Where do you think the idea of fairness comes from?

[AngryAmish]

If I have an ice cream cone and someone comes along and takes it I think that is unfair and I object. If my parents gave a larger inheretance to my sisters than I I would believe that is unfair and I would feel resentful.

This emotion - this is unfair - clearly exists. We hear it all the time in political discourse, fair taxes, unfair benefits to the 1% etc.

But where does the notion come from? Is it from the Bible? Evolution?

What do you think?

[Poll_Blind]

1. Legitimate desire from fairness comes from empathy.

If I empathize with others or a specific group, I pay more attention to any disparities of their fortunes. Not all empathy is automatic. Some empathy can be situational or even coaxed by revealing new or unknown information. Or that information can come with modifiers which dampen a natural response to empathize as well.

PB

[piratefish08]

5. do you think we evolved the empathy/fairness as part of our social evolution?

to allow us to live in larger, safer groups? I do.

or is it coded in our DNA?


but i admittedly don't know shit about shit.

[Poll_Blind]

8. I think it comes from our unnecessarily-large brains, and with it, our ability to...

...symbolically represent things. If someone inflicts pain on me, I feel pain. A "lower" animal is subject to that action and response as well. But, because of my ability to symbolically-represent myself in an other-than-me context, I can feel similar pain in contexts where a symbol I have chosen to represent a part of me (say, Native Americans) is attacked, even if the attack on that symbol is symbolic in itself.

We know ourselves by the things we choose to symbolically represent parts of us. Whether it's a band, a political movement, a brand, our family, etc.

But it comes back to those unnecessarily large brains. Those brains are not satisfied with staying contained in skulls and extend and project themselves into the world around them though symbolic representation.

As an aside, we have children over here and we also have a lot of friends with babies. One of the neatest things for me is when a young child goes from thinking that an object which has been removed from view has disappeared from the universe to when they start looking for the object or when they account for the object's existence in some other way.

Internally, they have automatically made a proxy object which need not actually exist any more, but exists and is tracked (at least for some period of time) in their mind.

That's powerful stuff! That's powerful stuff! Not long after (or maybe even before, I dunno) the child is imprinting on the object, caring about whether it continues to exist or not. It's a precursor to more complex and subtle influences symbolic objects will have in their future.

Now that I've gone on a tangent, I should rope it all back by saying that I believe there is some evolutionary/DNA-based element to it. As a viable organism on this island Earth, it will benefit my survival if I understand that the tiger which I have just spotted, and which has disappeared from view, is still lurking in the tall grass.

Which is why I put "lower" (as in "lower" animals) in quotes way up there in my second sentence. I believe animals carry out symbolic representations and have empathy in some form, as humans do. Members of a pack will sometimes rescue each other from predators. Again- that's hardcore empathy if you sit down and think about the thought mechanics at play.

It also pains me a great deal, because I am a meat eater and I know this. I regularly consume the flesh of things which almost certainly had a "reality" which is very near my own, although they don't have the cognitive ability to process some of the same stimuli as well as I may.

That those things are executed for my benefit, and essentially at my indirect command, and that those experiences of death should be recorded in my name (symbolically) in the history of the Universe is very troubling to me. But not so troubling that my big ole brain doesn't concoct a rationalization to allow me to escape the burden of it.

We make very strong pots of coffee at this house. That's my only excuse for all those words.

:)

PB

[hifiguy]

11. I think you are right.

Richard Dawkins discusses moral sensibility in terms of a useful adaptation to a world that was very hostile to fragile early humans. On the most practical level, no individual could fight off, say, a saber tooted tiger or a short-faced bear (real animal, about half again the size of today's grizzly) or bring down large animals in the hunt; in such circumstances cooperation provided a survival advantage.

Over the eons this matured into social compassion, at least in most humans. There are, it seems, a lot of evolutionary throwbacks.

[Bragi]

12. It can also come from enlightened self-interest

I think the notions of fairness and equality are linked.

I also believe it is in my self-interest to live in a society that values fairness because it means I don't have to live my life in constant conflict trying to impose unfairly on others, or having to defend myself from being imposed upon unfairly by others.

I think the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism is based on that notion.

(Interesting question!)

[ret5hd]

2. Both examples you gave were situations where you came out the loser...

unless you would feel exactly the same if the tables were reversed, i would say your idea of fairness comes at least partially from selfishness.

