means Brexit”.
This isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. More often than not, people instinctively know what “fairness” will look like in a given set of circumstances, and from that starting point they assume their version of fairness is somehow obvious, sometimes too obvious even to bother stating out loud.
