Justice as Fairness? Well, what do you mean?

I love this clip. Always have. I've hesitated to use it up to this point because it's long: 8 minutes. But there are a couple of really interesting lessons in here that Bart Wilson pulls out -- and manages to support -- with experimental economics.

Now, I would not claim that you can derive an "ought" from an "is" -- that is, normative from positive experimental economics. And neither would Wilson. So, because we learn something about human behavior and different (context-dependent) concepts of fairness, it doesn't follow that any of these behaviors are right or wrong, good or bad--or point to some moral truth. These behaviors just are. Muddled, human, influenced by language and triggered by genes. 

Nevertheless, the experiments do unpack some very different concepts of fairness that will turn out to be important in a functional sense of shaping an economic order. And, of course, this distinction appeals to my fetish for rules. Consider:

• One connotation of "fairness" has to do with equal outcomes, or "equity." 
• One connotation of "fairness" has to do with equality before rules, or "fair play."
• One connotation of "fairness" has to do with justice, but in German. 

In English, we're dealing primarily with the first two connotations. But the German connotation is interesting from a linguistic and anthropological perspective. Indeed, that Germans mix so many of these connotations within their language may go very far in explaining why Germans tend to be more egalitarian in their concepts of justice. After all, it's all the same word (Gerecht).

Analogously, linguists comparing the word bridge in German and French will discover that corresponding definitions of bridges will take on masculine or feminine characteristics according to the gender assignments of the object. In other words, words change the way we think about the world. Die Bruecke is feminine. So when describing bridges, Germans tend to use feminine descriptions of their architecture. French people use strong, masculine words to describe bridges, because bridge is masculine in French. (In English, of course, we don't assign genders to nouns.)

So what does "fair" mean? Consider now your reading of John Rawls -- specifically "justice as fairness." What if we could go back and rewrite A Theory of Justice using the Anglo-Saxon connotation of fair? What if fairness in common parlance was geared more towards the idea of equal application of the law--i.e. the rules? Wilson's experiments suggest that English speakers are amenable to both concepts of fairness. It will be interesting to see which concept of justice takes greater account of the laws of organization that government human interaction. I have my own hypothesis about this. But Wilson's experiments suggest that, at minimum, a concerted effort by classical liberals to re-appropriate our preferred concept of fairness could be in order. Of course, re-framing our language to include the word "fair" would follow such an effort.

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[Troy Camplin]

To paraphrase Hayek, if you try to impose the rules of the moral order on the catallaxy, you will destroy it, while if you try to impose the rules of the catallaxy on the institutions of the moral order, such as the family, you will crush them. One cannot extend the strong bonds of the moral order to the weak bonds of the catallaxy. One cannot make all impersonal interactions personal. And one certainly should not strive to make all personal interactions personal.

[Don Wilde]

I think Professor Wilson weakened his case by wrapping up with a quick statement that 'government shouldn't be involved'. Up to that point, this piece was fascinating and compelling and I thought was leading to a clearer definition of fairness that involved value creation as well as 'need'... which would have made the point that government shreds the order of fairness by its action.

Of course, we cannot forget that government 'needs' drones to vote for it.