the human concepts of fairness, blame, etc

[gusl]

Robin Hanson - Is Fairness About Clear Fitness Signals?

I've often struggled with the concept of "fairness" (distinct from "justice" in the sense of "being wronged", which is relatively unproblematic, and can be formalized in terms of (social) contracts). "Fairness" here is about what feels right, absent any agreements.

The concept of "blame"/"responsibility" is similarly problematic (e.g. "when can you blame someone? what about the environment where he grew up? his genes?"), but at least it has a reason to exist: assigning blame can prevent future problems.

"Fairness", OTOH, seems like a quirky concept with no clear purpose. Why is it unfair to compete against a disabled person, while it's fair to compete with (and merciless beat) someone who is chronically lazy? We say this is the case because the lazy person chooses to be lazy. So humans have a folk theory of free will. (never mind the free-will / determinism debates).

Anyway, Robin Hanson provides an interesting answer to the above, without going into this question of attributing "choice": instead he focuses on the hypothesis that the outcomes of unfair dealings are poor signals of genetic fitness... although this doesn't explain why unfair games can be repulsive. Is this because they waste people's time, not satisfying their immense curiosity about others' genetic fitness? or because unfair games could give deceptive signals? Could it be that people are repulsed by the sight/knowledge of others struggling helplessly?

What about people who say that sweatshops are "unfair", even when they are a good deal for everyone involved? Are they framing the situation as a competition between boss and worker? Does it bother them that rich and poor are interacting in a capitalistic way?
(I'm reminded of a link about this: a theory of how things get "morally contamined" by association. Maybe it was a response to Amitai Etzioni)

Comments

[r6.livejournal.com]

Corporations buy the governments that set the labour laws that create working conditions for sweatshops. This is hardly rich and poor interacting in a capitalistic way.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Corporations buy the governments that set the labour laws that create working conditions for sweatshops.
Are you saying that they actively change the law to be more laissez-faire? I never heard of this. Can you back it up?

There are sweatshops that work on deception. These are better termed "slave camps". Unfortunately, too few people focus on educating poor workers.

In any case, I would like to hear about labour laws that are good. I suspect that all the bad things that they prevent could be better prevented by educating everyone, but this may be too idealistic of me.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

There was an article in Scientific American about the economics of fair play, which may be interesting to you. Here's the summary:

Imagine that somebody offers you $100. All you have to do is agree with some other anonymous person on how to share the sum. The rules are strict. The two of you are in separate rooms and cannot exchange information. A coin toss decides which of you will propose how to share the money. Suppose that you are the proposer. You can make a single offer of how to split the sum, and the other person-the responder-can say yes or no. The responder also knows the rules and the total amount of money at stake. If her answer is yes, the deal goes ahead. If her answer is no, neither of you gets anything. In both cases, the game is over and will not be repeated. What will you do?

Instinctively, many people feel they should offer 50 percent, because such a division is "fair" and therefore likely to be accepted. More daring people, however, think they might get away with offering somewhat less than half of the sum.

Logically, any offer by the proposer where the responder gets >0 should be accepted. The alternative is rejecting the whole deal and getting nothing, which is less than something. In practice though, if the proposal is deemed "unfair", the responder will reject the offer.

I can mail you the full article if you want (It requires a subscription to SciAm digital, which I have).

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

This actually fits in with the "unfairness" of sweatshops. Logically it's a good deal because both the workers and the owners get something, while the alternative is nothing. Intuitively though, people find it unfair because the workers get very little while the owners get a lot.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I played this game as a labrat for Harvard economists. I got the lucky position of Proposer. I also had a second Acceptor available in case the first one refused.

If the subjects established a reputation (their anonymous identities, I mean), and positions changed once in a while, then they would play more fairly.

There's another setting, where you play with 3 other people, but you never know which one you are playing with, so you can't easily tell whether you've played someone before (although you might guess by the way they play).

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

In any case, I would like to hear about labour laws that are good. I suspect that all the bad things that they prevent could be better prevented by educating everyone, but this may be too idealistic of me.

Just look at the Industrial Revolution. I remember a statistic from highschool that life expectancy for some groups of factory workers in Britain was just 30 years. And this wasn't due to high infant mortality, it was due to poor working conditions.

Education does help to some extent, but such problems also have to do with intelligence and personality type.

Besides, in many job-markets there is an abundance of labour and a shortage of work. This drives down the price of labour. Economics states (correctly) that the price of labour cannot go down indefinitely and people will refuse to work for less than a certain intrinsic minimum. However, it does lead to the "american" situation where many people need to work 2 or more jobs, often working 6-7 days a week and make 80+ hours a week to make ends meet. Since this is not an acceptable situation for enough people, democracy ensures that people are elected who will regulate the job market to prevent this.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

The point is that if workers were educated, they would refuse to do something that endangered their lives for such little money.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

Sure, but my points are:

1) intelligence and personality plays a role too. Not everybody is very eloquent or good at standing up for themselves. A trait that will die out once it becomes a distinct evolutionary disadvantage? Perhaps. But until that time, people will do crazy stuff for a pittance.

2) People don't always have the luxury of being picky. Some people must earn money at all cost, even if this means doing dangerous work for little money.

Both these points are not solvable, or at least only partly, by eduction.

Not that I'm against education, obviously. Education can achieve more than all aid programs, debt relief packages and whatnot combined.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

2) People don't always have the luxury of being picky. Some people must earn money at all cost, even if this means doing dangerous work for little money.

But that type of work wasn't there before, and its arrival only gives people new choices... unless they were fooled into changing their way of life in a way that doesn't let them go back to doing what they were doing.

One could also resent the whole community for accepting the new way of production, but then one should blame one's community. Oh well.