Against Fairness

by Asma, Stephen T.

  As Christian egalitarianism grew and appropriated the ancient virtues, the idea of generosity changed slightly from sharing as philia (brotherly love) to sharing as philanthropos (love of all humanity). The ancients had an idea of “loving all humanity,” but it was embryonic and applied more to how the gods loved the human race (e.g., Prometheus was philanthropic when he gave us fire). Generosity, in the Christian era, became redefined as giving to the poor (whether we knew the poor or not).

  The virtue of generosity that may best capture the biased version is probably magnanimity. This is the ancient virtue of being big-hearted (literally, the large-souled person). This is giving without any expectation of recompense. But when we read ancients, like Aristotle and Cicero, we find that affection is the inner spring of this generosity. Since I already discussed the virtue of “biased generosity” in chapter 4, I want to turn to the correlate virtue—namely, gratitude.

  Gratitude

  It’s hard for many of us to receive a gift. We do fine with birthday presents, wedding gifts, and other institutionalized generosities. But most other gifts come with strings attached, and Americans in particular are uncomfortable with the binding entanglements that strings bring. If we’re raised on an ideology of self-reliance, and if our money-based economy has “freed” us from family dependence, then being grateful may not be a regular exercise for us.

  In a real circle of favorites, however, one needs to accept help gracefully. We must accept, without cynicism, the fact that some of our family and friends give to us for our own sake (our own flourishing) and not for their eventual selfish gain. However animalistic were the evolutionary origins of giving (and however vigorous the furtive selfish genes), the human heart, neocortex, and culture have all united to eventually create true altruism. Gratitude is a necessary response in a sincere circle of favorites.

  Pride is a curious thing because it puffs up whenever you know that you are someone’s favorite—whether you’re one of God’s chosen people, or you’ve just been chosen first for gym-class soccer team, or the cute girl chose you at the dance. But pride can also prevent you from graciously accepting help and can fill you with resentment instead of appreciation. This is not just a psychological generalization, but a kind of existential point. It takes real effort and sensitivity to accept preferential treatment. A sense of existential worth comes along with genuine gratitude. And a rare charity toward oneself (a kind of magnanimity) must accompany the thought: I’ll gladly accept your help, and (in some cases) I’ll never be able to pay you back.10 The idealized grid of fairness cannot limn the contours of these deep existential debts.11

  This brings us to a brief consideration of the relationship between character and favoritism. One of the reasons why the grid of impartiality evolved was to prevent the privileges of class and race and gender. Stripping away the diverse content of people in order to arrive at the generic human being was good for legal jurisprudence, but problematic in other regards. People are not just biased about class, race, and gender. In addition to the obvious biases of kith and kin that I’ve been focusing on, people are highly preferential toward attractive people, tall people, happy people, confident people, and charismatic people generally.

  Now, here’s a telling analogy. When mega-corporations like fast-food chains, for example, sought to create highly uniform branches and franchises, they fashioned extremely methodical rules for employees to adopt. If I’m the French-fry guy in a fast-food restaurant, then I am governed by a very precise set of directives that tell me what temperature to make the oil, when to add the prefabbed potatoes, when to jiggle the basket, when to pull them out, how much salt to shake, where to put the fries, how to place the heat lamps, and on and on. It’s the same institutional manufacturing model that industrialization created and that Karl Marx complained about.12 Now, worries about alienated labor aside, the thing to notice here is that personality has been systematically removed from institutionalized labor. Personality—with its unpredictable differences and unique mannerism, perspectives, and behaviors—is the last thing employers want on the fast-food assembly line. The more personality and charisma you add to the fry guy, the less uniform and reliable the product. The quirks of human personality are impediments to the efficiency of the system. In this regard, modern labor has sought the idealization model of physics, which often ascribes universal laws to bodies that have been mentally stripped of their respective variables and treated “as if” they were frictionless, or perfectly spherical, or perfectly elastic, or whatever.

  The digital age has only strengthened this trajectory, because we increasingly think of knowledge as information. But information can be separated from its original medium and re-instantiated in a new one, plus an informational byte can be digitally reproduced ad nauseam. I can have some information fact come to me in an e-mail, and it can be sent to my phone, my digital work pad, my social network, my office computer—I can have it printed, change its font, project it, turn it into an audio message, and so on. The medium doesn’t matter.

  The grid of impartial fairness tries to do the same thing with people and ethics. Egalitarian fairness tries to separate abstract rules of right and wrong from the person. It tries to reduce our messy ethical lives to regimented fast-food-like procedures. Utilitarian, Kantian, and Rawlsian approaches to ethics make this same fatal mistake. But in the social domain—the real world of diverse people—the medium does matter. Who I am (and where I stand to kith and kin) makes all the difference.

