Against Fairness

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Going Off the Grid

  Now what happens if I adopt this modern spectator perspective for some real-life ethical questions? Let’s say I own a tavern, and I regularly book musical groups to entertain the patrons. Many good music combos want to play my tavern, because the crowd is big and appreciative and the pay is decent. My brother, whom I love, has a half-baked uninspired quartet that can muddle through some tunes adequately. I hire his band regularly to perform at the tavern (excessively even), not because he’s good or he’s the most deserving, but because he’s my brother. Have I sinned according to the grid of impartiality? Probably. Looking at the scenario as a disinterested spectator would probably lead me to disfavor my brother. But, from an ethics standpoint, my favoritism here seems like small potatoes. Kant would probably chastise me for letting sentiments infect my decision, but most of us would do the same without much hand-wringing.

  In an obvious way, of course, I have to violate a strict egalitarian notion of equal opportunity as soon as I insist that whomever I hire to play the gig is actually a musician. This may seem trivial, but it’s interesting how quickly the concept of equal opportunity starts to break down when competence is introduced as a criterion. It’s not clear when a musician (or any skilled practitioner) has crossed the mysterious line that separates the qualified from the unqualified. Obvious cases of incompetence are clear enough, but most cases are fuzzy, and the ambiguity creates opportunity for favoritism to decide the competing claims. My brother’s band is not awful, but they’re also not as good as many of the other bands that are now prevented from playing the gig.

  Let’s push the example a little further now. Let’s say my brother is struggling to make ends meet and provide for his family (my nieces and nephews), so in addition to giving his band slots instead of other, better bands, I give his band a little extra pay than I give the other bands that occasionally play my tavern. This is typical petty favoritism. Again, I’ve already deviated from the egalitarian grid and the disinterested spectator perspective by preferentially hiring my brother. Now, add a classic skim. At the end of the night, when my brother goes to pay the other musicians in the group, he thinks about how his daughter needs braces and he pockets an extra $20 before he splits the remaining wages equally.

  Have ethical norms been violated here? Yes, the ethical framework of fairness has certainly been breached, but the example is innocuous enough to illustrate that the breach is probably acceptable to most of us. Why? Many people when presented with such a case will explain their endorsement on the grounds that it’s just a tiny infraction after all and everybody does it anyway—so what’s the big deal? This shows, I suspect, that our thinking about such cases is dominated by an official allegiance to fairness, but a cringing willingness to look the other way on minor infractions. It’s hard for us to articulate how this violation of the grid could be anything but tolerable failure. But I want to suggest a different way of thinking about the case—a positive vindication of the actions rather than a begrudging toleration. At the same time that the ethical norms of fairness are being violated, another older ethical norm of loyalty and devotion is being fulfilled. There is not one ethical framework here (fairness) and some misdemeanor violation. There are two mutually incompatible ethical frameworks here: fairness to all relevant musicians and dedication to kin. You may protest, as Kant might have, that there is only one right thing to do here, but your love of your brother has understandably clouded your ethical judgment (and maybe your failure is even forgivable). But I submit that there are actually two right things to do here, and they intrinsically conflict with each other. Success as an egalitarian citizen is failure as a brother, and vice versa.

  Consider some recent well-known cases of nepotism. It is quite likely that filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola opened many doors for some of his family. He didn’t just represent cosa nostra on film; he practiced its benign nepotism in life. Actors Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman are Coppola’s nephews (true nepotes), and director Sofia Coppola is Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter. Hollywood, like politics, is filled with stories of favoritism. Powerful people frequently smooth the way for their kin in the same ways we all do, but their celebrity status makes the favoritism more public and obvious. Consider, for example, that Sigourney Weaver’s dad was the head of NBC, and Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges benefited from their dad Lloyd Bridges’s connections, and Mamie Gummer is a successful New York stage actor and daughter of Meryl Streep, and Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s kids look destined for successful Hollywood careers as well. Let’s not forget Martin Sheen’s kids, Charlie and Emilio, or Donald Sutherland’s son, Kiefer, or Jon Voight’s daughter, Angelina Jolie, or Goldie Hawn’s daughter, Kate Hudson, or that one guy’s daughter Miley Cyrus.

  Not many of us are morally outraged by these Hollywood violations of the impartial grid. Like my example of the tavern owner and musicians, these Hollywood cases seem less serious. The social stakes don’t seem very high in cases of entertainment favoritism. We tend to write off the whole Hollywood world as play. But of course jobs are jobs, and the money stakes are not trivial in Tinseltown. If preferential hiring automatically discriminates against competing actors, then the grid is violated here too.

