Against Fairness

by Asma, Stephen T.

  This, I believe, is the same careful empirical approach that we should use when tribal values and egalitarian values clash—both in ourselves and in the geopolitical sphere. It is not enough, by a long shot, to say: I am of the liberal tradition, and therefore I am always against tribalism, nepotism, bias, and favoritism. I have tried to show, in this book, that there is some greater rapprochement between liberalism and tribalism, but of course there is also a limit.27 Conflict between tribes is inevitable (as is conflict between tribalism and egalitarianism), but cooperation/consensus is not impossible.

  We make these tough contextual decisions all the time, but we don’t always acknowledge their improvisational nature. For example, as a teacher I have a grid of assignment grades and attendance for my students. At the end of the semester, I, like most teachers, tabulate the scores and give the grade. If the final grade was just the sum of the grid calculations, I could give the tally sheet to my third-grade son, a neighbor, or a stranger on the street and still be confident that their simple addition will produce the just grades. But I don’t do it that way. In many large class institutions (e.g., 200-seat lecture halls), this sad mechanical approach is the inevitable method. But if you actually know your students, then you also know that there are many contextual aspects that cannot be put on a grading grid. This student, for example, was exemplary in their written work, but browbeat other students and lorded a sense of arrogant superiority over them. I don’t have a grid category for that. This student struggled admirably in the course, but lost her mother to cancer in week six and of course never regained full momentum. I don’t have a grid category for that. This student didn’t test well but seemed to read every supplemental book I offhandedly mentioned in class. This student is a homophobic jerk but reads and writes with great conceptual precision. This student does B work, but texts incessantly on his cell phone while we are having class discussions. This student is not doing well at all, but I accidentally saw him playing the most transcendent Bach piano concerto in the student center. I don’t have grading grid categories for any of this stuff. But I acknowledge, unapologetically, that they all play into my contextually bound judgments about students’ final grades. The more experienced I get (read “older”), the wiser these qualitative judgments seem to get.

  This grading example may seem trivial, but I offer it as an example of our everyday process of “feeling the stones with our feet.” Supreme, Superior, and District Court judges, presiding over complex legal cases, make similar types of judgments using sentencing guidelines, legal precedents, and other procedural strategies. If they can cultivate sensitivity to the particulars and the contexts of their cases, wisdom will prevail as they go beyond the mere application of legal rules. As Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe argue in Practical Wisdom, judges must not fall victim to the modern jeopardy of mathematical or computational justice. In recent years, mandatory sentencing rules became inflexible grids that judges dogmatically applied, but their goal of fairness was undermined by an unwillingness to factor in the subtle contextual differences in the cases. Wise judges know when and where to bend rules and improvise, in the service of justice (not in the service of self).28

  If schlubs like me are doing this kind of wise improvising with values, and court judges are doing it, then we must accept the fact that presidents, premiers, and prime ministers are also feeling the stones with their feet. Favoritists like me wish there was more of this, not less.

  But even with the most dexterous improvisers, it may be impossible to reconcile some of the dissonance between values and tribes. The British writer Evelyn Waugh noticed that the happiness and virtue of human beings is not much influenced by their larger political and economic conditions. Sinners and saints, for example, arise and thrive in every sort of political economy. Still, this did not render him neutral and disinterested in the larger tribal conflicts. “I do not think,” Waugh stated, “that British prosperity is inimical to anyone else, but if, on occasion, it is, I want Britain to prosper and not her rival.”29

  On some things, you will simply have to choose between what is loved and what is fair. And on some things, you will find compatibility. But while there is no algorithm or calculus or universal grid of fairness, there is the humbler, groping method of mozhe shitou guo he.

  7

  Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line

  Johnny Cash wrote that famous song about his first wife in 1956, when he was touring on the road and struggling to stay faithful. The song “I Walk the Line” is about the sacrifices and the devotions of love—the profound lengths to which we will go for our favorites. The bonds of favoritism create moral gravity and contour the way we treat people inside and outside the gravitational field. I don’t walk the line for just anybody. Johnny Cash refers to the “tie that binds” and celebrates his own willingness to be constrained by the heart. This is not the realm of fairness, equality, or impartiality. But it is a moral realm of value and action, all the same.

  The fact that Cash couldn’t make this noble fidelity last is slightly amusing, but tolerable, I suppose, when viewed from a mature perspective on romance. He famously took a new favorite, June Carter, and the rest is history as they say. But it also reveals the obvious human flexibility of the “tie that binds.” Some of our privileged favorites are automatically given (e.g., mothers, fathers, children, siblings, ethnic tribes), and some of them are freely chosen (e.g., spouses, friends, aesthetic and political tribes).1

  The relationship between freedom and favoritism is complicated. On the one hand, freely choosing one’s spouse is a license not afforded in many parts of the developing world. But more provocative is the possibility that it’s not much of a free choice in the developed world either. Who you end up “falling for” seems (sometimes tragically) way out of your control.2

  Freely and consciously choosing my tribe of friends or favorites offers additional pleasures on top of the other attractions involved. Every rebellious teenager knows the joys of finally choosing friends that not only supplant parental choices but actually frustrate and torture parent expectations. But rebellion or even “free choice” is much too flimsy to sustain real favoritism for very long, and the lasting bonds of attachment need sturdier validation.

