The Contradiction between Liberalism and Fairness

The Contradiction between Liberalism and Fairness

Part 1: A Conversation with my Son

This morning, I was having a discussion with my son about “fairness”. He was complaining that his sister, who is not yet in Kindergarten, got to have a holiday party which involved the production of gingerbread houses on the sides of milk cartons. This is a fairly common thing for pre-K folks to do, apparently- as a matter of fact, when my son was her age, he also made gingerbread houses, coated in various types of candy, at his daycare. But today, his objection to not being able to participate, was that it wasn’t fair that his little sister got to make candy-covered gingerbread houses and he didn’t. This is a common complaint of his: Something is not “fair”. So I asked him to tell me what his definition of “fair” actually is.

His response to that question was “Fair is when I get to do the things that others get to do.” So I explained to him that he DID get to do those things, four years ago, when he was the age that his sister is now. He was not satisfied, so he altered his definition to “Doing the things that I want to do when others get to do what they want to do.” And a light went on in my head. My response was “No, this is not fairness. Fairness is a moderate position between having too much and having too little. Fairness is having just enough to be happy.” Of course, he was not satisfied with that response, because it means that having everything you desire certainly is not fair.

Part 2: The Liberal Conception of Fairness

I dropped him off at school and began thinking in earnest on this topic of fairness. In my short consideration on the matter, it became clear to me that in the United States, and in fact in most of the developed world, our concept of fairness is colored by our ideological attachment to liberalism. Fundamental to liberalism, whatever our definition of fairness happens to be, it is us, ourselves, who decides what is fair for ourselves. We have jettisoned the notion that there is some objective standard of fairness, and replaced it with this notion that justice=fairness, and fairness is that we get what we want. We individually set the standard for fairness, and by extension, we say it is unjust when we don’t or are somehow prevented from achieving that standard.

Liberalism has a lot of assertions attached to it, but at the heart of the entire liberal movement lies the notion that we are best at deciding what is in our own interests. We are rational, and as such know best how to defend our own rights and liberties and so forth. Also, we alone are the final decider of what is in our own best interest. Consequently, if I am a person who is of the mind where I seek to acquire as much as possible, I should be permitted to try- nobody else can tell me that my goal is invalid. That system also permits me to decide that acquisition of everything is unsustainable and to complain about the destruction to society and the environment that permanent acquisition lead to. There is, in liberal society, room for both attitudes toward material wealth. This is one of the strengths of liberalism, and it rests on the notion that I can choose to be wealthy and I can choose to be poor if I like. Ultimately, according to liberal ideology, nobody should make that choice for me, nor should they interfere with me attempting to meet my own goals.

The outgrowth of that ideology is therefore that fairness is me being able to accomplish the things I think I should be able to accomplish. And unfairness is the condition of being stopped from living the sort of life I think I should be able to live. This is the only objective standard of fairness in a liberal world- If I can do as I please, that is fair. If I am prevented from doing as I please, that is unfair. The liberals, and the socialists for the most part, adopt this assumption behind their arguments, though they take it in different directions. The liberals will advocate for reduced government “interference” in the pursuit of their own goals for themselves. The socialists will advocate for those who are otherwise prevented from living “the good life”, and charge the deficit in that area of fairness to the wealthy who have too much. The assumption is never that people should ever WANT to live a moderate life, where they actually DON’T have everything they want- it is always that lack of material resources prevents people from living out their dreams.

But I think this notion of fairness as being able to live the kind of life you want to is fatally flawed, because it is not sustainable. Without adopting a pessimistic view of humanity, we can still say that people are, to some degree, egoist, or in other words, self-serving. And we can agree that people generally prefer comfort to squalor. We can say that reasonable people would never pick squalor over abundance, unless they are committed to some vow of poverty for some reason. If nobody was forced, through circumstance to live in squalor, the attractiveness of even those vows, I think would disappear. Consequently, if pursuit of your own happiness is the measure of fairness and justice in society, everyone should theoretically attempt to acquire all they can. And nobody, not the socialists and not the liberals will agree that this is sustainable. The socialists will argue for limited resources in the world, and the liberals will argue that if everyone is well off, then nobody is well off, because some people will always seek to achieve more than their neighbors.