  Adjust the example a little, and notice a big change in your intuitions. Let’s say that I’m not a tavern owner or actor but a Chicago alderman on the city council.17 I am helping my district build a new youth center, and my brother owns a construction company. I use my influence to help him get the competitive building contract. There are many similarities with the musician example but also important differences. Most people will try to draw a clear line between the private world of the tavern owner and the public world of the alderman. We might be willing to look the other way for the tavern owner’s private nepotism, but a public servant who does the exact same thing is usually considered morally reprehensible. The difference seems to be that a public official has accepted a unique role, moving from mere citizen to some kind of administrator or manager of the grid. The egalitarian grid must be upheld in order to ensure equal opportunities in a pluralistic society, but the upholder, in this case, is now required to be less of a brother. This fact is frequently ignored or drowned out by the indignant cries of corruption. The alderman’s preferential favoritism is said to be a violation of the public trust, but people rarely notice that the alderman’s dedication to the grid is a violation of his brotherly duties. Our expectation is that a public official must serve strangers better than his own kin—which is a paradoxical expectation if it’s impossible for most people (non-saints) to do this.18

  My point here is not to defend corrupt aldermen, but to show that the ethics is more complicated than we usually admit. A distinction between public and private duties does not really help us if we realize that tavern owners, actors, aldermen, and all human beings are intermixed amalgams of public and private values, duties and interests. Separating these dimensions from each other and from the person in whom they are hopelessly blended is an artificial head game. Outrage over favoritism is easily sustainable if we adopt the grid as our frame of ethics and ignore the special duties of filial ethics. But we do this at a cost. And, interestingly, it’s hard to see where all the outrage and indignation is coming from, if the impartial spectator perspective is so disinterested and detached. Perhaps the demand for fairness has a more hidden emotional spring inside it. French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, thought that American principles of equality were heavily motivated by envy. We’ll examine this more later.

  Friendship and Favoritism

  Now, what if an alderman gives a contract to a friend? Or a friend of a friend? Not too long ago, at a social event, I raised this question to a group of acquaintances. One of our company grew outraged—practically apoplexic—and he sneered in disgust at what he called the “hopeless corruption of politicians.” Shortly after his show of indignation, one of his friends gently reminded him that he got his current job when a mutual fri
end in management simply appointed him—without any proper job search. He grimaced, stammered something about a previous engagement, and abruptly broke off from our conversation.

  Aristotle said, “Without friends no one would choose to live.”19 In the previous chapter, we looked at the development of our first favorites, our primordial family clan. We examined how humans and other mammals first establish preferential bonds between parent and offspring. Very early on, however, we begin to admit others into our circle of favors. We form non-blood friendships. Our team gets bigger.

  Prior to the construction of what I’ve been calling the great “grid of impartiality,” nepotistic friendships were the way that people advanced and even survived in societies. Your family and friendship connections helped you get access to resources, smoothed your path to success, provided you with a loyal and supportive micro-community, and made demands on your own wealth and loyalty. Ideologies of political and ethical egalitarianism looked to curtail this nepotistic reality, on the grounds that some groups were “losers” in such a society of favoritism. If you weren’t born into the right family or didn’t have the right friends, then you remained at a permanent disadvantage.

  Constructed in part by Enlightenment philosophy (human rights), in part by legal innovations (e.g., the Napoleonic civil code, common law in Britain and the United States, etc.), and in part by economic transformation (mercantilism and capitalism), the grid did much to alleviate the condition of the underprivileged. And philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755) claimed early on that commerce softens human relations—making us all kinder and gentler—because commerce forces us out of our tribal groups and helps us feel compassion for other social groups. Trading and doing business with strangers begins to reveal their common humanity and elicits sympathy and compassion instead of xenophobia. I’m not sure history bears out this cheerful view of commerce and compassion. Alexis de Tocqueville suggested instead that it was political democracy (not trade) that civilized our social interactions. When we take these things together—Newtonian science, commerce, democracy, social philosophy, and revolutionary ideas of freedom—we arrive at a strange combination of Romantic individualism and classless social idealism. The individual is the most important reality, but every individual is morally indistinguishable and interchangeable with every other individual.

  Industrialization further solidified the grid, preventing local folk nepotism from functioning well. The rise of modern urban life put new burdens on social cohesion. People of very different backgrounds fractured off from their nuclear families, migrated into massive cities, and worked shoulder to shoulder with strangers. In the early 1800s, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities, but now the figure is estimated to be around 50 percent. Congestion grows rapidly in the post-Enlightenment era and feeds the need for expanded government. If I’m proximally close enough to help you, I’m also close enough to harm you. Without some ideology of fairness, it’s hard to imagine this human mayhem working.

  Fairness is the management system for large-scale public interactions between strangers, but friendships compromise the system at every turn. The friend always gets and gives special treatment.20 The friend does not fit squarely in the consistent and regulated grid of impartiality—he looms large in the symbolic picture frame, like a medieval pope towering over tiny commoners.

  The friend is not fungible. In the impartial grid, everyone has equal value, and utilitarian divisions of labor entail the interchangeability of anyone who can satisfy the requisite functions. This is the alienating feature of modern life, well decried by Karl Marx in the realm of labor and by Franz Kafka in the realm of everything else. But a friend is not interchangeable with another person who has similar skills, talents, or tendencies. Favorites, like friends, are not cogs in the machine. It’s true that some people look to “trade up” when someone better comes along, but we generally consider this a shallow betrayal of the real meaning of friendship.