[backtoblue]

3. It's congenital

Children always seem to notice when someone has more than them or gets treated better than them. I don't think it's something that is learned, but rather inherent. nt

[woo me with science]

4. Not the Bible. It's certainly not confined to humans.

Remember this?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/dogenvy/

Dog Unto Others: Canines Have Sense of Fairness
By Alexis Madrigal Email Author
December 8, 2008 |

....
Like humans and chimpanzees, dogs seem to expect fairness in their dealings with humans. When two dogs sitting next to each other complete the same action — shaking paws in this case — but don’t receive the same reward, the jilted dog stops playing along.

To test this, the Austrian cognitive scientists placed two dogs side by side in front of a person. Both animals could clearly see a bowl filled with
(delicious) sausage and dark bread treats. The animals were asked to
"give the paw," generally known in American English as "shaking." The researchers then measured the amount of times (out of 30) that the animals gave the paw under various conditions.

In treat-heavy conditions, the dogs give their paws for nearly every trial. When neither dog was given rewards, the dogs only gave their paws 20 out of 30 times and they required more verbal prompting to do so. But, when one animal was rewarded and the other was not, the unrewarded dogs only shook 12 times and displayed considerably more agitation than in either of the other tests.
....
"I’m not at all surprised by this because I’ve spent years studying social carnivores," Bekoff said." The people who are surprised by this are the people who haven’t spent as much time watching animals."

[redqueen]

7. Exactly...

evolving in a social setting allows for observance of these kinds of situations repeatedly, and recognizing unfairness isn't exactly rocket science.

[PETRUS]

6. It's adaptive.

We're social animals and fairness almost certainly evolved via natural selection.

[bemildred]

9. Empathy, it's built in.

Once you can see that other people are like you, it's sort of obvious that they should be treated like you.

[lumberjack_jeff]

10. It's built into the monkey part of our brains.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY

[BrendaBrick]

13. For a long time, I've wondered about this myself...

Here is a fairly recent Huff Post article from biologist Frans de Waal:

Monkeys Join Wall Street Protest

Frans de Waal
Dutch/American biologist and primatologist
Posted: 10/11/11 11:57 AM ET


Monkeys, too, notice if others earn more than themselves, and don't like it one bit.

A few years ago, we re-enacted the wealthy CEO scenario with tufted capuchin monkeys at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, in Atlanta. Some monkeys played fat cat, while others played lowly clerk. Unfortunately, we couldn't go nearly as far as American society, with CEO's earning hundreds of times more than the average worker, but even small inequities proved effective.

Testing two monkeys at a time, we offered each a pebble, which they could return for a cucumber slice. Alternating between them, both monkeys happily bartered twenty-five times in a row. The atmosphere turned sour, however, as soon as we introduced inequity. One monkey would stay on cucumber, but its partner now received grapes, which monkeys like a whole lot better. Seeing their partner munching on juicy grapes, the disadvantaged monkey got agitated, hurling his pebbles out of the test chamber, and even those paltry cucumber slices. A food normally devoured with gusto had become distasteful.

From this experiment and others like it, we believe in an inborn sense of fairness. But there is more: primate studies also tell us something about empathy and altruism. In contrast to inequity, which is on the rise in our society, empathy appears in decline. If the audience of a CNN/Tea Party debate can happily shout "Yeah!" at the suggestion that the lack of health insurance amounts to a death sentence, and if David Brooks in The New York Times can deny the moral value of empathy, it is time to watch your back. Societies that put duty and loyalty before compassion, as advocated by Brooks, have existed in the past, but several genocides later their model has lost appeal.

Experiments on empathy in our closest relatives, the apes, have shown that they voluntarily share food even if they can keep it all for themselves. They also will donate tools to those who need them or open a door so that another can access food that remains inaccessible to themselves. I watch expressions of empathy every day, such as when chimpanzees tenderly embrace and kiss those who have lost a fight, or when in a choice test they prefer rewards for everyone over rewards for just themselves. Given that the latest empathy research also includes dogs, elephants, and even rodents, the underlying brain circuitry is thought to be a mammalian universal, which would make it two-hundred million years old. This explains why empathy, at least with in-group members, is automatic and anything but fragile.

One of the most empathic presidents this country has ever known famously halted his carriage for a squealing pig mired in the mud, and dragged it out while soiling his good pants. This was Abraham Lincoln, who often mentioned the bonds of sympathy that held the nation together. He acknowledged that the decision to fight slavery was born from feelings for the plight of slaves. The memory of seeing slaves in the South shackled together with irons was a "continued torment" to him, he wrote a friend.

The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice. That both may antedate our species should give pause to anyone proposing to ignore them. These tendencies may be inconvenient for the 1% who control the nation's wealth, but the rest of us surely would like to honor our heritage as social animals.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frans-de-waal/monkeys-join-wall-street-_b_1004370.html

Very interesting question to ponder and thanks for posing it!