Part 3: People Want Things that They Shouldn’t Want

The world of gross inequality is the result of immoderation in the desires of individuals. Aristotle, (and Augustine, for this matter) for all his faults, did actually have some good to say on the topic of justice as moderation. According to Aristotle, it was a vice to be completely abstinent as much as it was a vice to be too indulgent. The person who is abstinent misses out on the good things in life, while the person who is indulgent causes suffering in other ways, and possibly injury to himself and others. The formula holds with material acquisition as well: Nobody will disagree that those who are poor have a miserable, or at least difficult life. But few will agree that those who have a lot of wealth and material possessions are also miserable. In fact, those who have a lot live in constant fear of losing what they have to others or to chance. This fear is why we see the rich manipulating legislation in their favor, and living in gated communities, and hiring private security to protect them and more importantly the things they have.

Very few people have actually challenged the fairness of unlimited acquisition and fulfilling all our dreams on the grounds that actually meeting those goals may make you quite terrified of the society around you, and certainly nobody has said therefore that this is a bad thing, or that people should not want many of the things they want. We just take for granted the assumption that all poor people want to be in the upper class, and have the big house and two cars, or in other words, their “fair share.” We take it for granted that the best they may get to would be the middle class, but still, that is nice. We do things like calculate the GDP per capita and then we will critique poverty by saying “Well, the reason that there are so many poor people, is because the wealthy in this country have taken more than their share. What would be fair in this society is to redistribute wealth so everyone can live at 40K or whatever that number happens to be. Then everyone would have ‘their share’.” In other words, we calculate “fairness” according to the reason of an 8 year old.

But we never consider whether a person should want that in the first place. We place quantity of choice over quality of choice, each and every time. The reason is that we are stuck in this liberal mindset: on one side, we think that people should be free to pursue their wildest dreams, and it is completely unjust to stop them in that pursuit. And on the other hand, we call it unfair when someone actually DOES get in the way of people getting what they want- that forms the basis of our critique of inequality in our society.

Part 4: Fairness as Moderation

A radically different approach to the notion of “fairness” is needed if we want to sustain the human species for another seven generations in relative comfort. We have to take an objective approach to this notion of what is fair, and that will then help us redefine what is “just” in the world. The objective approach is perhaps more of an objective standard, against which we judge injustice in the world and in our lives. Fairness would take the form and substance of moderation in the things we want for ourselves.

We would then be able to say “Well, people should have a house.” And then we can make the claim for housing for all. We could leave choice in the determination of the style of house- If someone is more comfortable in a 2 bedroom apartment than a McMansion, then they should have that option. The point is to establish the baseline under which it would be both unjust to go too far below, or too far above. The latter clause in that last sentence is the controversial one. It suggests that yes, in the interests in fairness, we should NOT have access to things we don’t need to live a decent life, nor do we get to be the ones who have the final say in what is needed to live a decent life. Everyone should have access to transportation. But this doesn’t automatically mean individualized transportation. Everyone should have access to quality healthcare, but this doesn’t mean that a person should always be entitled to every single medical intervention available, especially if it means producing huge medical bills in exchange for a few months more of life.

Fairness in this sense is summed up by saying that people should have what they need, and add some of the relish of life, and then not more. We can then phrase it in terms of entitlements and public goods, which should not ever be denied to people regardless of their ability to afford them. People should be entitled to a comfortable life. This is both permissive and limiting: Nobody should live in squalor but at the same time, nobody should be permitted to live in an extravagant lifestyle either. A rephrasing of “fairness” away from the liberal conception of “getting what everyone else gets and being free to do as I please” to a more social conception of fairness, which is based on moderation will ensure that all, not just a few, have their needs met. This is impossible to do as long as people are totally free to think and act like 8-year-olds with regards to the the use of the world’s wealth and resources.

Part 5: The Benefits and Costs of Moderation

Meeting the needs of all of those living today is only part of benefit to “fairness as moderation.” By not using all that is immediately available to us now, we guarantee that there is something left over for others, perhaps those that will follow us. Our current path, especially in the post-developed World, but increasingly in massive population centers like China and India, is one of over consumption. The notion that everyone has to have an automobile, for example, is simply unsustainable for a long period of time. No, in fact, not only should those who have a lot do with less, but we should attempt to save resources so that the future of our species can also live in comfort and avoid squalor.

Naturally, those who are arriving at the material wealth that the West has long enjoyed will object to this notion that it is fair to artificially truncate their opportunity to live extravagant lifestyles like wealthy white people have done for so long. It’s like everyone put all their money into a lottery, and now I would be arguing that the last 15 lottery drawings were immoral and so the lottery must be shut down before another drawing is completed. But in fact, that is what I am saying. And not only that, but I advocate that the winners of the former lottery drawings should split whatever is left of their winnings with all those who were shut out of the lottery.

