How about a little fairness?

Current political discourse is dominated by Freedom: it forms the foundational myth of the US and it’s being exported to the world – apparently the US has excess supply. The neo-liberal reform programme in Europe is referred to as “the fight for economic freedoms”. The invasion of Iraq is “bringing freedom”. No doubt an attack on Iran would also be bringing freedom. Free-market think tanks call themselves Freethis, Freethat and Freetheother. Freedom is the fundamental value that Western Civilisation is built upon and it part of our heavy burden that we must press it upon the less enlightened parts of the world.

It’s a cunning framing of issues: after all, who could be against Freedom except nasty people like the authoritarians that populate the demonology of the West? Stalin, Hitler, tin-pot dictators and Islamic religious leaders are against Freedom so any decent people must be in favour of anything labelled with Freedom. That the concept of Freedom in question is limited to Freedom to pursue the interests of rich (and preferably male) members of the Christian West is irrelevant.

There has been a lot of talk recently on EuroTrib about myths and stories and on dKos and BT about framing. The consensus is that we need new myths, new stories to set against the myths of the neo-liberals and the conventional economic wisdom. I have mine, and I’m afraid it’s not new: it’s Fairness.

Fairness, to my mind, is the basis of human society and human morality. Humans are social animals and we have evolved in that context. In a lot of ways our basic drives and motivations are similar to our primate cousins and other animals. We’re better at culture, we’re better at reasoning and we’re better at communication and building on these three things we have built a society that looks nothing like a tribe of apes living in a forest. However, at the biological and mental level we are still that animal living among the trees – or possibly on the savannah. Any successful social animal needs a sense of morality: a set of rules for living in its society.

Non-human social behaviours are more complicated than generally thought. Dogs and wolves don’t have a single alpha that always takes the lead in all things and might does not always make right. Horses have a complicated social life with friendships, dislikes, exchanges of grooming and violent conflict.
In these cases most of the behaviour is instinctual, with a little bit of culture thrown in from self-reinforcing learned behaviours: if the herd never crosses that river then caution dictates it is not likely to do so in the future unless forced to or an especially bold individual decides to lead the herd that way.

Fairness, at least to the in-group, is an essential part of any society: a dog who prevents his pack mates eating at all when food is scarce may find himself hunting alone when the game returns and may very well find it hard to reproduce. Dogs need packs to survive. Animal senses of fairness are coloured by dominance hierarchies and social networks: the lead members may have first access to resources and there may be some outrage if less deserving members of the society are caught with access to a treat when the more valued members do not: a stable of horses will explode into excitement if you give an ordinary member a piece of carrot while remaining quiet while you give a dominant mare an apple. Human society is, of course nothing like this.

My sense of it is that fairness is one of humanity’s innate drives: it is part of all the great moral systems. In fact it is the golden rule: “do unto others as you would have done unto you” and its variations. The drive only applies to the in-group(s): family, tribe, nation, continent, race, species, planet. It’s the definition of in-group that makes a lot of the difference: for right-wing libertarians the definition seems sometimes to be “me”.

The right emphasises freedom and ignores fairness (except when they feel the world is being unfair to them…) because the laissez-faire economic system is fundamentally, basically unfair. It magnifies the effects of accidents and acts to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the lucky. A fair system would damp the effects of accidents, asking the lucky to support the unlucky. Now, some of the right may consider the current system perfectly fair because the unlucky are not in their in-group: the unlucky are cursed by God or their own immorality or laziness and are not members of their family or tribe. Much of rhetoric of the right is devoted to explaining why being selfish and unfair is good for everyone in the long run. “Cruel to be kind” is their motto. However, the right can’t come out and say that the system is unfair to the majority of people but that that’s ok because we don’t care about you at all. There’s a weak point that we can attack.

By emphasising fairness we can force the neo-liberals to either say that their policies are unfair but only to people that don’t matter or try to argue that manifestly unfair policies are fair. The first is not a winning plan politically in most parts of Europe and the second can be fought on the merits. I say that explicitly being unfair to out-groups isn’t a winning plan politically with caution: coded unfairness – racially and economically – is acceptable and even a positive for many politicians. The trick is to force it to be explicitly stated. We also need to put forward alternative fair solutions to problems. Economics is about trade-offs: we need to ensure that we make fair decisions.

A fair economy does not disproportionately reward luck. A fair economy ensures that all the members of society have a decent lifestyle¹.

Fairness does come at the expense of some freedom, but so does everything else. The right to property beloved of the right comes at the expense of some freedom. The right not to be murdered in your bed comes at the expense of some freedom. The right to have children comes at the expense of some freedom. Nothing is free.

Crossposted from European Tribune