  Compare the cog-in-the machine version of the French-fry guy with the mentor-apprentice model, and you will see a better way of thinking about virtue and character. Of course, the French-fry guy doesn’t need a mentor for his job—that’s the “triumph” of regimented labor. But human beings do need ethical mentors.13 The mentor-apprentice relation is one of those preferential, favoritist relations that I mentioned earlier, and it flickers still in some forms of labor and education. In modern egalitarian education, we separate out the information from the character. Uniform workbooks and lesson plans allow for almost any teacher and any student to process similar informational content. Substitute teachers can look at standardized lesson plans and pick up where the last teacher left off. But mentoring is different. As philosopher Vigen Guroian puts it, “In mentoring there is no distinction between method and content. By means of physical gesture, tone of voice, and behavior, the mentor communicates his special knowledge and skill and also a piece of his own character.”14 This intimate learning is how ethics really works. And you can’t get kinder, more compassionate, and more generous people by teaching them formulas of fairness.

  The intimacy of favoritism brings personal character back to the forefront of ethics, where it belongs. You don’t inspire a kid to be generous or courageous by giving him a rulebook of universal moral maxims. Instead, parents or caretakers must demonstrate generosity and other virtues. Tribes transmit their ethics to the young by their actions, which cannot be abstracted as information. And art, too—whether it’s the entertainment of Pixar and Disney movies or the biblical stories of heroism and folly—must show the virtues as concrete expressions of character. You can take the personality and charisma out of French-fry making, but not out of ethics.

  You Can’t Love Humanity. You Can Only Love People.

  Throughout this book, I have been suggesting that fairness unfairly dominates our culture and crowds out the virtues of favoritism. Many people will disagree with this characterization, but some will actually agree and still resist my call for more favoritism. They argue that we need fairness (and a lot of it) to counterbalance the tribalism of favoritism.

  The excellent social theorist Barry Schwartz has challenged my view, with what I’ll call the “counterweight argument.” He asks us to consider

  the possibility that the only thing that keeps favoritism within reasonable bounds is precisely our commitment to fairness. In other words, favoritism comes “naturally,” but fairness does not. Maybe it takes all of our will,
rational justification, and ideological commitment to fairness to keep favoritism within bounds. Were people to subscribe to [Asma’s] view, perhaps the center would not hold, and we would slowly but inexorably give in to the worst of our “us vs. them” tendencies.15

  I take this objection very seriously. My job in the book has been to promote the underdog idea that favoritism also has an ethical structure (i.e., it’s not just self-interest and corruption), but maybe I’ve overplayed my hand to compensate. The heuristic idealism of fairness may be just the thing that constrains too much nepotism. I’m sure there’s some truth in this. On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time showing that we don’t really know what we’re talking about when we confidently intone fairness. We frequently use “fairness” when we mean other things (e.g., tolerance, generosity, etc.), and we criticize favoritism when we mean to criticize other things. And I think it’s important to raise this point again, in light of the counterweight argument.

  For example, Dr. Schwartz voices a popular view, rightly suggesting that we need a counterweight to our natural preferences and biases of kin and kith, but what he means (I think) is that we need ideological reminders to motivate us to help strangers. We need a “Good Samaritan” trigger that pulls us out of our default nepotism. I agree with this, to some extent. But why are we so quick to call this fairness? And why would we need a concept like equality to motivate our Good Samaritan behaviors? Reaching out to strangers actually looks more like charity and compassion, which often get confusedly labeled as “fairness” but shouldn’t be.

  If you plug in the word and—more importantly—the act of charity (where we ordinarily use “fairness”), we find that the sought-after moral upgrade is still achieved: the less fortunate become better off than before. People who are triggered to charitable acts share their good fortune with others. But it isn’t fairness that accomplishes this moral goal—it isn’t the pursuit of equality; it is kindness, goodwill, and dare I say a little bit of “favor” (in this case, for strangers).

  In our current culture, the language of fairness is ubiquitous around this kind of charitable benevolence toward strangers, but it shouldn’t be. Sadly, there is not enough of this compassion in our contemporary culture, but it doesn’t improve matters to incorrectly call it fairness and expect egalitarian rules or calculations to fix it. Our charity to strangers is not motivated by the idea that they are our equals, or that they have equal claim on us as our kith and kin have, or that they merit our goodwill by some excellent achievements, or that they have human rights, or that we’re restoring some imbalance in the social system. When we move beyond the civil courtesy that we owe to strangers and we donate to some cause or give to someone on the street or whatever, it is because we’re moved by sympathy. We are stirred to care about these particular sufferers. We identify with them emotionally. Love, not fairness, is the engine of philanthropy, and the counterbalance of too much kin favoritism is a more broadly cast affection. But, of course, there’s a limit to the breadth of one’s affection, for as Graham Greene reminds us: “One can’t love humanity, one can only love people.”16

  As I write this, the Occupy Wall Street movement is in full swing. I don’t know where it will be in a year from now, but it is currently an exciting time. People from all sides of the political continuum are calling for radical change in America’s obnoxious wealth gap—wherein the top 20 percent of Americans own 85 percent of the country’s wealth, and the bottom 80 percent own a mere 15 percent of the wealth.