  The Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden claimed that American ideology reverses the traditional European value system—for Europe, virtue precedes freedom, but for Americans freedom precedes virtue. Auden noticed that America is so fiercely devoted to liberty that we would rather freely choose vice than have virtue forced upon us.3 Our national stance—“You’re not the boss of me”—leads us to think of freedom as an end in itself rather than a means to some virtuous end. This may be one of the reasons why Americans tend to think of morality as a set of rules rather than as virtues or modes of character. American values assert freedom from harassment and freedom to fulfill basic human capabilities, but positive and substantial notions of good are noticeably absent beyond this rudimentary ethical conversation. I have been suggesting that many of the substantial ingredients of the good life (i.e., bonds of family, friends, and tribe) clash incurably with our official culture of fairness. In this last part of the book, I want to remind people about the virtues of favoritism. And also offer some reflections about the future of favoritism, especially in the digital age.

  The Virtues of Favoritism

  I have not argued against obviously good egalitarian ideals, like legal due process. And I believe that ideals of fairness will have to remain dominant in the legal domain of modern nation-states. Moreover, economic and health-care disparity should be improved, and my favoritist position should not be taken as an endorsement of lassez-faire doctrine. It was not my goal to denounce all forms of egalitarian fairness, but to dethrone it as the standard of Western ethical life. One can see, given the large social-justice issues, why many philosophers try to draw a line that separates public and private ethics—suggesting two worlds of ethical norms. But as I’ve argued throughout this book, the cure for corrup
tion and obscene wealth is not legalistic fairness, but something deeper—something in the cultivation of our common humanity. Overcoming greed and increasing charity are not just possible after the ideology of fairness, but we see such virtue already confirmed in non-egalitarian cultures and eras. I’m not overly Romantic about virtue-based cultures—they have room for improvement too—but many Westerners naively continue to confuse ethics with fairness.

  In today’s political climate, both liberals and conservatives struggle to articulate a notion of the good that accommodates individualism, tribalism, and strangers. But the Left, especially, has fallen prey to the myth of egalitarianism. The Left writhes under the neurotic push-pull of its own human attachments to family and tribe, and its contrary dogma-driven guilt about partiality and bias. Furthermore, the Left has taken a morally righteous tone in recent years by disingenuously redefining “fairness” in purely progressive terms (e.g., redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, etc.), suggesting that alternative views of justice and value (e.g., our natural nepotism) are simply forms of bigotry. As political rhetoric, this pretended piety seems advantageous, but liberals should be careful not to premise their sense of justice on a complete denial of bias—since biology usually triumphs over ideology.

  The Left erroneously assumes that the “open society” cannot be achieved if favoritism is allowed to persist. Its historical response to favoritism was to level the social world on the model of universal scientific laws (see my discussion of “the grid” in chapter 3) and forbid partiality as immoral and uncivilized. I have been suggesting that liberalism confused the excesses and abuses of centralized regime kleptocracy with the more benign and meaningful forms of kin loyalty. This is understandable since liberalism was born in large part by kicking its way out of empires and monarchies. But it’s time to reclaim the lost virtues of preference. What is needed is a liberalism that can admit and acknowledge our nepotistic attachments.4

  My own trifling attempt to poeticize our culture has been to return our preferential emotional life to the center of ethics. One of the most obvious justifications for favoritism—hinted at but not yet explicitly discussed—is that it substantially increases human happiness.

  In the last decade, positive psychology and neuroscience have pursued extensive research into human happiness.5 Traditional psychology focused primarily on pathology, but positive happiness has been subjected to empirical analysis of late, and the findings are relevant for my argument. The main ingredient in human happiness is not wealth, property, pleasure, or fame, but strong social bonds. Strong friendships and family bonds are unparalleled in providing people with happiness. That doesn’t mean they always give pleasure, because sometimes they are highly stressful. But pleasure is not the same as happiness, and on balance people self-report that their tribes are worth the trouble.

  Many Americans are duped by flashy consumer culture into the belief that happiness comes from material wealth and limitless free choices. Subsequently, we tend to go in the wrong direction, trying to satisfy our endless desires, when we should be looking elsewhere for happiness.

  My son’s mother, Wen, who grew up in Mainland China, always chuckles at the American obsession with choice. Americans, she thinks, are quick to let go of things and people as soon as pleasure dissipates. And my Cambodian friend Naht—who spends half the year in the States and half in a village near Siem Reap, Cambodia—confirms this assessment of American whimsy. “Americans,” she says, “have too many choices to be happy.” Both Wen and Naht agree that too many choices lead to increased anxiety and misery, and they claim that the more obliged lifestyle, where family duty constrains your choices, actually lets you focus better and live more deeply in your activities.