Yes! Give it back so that we can live a life of more moderation. But give it back to whom? If we return our iphones and our third cars and other various extravagances, and sell off our extra houses and divest ourselves of the stocks which represent a share of human-grinding capitalism, the people who buy those things from us only get richer- they resell those things to other people who don’t have them, while paying us fire-sale prices for them. But surely we can come to a point where we are not only using only our share of the world’s resources, but then only just what is needed to live a comfortable, moderate lifestyle! That lifestyle would be FAR below the lifestyle of most of those who count themselves as Middle Class today: it would be a small house, enough transportation to get them to and from work and acquisition of their necessities, adequate education and health care, and adequate entertainment and other various frivolities necessary to prevent life from being Spartan. Everything else would have to be foregone.

The resources saved in not driving everywhere in an SUV or wasting electricity in fully unnecessary electronic devices could then be spread across the globe. Going to decent schools would help save resources to make all schools decent, rather than having some gross inequality of educational outcomes. Playing a board game or reading instead of wasting a day’s wages at the movie theater for an hour and a half of entertainment could save money to be spent on necessities, and could actually help people work fewer hours.

The implications to the economy as a whole by the adoption of a moderate notion of what is fair in this society would be dramatic, at the least! Not spending, and in fact, not needing to spend so incredibly much money to live an extravagant lifestyle would undermine both the structural and attitudinal support for capitalism. Our economy right now is based on wild, unrestrained consumption. There was a debate, for instance during the recent depression about the need to switch from spending to saving. However, the counter argument was that “If nobody spends, the economy goes into the drain.” In fact, our economy is built on constant and extravagantly unnecessary spending. Suppose nobody spent on anything unnecessary anymore- Well, there goes all those jobs which exist only to meet the demand created by a company for their product.

To counter that and still maintain the idea that all are entitled to a decent life, you would have to adopt the idea of public and private goods, and have the public sector provide the public goods. The Private sector then would be reduced to producing the “relish” which is the stuff that makes our sparse life softer and more enjoyable. The Private Sector would be vastly reduced in size from just about everything to almost nothing, in line, of course with the notion that people should not need the kind of compensation that CEOs and investors get today. We would still have movies, but they would have to actually be good ones or bad ones- Mediocrity in art and products would not be permissible any longer. The private sector in this scenario provides the garnishment for the food on our plates. Nothing more. Nor does the market determine anymore what is “good for us.” The end result is socialism, where nobody lives in squalor, or even discomfort, but we no longer individually decide what level of comfort we want either, especially if our level of comfort comes at the expense of other people, which is the system we currently have.

Part 6: Conclusion- Fairness as Equity

In closing, let us return to the earlier statement on fairness from my son today, because it needs to be addressed. He first said that fairness, to paraphrase, is that he gets whatever everyone else has. To some degree, that notion of fairness also exists in the conversation on fairness. The socialists would advocate, ultimately for a leveling of wealth across society, whether sustainable or not, depending on their stripes (the closer to the liberal position they are, the more unsustainable their notion of equity will be.) But the liberals are terrified that while a leveling may alleviate the effects of social and economic inequality, it will always come at the expense of the wealthy. Unlike the socialist, who dream of pulling the lower groups up to the middle, the liberal fear pulling the upper class down to the middle.

Both visions are correct, in some ways, but I would say the place where we argue “the middle” that all must rise and fall to is entirely too high to be sustainable, not only for those who are here today, but for future generations. The above proposal for moderation would be to set that level significantly far below what is “possible” or some notion of an perfect equity in distribution of wealth in society. That line should be well below “our share” of the pie, because the collective “our” in the US has a much larger share of the world’s pie than most people in the world.

My son talked about getting what everyone else gets. My hope is that he will be satisfied when in fact we have to calculate not only what our own share of the resources of this world will be, but also add into the calculation what the future’s share of those resources are. We will have to significantly modify our conception of what is “fair” if we take into account the future, and whatever is said about socialism, liberalism is entirely unconcerned about that when they do their calculations of fairness. To survive on this planet for the foreseeable future, we need to change our conception of “fairness” and actually make attempts to live according to the results of that recalculation, even if it means we don’t get to have huge flat screen TVs in each room of our house. But if we keep adopting the 8 year-old version of fairness, we are going to wipe ourselves clean off the face of this planet, sooner, rather than later. And if we as a species are completely incapable of imagining a way out of this conundrum, then perhaps we deserve what we are doing to ourselves.