  The counterweight arguers, like Barry Schwartz, might use the Occupy Wall Street movement as a strong objection to my call for favoritism. See what favoritism, unchecked by fairness, gets you? The Occupy movement, one might argue, is trying to reset the scale toward greater fairness. After all, the movement regularly intones the language of fairness, and journalist Charlie Rose referred to the movement as “all about fairness.” But while I like and support the movement generally, I don’t think it should be characterized as an egalitarian crusade of fairness.

  Closer examination of the movement does not reveal a call for equality of wealth or goods. It is not a communist quest for redistribution of wealth along egalitarian lines. The protestors want the wealthy to pay their respective taxes, not have their property seized and redistributed to the proletariat. Moreover, the protestors are disgusted by federal bank bailouts and corporate protections, while middle-class housing collapses, jobs disappear, and wage and benefits protections vanish. It is also the injustice of the disproportionate distribution of debt burden that inflames the movement. The Occupy movement is a cry for justice, but not a cry for fairness.

  Underneath the varied and sometimes incoherent demands of the Occupy movement is an objection to the entire culture of profit and consumption. The cracked economy has forced reflection on the younger generation—who are entering the job market for the first time without the prospect of expanding innovative bubbles (like manufacturing, dot-coms, housing, etc.). Graduating with massive debt and facing “careers” like coffee barista and waiter have not only created despair about joining the upwardly mobile American dream, but have also created questions about the dream itself—consumerism and capitalism.

  The deeper discontent under the Occupy movement is not unfairness, but a lack of community, creativity, and meaning in a society that currently defines all these successes in materialistic terms. Corruption and abuse of power are high on the list of complaints, but people also want more stability and security (e.g., housing and job security), more community, decent health care, less debt (e.g., staggering education loans), less stress, and less alienation from the meaningful aspects of life (e.g., the rat race makes family and even friendships more fractured). Most of these complex grievances about social justice get reduced down to cries for greater “fairness” because we lack a more nuanced moral vocabulary. But most Occupiers are not calling on political leaders and the wealthy to treat them as entitled to equal shares of wealth or even equal opportunities. They want the privileged class and the corrupt policy makers to open their eyes to the suffering of the underprivileged, and to stop policies that increase that suffering—and, positively, to create policies that ameliorate such suffering and even contribute to the happiness of the majority. It’s hard to see how ideas of fairness help here, except in the trivial sense that hard work should reap more deserts than the current system apportions (i.e., the merit-based notion of fairness).

  The counterweight argument—that fairness checks excessive favoritism—accepts the idea that fairness may be unrealistic, overly idealistic, and even wrong, but if we remove this egalitarian tradition, we will be in worse shape. I appreciate this warning—that I should be careful what I wish for. On the other hand, we have the much older virtue tradition of giving, generosity, magnanimity, and compassion, which has atrophied during the rise of instrumental modernity but which can ably inspire the needed Good Samaritan values.

  I’m not suggesting a conservative return to religious values here. Instead, I am isolating the emotional engine of motivation that lives underneath both secular and sacred forms of charity. Nepotistic virtues like loyalty are emotion driven, but Good Samaritan virtue toward strangers is also emotionally driven. It is the affective connection or concern—which thrives in tribalism, but also stimulates philanthropy beyond immediate circles.

  Cosmopolitan thinkers voice a version of the counterweight argument when they call us to adopt a different set of public values than the more biased domain of private values. From Immanuel Kant’s autonomous agent to contemporary notions of a public “thin self,” the liberal cosmopolitan view has decontextualized people in order to protect against bias and favoritism.

  My view, however, is hard to square with the cosmopolitan views of universal decontextualized agents. Like the communitarian philosophers (e.g., Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Sandel), I reject the disembodied approach of egalitarianism, but I’m offering something new here too. The communitarian
s all stress the community of “tradition” in opposition to egalitarianism. They think community comes from being Catholic or Jewish or French Canadian or some other linguistic, ritualistic, or ideological tribe. But my view is that true communities are “affective communities”—emotional bonds precede cultural/historical/linguistic traditions, though they certainly feed into one another. This unappreciated point reveals the true bond underlying cultural tradition and also highlights the flexibility and changeable nature of favoritism and tribalism. If being Catholic or Jewish failed to give us affective community, then we would undoubtedly keep searching. Being Catholic or Jewish, for example, is not an end in itself, but a means to an emotional end.

  The Future of Favoritism

  Technology is a double-edged sword. It clears the obstructions ahead, but also severs the ties that bind. Sigmund Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents, weighs the positive and the negative. Modern technological culture, he says, can bring me my faraway son’s voice on the telephone or provide me with a cable that notifies me of my friend’s safe arrival in a distant country. But, taking up the opposite side, he points out, “If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him.”17 These examples sound quaint to us now, of course, but the recent technological jumps have only strengthened this debate, not put it to rest.

  We live in the digital age of high-speed Internet connections, Twitter, Facebook, avatar egos, and apps for everything. All around the developed world, some kids are so addicted to computer gaming that parents and community leaders have created intervention services to detox them. People can spend increasingly larger chunks of their lives in the simulacrum—working, playing, and socializing. What does all this mean for deep tribal connections?