  There are no universal rules of friendship, no clear rational justifications, no science of friendship. Trying to justify friendships by using Newtonian-inspired grids of rationality is a fool’s errand. My friend is an exception to the rules. I can never start with an impartial spectator view of social relations and then arrive at a justification for my friendships—unless I artificially reduce friends to expedient utilitarian resources (i.e., unless I’m a shallow jerk). I cannot find my friend in the hedonic calculus, in the categorical imperative, or even in the legal system. It’s not logic or calculation that explains a friendship, but history.

  It is common for people to describe, excuse, or defend some preferential or exceptional treatment of a friend by shrugging and giving the classic “Well, we have history” answer. That doesn’t seem like much of an explanation at first blush, but we grasp the meaning. Sharing experiences with someone, good times and bad, creates a new kind of relationship between people. Biology can bond people together, but so can history—so can shared habits, emotions, and values, as we respond to life events. In a very important sense, I share my life with my friend in a way that I cannot with a stranger. Our shared life is our history. And that unique, contingent history prevents any transferability of friendship. You can’t have substitute friends.

  The non-transferability of friendships becomes obvious when we reflect on the common problem of embarrassing friends. This is more pronounced in politicians and public figures who have more to worry about, but of course we also have that one friend that we just can’t take anywhere. As we discussed earlier in the case of the alderman and his brother, politicians are held to a different standard. And in the same way that the alderman is expected to devalue his brotherly duties if they conflict with the public good, so, too, the politician is expected to devalue his friend if there is conflict with the public interest. Sadly, politicians are expected to vouch for the characters of their friends, and God forbid if a politician should be seen with a morally dubious friend.

  Some politicians are devoted enough to a friend that they’ll hold on to them even as a public media swell condemns the association. This shows how real friendship history can trump other considerations—including the threat of political failure or even the temptation to accessorize oneself with more glamorous sycophants, flatterers, and ersatz friends. Unfortunately, many public figures do abandon friends easily, because they can be real liabilities in the political world of pretended saintliness.

  When Barack Obama’s friend and pastor Jeremiah Wright sermonized a variety of embarrassing and seemingly anti-American views, candidate Obama tried to weather the media storm. But as Wright continued, in 2008, to suggest vaguely racist theories and divisive generalizations (e.g., his weird keynote address to the Detroit branch of the NAACP), Obama decisively broke with Wright and formally left Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Presumably, Obama decided that the liability had grown too great. But this was merely an extreme case—accentuated by high-stakes, feverish media attention; most other public figures wrestle more quietly with the demands of friendship and civic duty.

  We, the public, expect our civic leaders to have the preposterous fairness of Gandhi, and this unrealistic expectation helps create several problems. First, we’re crestfallen if we discover nepotism. Second, public servants must live schizophrenic double lives, because they’re not allowed to have normal biases. And third, it encourages the civic success of a whole population of detached, expedient eunuchs, because those are the kind of people who don’t take risks or have awkward attachments.

  Reasonable Favoritism

  When philosophers tried to make ethics into geometry or physics, they did so from the best intentions (i.e., objectivity, they thought, reduces squabbles). But they made a terrible error in thinking that mathematical rationality was the only true reasonable approach to problems.21 Subjective experiences, biases, personal histories, emotions, and even friendship and kin ties were not compliant in a grid of universal binding rules. My brother, my mom, and my son are not
variables in a hedonic calculus or coordinates on a Cartesian lattice. But does this mean that favoritism is intrinsically irrational? No, favoritism is only problematic if we’ve adopted theoretical reason as our paradigm; however, practical reason is more capacious and capable of handling the realities of our preferences.22

  Practical reason is the true foundation for ethics, because it does not pursue theoretical mathematical certainty, but probable, fallible, and context-dependent problem solving. Newtonian-inspired fairness tries to make all people commutative and quickly becomes incoherent when real-life values like favoritism crash the grid. Kant saw all persons as idealized equals, guided by logical consistency. And the utilitarians saw pleasure itself as the commutative and transposable element or variable in the system. But Aristotle starts from real life and acknowledges that people are already in a value hierarchy—and the good (rather than pleasure) comes in many qualitatively distinct forms.

  On friendship, Aristotle starts from some important inequalities.23 Parents, he explains, are responsible for their children—responsible for their existence, their nurture and upbringing. He considers this to be a case of positive unequal friendship and thinks there are many forms of friendship (e.g., teachers and students, etc.) that imply the “superiority of one party over the other.” Now, this talk of superiority rings strange to our egalitarian ear, but his general point is not very controversial. “The justice,” he continues, “that exists between persons so related is not the same on both sides, but is in every case apportioned” to merit, to excellence, to usefulness, and to bonds (emotional and blood). Justice is not “the same on both sides”—it is not the commutative relation of fairness. We ought, he says, to render different things to parents, siblings, friends, benefactors, and pastors.24