Understanding Fairness

Summary

This essay introduces a recently published philosophical book "A brief discussion on fairness analysis", which explores the nature of fairness and its significant role in our civilization. Beauty is used as a comparison to fairness in the discussion as an attempt to bring to the attention of the readers one basic fact about fairness: it is so familiar to us but so little has been known so far by the public about the nature of it. The author tries to help readers to notice the importance of learning the dynamics of fairness through fairness analysis as discussed in above mentioned book. The link to the webpage of the book hosted by the publisher is provided in the essay.

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Fairness is like beauty that every person could enjoy without the need of being coached. This simple fact actually makes fairness a very complicated issue just like the issue of beauty. What someone considers as beautiful could be considered as ugly by someone else (especially when the beauty is appreciated with an abstract connotation without a physical referent); similarly, what someone considers as fair might be viewed as unfair by someone else. The sense of fairness of any person could also change from time to time just as the taste of beauty could change at different times, most probably under some external influences.

For a mature person, appreciation of beauty goes far beyond the physical appearances and extends to abstract values, and fairness is indeed one important ingredient of abstract beauty that would normally please people around the world. However, just as beauty could do us good or bad under different circumstances, if we learn more about fairness, we might find that neither would fairness always do good to people as we might often assume so.

Even though fairness has been a buzzword of all nations for thousands of years, only a little has been known by the public about its nature over the history. Main stream thinkers have been interested in the issue of fairness mostly for what are fair or not fair and their consequences in public social affairs; and thus cultural reflections about the notion of fairness that is no doubt a critical agent of human civilization have been focused on the significance of fairness at social macroscopic level, complemented by some minor attentions on the impact of fairness on private relationships. Consequently, the whole spectrum of the fascinating dynamics driven by fairness has been so far pretty much missing in literature around the world.

This missing of reflection about the dynamic nature of fairness in literature has been one of the main causes for the confusions (of writers, poets, artists, as well as readers and audiences) about various cultural, political, and economic phenomena. When people are criticizing unfair social happenings, they seldom realize that they themselves might be important contributors to the unfair reality in many cases; when people are trying to design a fairest system or pursue an ideal society, they might not realize that without some special cautions what they consider as fair might be the seed for future unfairness; when people are puzzled about why bad guys so much often could easily defeat what they consider as good guys in many historical events, they are normally ignoring the work of fairness in the cause since they have labeled fairness as always positive; when people try to portrait historical heroes, they might assign them some attributes that could be detrimental to fairness in real life.

The lack of curiosity about fairness and consequently the ignorance of what on earth fairness is really about have led to not only mutual misunderstandings among people living together but also misunderstandings about history and about the cultural, political, and economic realities of society. But this missing sight of an elephant in the room is not by accident but a result of the complicated nature of fairness itself.

Every artist should know what beauty is when he/she is creating his/her works of art; but still, without referring to any specific sample, "what is beauty" would be one of the most difficult questions for all artists. Similarly, everyone who cares about fair or even fights for some fairness in this world would have an idea in his/her mind of what kind of fairness he/she cares about or fights for, but "what is fairness" without reference to any specific event would still be one of the most difficult questions for every single person on this globe. The reason for the difficulty of answering both questions lies in the fact that both beauty and fairness are open concepts in the sense that they have very wide ranges of connotation; and thus neither of them could be interpreted in a satisfactory way with a simple sentence as most people who are used to thinking by specific definitions would like to see.

For example, one definition of fairness that you might find from online is "the state, condition, or quality of being free from bias, dishonesty or injustice." However, if we define the meaning of "bias" based on a mathematically strict sense of symmetry, then we will find that an attempt of deconstructing the meaning of "free from bias" would involve ourselves into a full-scale discussion the same as a discussion about what is fairness; as for the part of "being free from dishonesty or injustice", it could only offer a very partial meaning of fairness since even crooks would fight over fairness issues among themselves. Another example of dictionary definition of fairness is "being proper under the rules", which obviously could not fully provide the nature and impact of fairness either since the rules in this world have very often been very unfair.

Nonetheless, the nature of beauty has long been a well-known topic for philosophy or a special branch of it, aesthetics; while the nature of fairness is still pretty much an untapped territory since almost no one has seriously studied the issue. With this writing I would like to refer you to a recent book I wrote on the issue: "A brief discussion on fairness analysis". As an effort to fill in one missing part on the spectrum of human cultural radar, which is about one of the most fundamental concept of this civilization, that book provides an introductory discussion on the nature of fairness and its role in our civilization.

Obviously, fairness cannot create visual pleasure as beauty, which not only makes it harder to discuss fairness than discuss beauty but also determines that the study of fairness would take a very different way from the study of beauty. That book "A brief discussion on fairness analysis" not only unveils some important logic behind the issue of fairness and its influence upon our everyday life, but also demonstrates a viable approach of exploring the nature of fairness and its role in human civilization.

We all know that it is our instinctive nature to sense and react to beauty, but many (if not most) people would not relate our sense of fairness to our instincts while our sense of fairness is indeed one of our fundamental instincts. Knowing this is important for understanding the power of fairness in our everyday life and that is the starting point of fairness analysis discussed in the book, instead of cultural reflection of societal fairness as most people would do when discuss fairness related issues.

Of course, it is impossible for that 250 pages book to be thorough on the complete issue of fairness, but it is a good start for exploring an important territory of our civilization (hopefully by more and more people) in the future. As it is printed on the back of the book, fairness analysis is a cultural domain that human civilization cannot bypass, and the study of fairness analysis would lead to a new philosophy that would change this world.

 

Links and references:

1. Link to get the book “A brief discussion on fairness analysis”:

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Discussion-On-Fairness-Analysis/dp/1478753692%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAJ2ARPXFHVMONXSFQ%26tag%3Dcmk1999%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D1478753692

2. A Brief Introduction to Fairness Analysis, R. Dai, Arts and Social Sciences Journal, URL: http://www.omicsonline.com/open-access/a-brief-introduction-to-fairness-analysis-2151-6200.100095.php?aid=36912
3. Chaotic Order: A Consequence of Economic Relativity, R. Dai, Complexity in Economics, ed. Marisa Faggini, Anna Parziale, 2014, p.117