Belligerati

« Categorized as misleading at best | Main | Bad statistics on cars at the ISO Quality Planning »

January 28, 2009

Is fairness a cross cultural value?

In Fair's fair, Bart Wilson analyses the word "fair" in the context of the ultimatum experiment. In this game, the proposer divides a sum of money, and the responder can take amount assigned to him (giving the proposer the remainder) by the proposer or give him and the proposer nothing. Fair is an unusual word because it doesn't have a lot of direct translations, even in nearby languages like French and German. In making hay of this idea, he is essentially claiming a form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH). One of the consequences of the strong form of the SWH is that if a person lacks a word to distinguish between two ideas, then they cannot see the difference. That theory is false, humans can clearly distinguish between colors without having a word for both colors. Even the weakened ability to distinguish between types lacking names is controversial. However, like the Eskimos' many words for snow, we assign words to distinguish among types that frequently need to be distinguished. Maybe the industrial revolution in the Anglo-sphere was the first time in human history that fair required frequent distinction from just and equitable.

I enjoyed a few choice quotes from the article:

Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language--that it is distinctly Anglo in origin? And a relatively new word at that? (Late 18th century, actually--the industrial revolution apparently also vastly enhanced our capacity to complain.) But the twisted history of "fair" is even more interesting than that. For the original antonym of fair is not, as most modern Americans would probably expect, unfair. If you want to understand the roots of fairness, look not to ethicists, but to baseball, which still uses the original dichotomy. If a ball is hit outside the bounds of fair play, it's not unfair--it's foul. That's an important clue. As Columbia law professor George Fletcher had noted in his 1996 book Basic Concepts of Legal Thought, the Anglo-American notion of fairness is firmly rooted in the rules of a game. ... Wierzbicka's research indicated that there are two key contextual elements that make fair precisely the right word for the situation. First, the circumstances entail a tradeoff in welfare between individuals: some action benefits one person at the expense of another. The second element is that other people in the community think that there are limits to how much people are allowed to cost others in order to benefit themselves. ... How does this free us from that circular reasoning we saw in the ultimatum game? Instead of looking inwards for some inherent sense of the word, we look outward, towards the community standards that externally ground the interaction. When two subjects are randomly assigned to the roles of proposer and responder, it is not some pure platonic ideal of fairness that causes a proposer to offer $5. Rather, the proposer knows that other people would think offering less than $5 is below the socially acceptable limit in this situation, and so the proposer obeys those tacit rules.

This explains another widely observed phenomenon: proposers who have earned the right be the proposer, say by doing well on a quiz, offer much less to responders than those who are randomly chosen. What is truly amazing is how accurately proposers ascertain the limits of what they can offer. The rate at which their responders reject their offers doesn't change when proposers who have earned their position offer them a smaller portion of the pie[1]. We (most of us) implicitly agree that earning an advantaged position calls for the application of different rules than does randomly endowing someone with a windfall. Moreover, we all have a pretty good sense of what those rules are; most offers are accepted.

In a followup article, Is fairness cross-cultural, or not? he adds another point:

The esteemed James Surowiecki, whose book I use in the classes that I teach, wonders whether it really matters that only English has the specific word "fair", given that people around the world make similar decisions in the ultimatum game.

It's less interesting to me that people nearly universally offer (and accept) more than $1; the benchmark of a game-theoretic automaton is a low standard. The only people I've seen do that for real stakes are graduate students in economics, and they're an odd bunch whose training has somehow disturbingly supplanted the rules of fairness that ordinary people apply. (Something that's worth remembering as you read the Op-Ed back and forth on the banking bailout.)

This is a cheap shot and wrong on the moral philosophy. Our unexamined instincts offer no moral value, they just are. To consider something moral merely because it exists in nature is just a version of the naturalist fallacy that evolutionary biologists have been trying to stamp out for decades. It is entirely possible for people to walk around with a brain module that tells them to instinctively evaluate situations with a sense of fairness that is not ethical. Given that economists are at least in part philosophers, why shouldn't it be possible that extended study has lead them to a moral and behavioral outcome that is superior to unconsidered alternatives. Maybe this is inevitably elitist. But that doesn't mean is it wrong.

A similar distinction is currently being examine in moral philosophy the Moral Sense Test. [I]t is intended to investigate whether respondents with academic philosophical training respond differently to a suite of moral dilemmas (you know, the usual sort of potted philosophy cases) than do others (you know, the man on the street, mere mortals, Joe the Plumber). . But consider the alternative. If smart people think hard about a subject and study each others thinking on that subject, were no better at making difficult decisions than the average man, then that would imply that the entire field of study was of little value. Which is possible. But your life is filled with ways in which you act sub-optimally because of your educational and cognitive limitations. What is so special about morality that you feel that your gut is right? How certain are you in the quality of the morality of your unexamined behavior?

Posted by OneEyedMan at January 28, 2009 7:26 AM

Comments

Post a comment