  In America we spend a lot of time and energy trying to maximize the most satisfactory choice. We gather data about our choices and stress out about our imminent decisions. We regret many of our decisions because possibilities are so endless. We waste hours researching the best toaster oven on Amazon, or the ultimate juicer, or the most nutritious cat food. I stood frozen and motionless recently in front of a bartender who had handed me a drink menu of over two hundred microbrew beers. Frequently, all these choices leave people paralyzed and unable to commit. When they do commit, they obsess and fret over the missed opportunities that their actual choice forced upon them.

  Most of us assume that more choice always means more happiness. But a recent study by psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that Naht and Wen are correct.6 According to recent figures published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Americans are more depressed than ever. And Dr. Schwartz claims that it is because Americans, despite their relative wealth and their myriad life choices, are fundamentally lonely. The most important factor in happiness is close social relations, something that most Americans lack. Being connected to others, he argues, is the missing ingredient that Americans have lost in their pursuit of individual success. Materialism, prosperity, and consumer culture help to sever the traditional “ties that bind”—we’re not as economically reliant on our families as those in the developing world. And then we use these same things—materialism, prosperity, and consumption—to try to fill the emotional hole. Things like demanding family obligations, serious long-lasting friendships, religious fellowship, and community closeness all bind us, but paradoxically create happier people. Throughout most of human history, these bonds were inherited, not chosen.

  Americans complain of a lack of intimacy in their lives. Dr. Schwartz points out: “We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. Partly this is because we have less time, since we are busy trying to determine what choices to make in other areas of life. But partly this is because close social relations have themselves become matters of choice.” In other words, we used to live in a world (more like the tribal developing world) where the social bonds were simply a “given,” but now we must actively cultivate fundamentals like family and friends. For example, in Cambodia your family always lives in very close proximity, usually multiple generations under the same roof. But in the States, the family can be spread out over the whole country, forcing people to work hard (and fail) at endeavors that used to be no-brainer natural conditions. Friendships also grow flimsy at continental distances, and Schwartz concludes that “our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices.”7

  I conclude from all of this that favoritism leads to more happiness than fairness. Happiness has been largely misunderstood as a passive state of pleasure, when it’s really more like a skill—something that needs active cultivation. That is why I’ve discussed it here in a section on the virtues, where it may seem surprising. But let us now turn to some more recognizable virtues of favoritism: loyalty, generosity, and gratitude.

  Loyalty

  The American educator and psychologist Rensis Likert (1903–1981) argued that the real cause of group success was not top-down management but intergroup loyalty. “The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.”8 This appears to be a general management application of an already well-known truth about successful families and tribes. If we have each other’s backs, then we survive and thrive. But the thing about loyalty is that it’s not premised on optimal conditions. You need to have my back, for example, even when I’m sometimes wrong. You need to have my back, even when I sometimes screw up the job. And I have to extend to you the same loyalty.9

  Having a shared cause (even an arbitrary one) is a monumental aspect of the meaningful life. For one thing, it sifts out many of our competing desires and focuses our motivations. Loyalty also sparks a related virtue—resoluteness. We resolve to stay the course, even when storms try to divert us. And shared cause is what “takes over” after the biology of family bonding d
oes its first-tribe work, and we find ourselves out in the free realm of competing allegiances. The average child finds herself already allied with a given community, but as she matures she consciously gives loyalty to new shared causes—thereby bringing herself into meaningful community with others. Equality and fairness have little to offer in this fundamentally biased arena of meaning.

  Fig. 22. The Trojan hero Aeneas (son of Aphrodite) is the Western icon of filial devotion. When Troy was sacked by the Greeks, Aeneas (who had killed twenty-eight Greeks in battle) narrowly escaped, but not before he saved his father and his son. Here he is depicted carrying his elderly father and dragging his son out of harm’s way.

  Loyalty and fairness seem to me to be two of the inherently clashing values that Isaiah Berlin warned us about. Of course, loyalty on its own will not be enough to set our ethical norms, and other considerations (regarding which goals we should be loyal to) will need to inform the virtue. But in a sense, the kind of loyalty I’m praising here is loyalty to specific people, not to “goals” or “causes.” The truly loyal person says: To hell with consequences! The egalitarian rule-follower is merely expedient, but the loyal person will go to the wall for you. And you’re supposed to return the existential devotion.

  Generosity

  Another crucial virtue of favoritism is generosity. Most people ally generosity on the side of fairness because fairness seeks to redistribute benefits and properties. But favoritists can claim selfless giving as a virtue too. Greed is not possible in a real circle of favorites, and the truly avaricious must separate themselves away from the bonds of family and friends in order to indulge their vice. Unlike the bureaucratic egalitarian attempt to distribute minimal goods as far and as widely as possible, the favoritist will lavish his loved ones with benefits that cost blood, sweat, and tears.