Yves right here. I need to say I like seeing Matt Breunig patiently and clearly unpack problems with terminology and utilization, since they frequently incorporate hidden assumptions that may’t be simply picked aside in routine discussions. The issue with phrases like each fairness and equality is that they have change into unduly plastic.
By Matt Bruenig. Initially revealed at his web site
Over the past decade or so, a confused concept that began within the nonprofit sector has progressively seeped into liberal discourse extra usually. In line with this concept, “equality” is dangerous or insufficient and what we’d like as an alternative is one thing referred to as “fairness.”
Bernie Sanders was requested to clarify the distinction between them on Actual Time this weekend and he didn’t actually know what to say.
On @billmaher @CNN Tonight, @SenSanders didn’t know the distinction between equality and fairness, and but the federal govt spending billions of {dollars} on fairness coaching proper now in each single federal company. If a U.S. Sen doesn’t know the diff why are we spending that $? pic.twitter.com/KAaUXjBUZB
— Brian Doherty (@BDOH) March 4, 2023
This alternate lit up each conservatives and liberals. Conservatives lit up as a result of they affiliate the phrase “fairness” with Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings, which have proliferated throughout the company sector regardless of being fairly clearly silly. Liberals lit up as a result of they’ve adopted this phrase very vigorously and suppose it displays badly on Sanders that he doesn’t have a spiel about it able to go.
Within the meta-discourse in regards to the alternate, the talk has devolved into whether or not it’s good or dangerous for politicians to make use of the linguistic improvements of the nonprofit or educational sectors, which at this level is a reasonably well-rehearsed form of affair the place one aspect says that language may be very key to oppressed peoples and the opposite aspect saying that it isn’t key to them and alienates others.
However lacking on this discourse is an precise reply to the query offered to Sanders: how does fairness differ from equality?
In my early 20s, I spent a lot of my time studying and enthusiastic about egalitarian political philosophy of each leftist and liberal varieties. And so when folks began saying they had been towards “equality” however for “fairness” shortly after that, I used to be well-positioned to combine that declare into my understanding of present egalitarian philosophy. And it was clear then as it’s now that “fairness” is getting used to imply “equality of the proper unit of equality.”
To grasp what I imply, let’s have a look at the foundational philosophical textual content of the “fairness” revolution, which is definitely only a two-panel cartoon meme.
Within the “equality” panel, there may be an equal distribution of bins. Within the “fairness” panel, there may be an equal distribution of sightlines. So it’s equality in each circumstances. To the extent that you’re alleged to glean something from the panel, it’s that, within the case of watching a baseball recreation, the proper unit of equality is sightlines not bins.
At instances, folks attempt to boil this transfer down into simply being a linguistically novel solution to advocate for equality of outcomes over equality of alternative. Proponents of “fairness” constantly reject this simplification and, from what I can inform, these proponents are literally right to reject it. “Fairness” just isn’t used to advertise any specific unit of equality — whether or not outcomes, alternatives, bins, sightlines, luck-adjusted outcomes, major items, revenue, wealth, or capabilities — however is as an alternative a phrase that you simply invoke any time you object to the unit of equality another person is utilizing, no matter what, if any, your most popular various unit of equality is.
case of this I noticed lately was when, again in COVID days, the USPS introduced that it might be sending 4 COVID exams to every family within the mail. In a wildly standard tweet, a outstanding “fairness” advocate mentioned that this was an ideal case for example why “equality” is so inferior to “fairness.” They elaborated that this program was “equal” as a result of it despatched the identical variety of COVID exams to every family however “inequitable” as a result of completely different households have completely different numbers of individuals in them.
After all, in additional pure language the place we don’t maintain flipping forwards and backwards between two phrases, what you’d say, utilizing simply “equality,” is that the USPS program was equal on a per-household foundation however unequal on a per-person foundation, and that, within the case of distributing diagnostic exams, the per-person foundation is the extra acceptable one.
The purpose that whether or not one thing is taken into account “equal” or not is delicate to what unit you employ to measure equality is a fairly introductory idea in egalitarian thought. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spends an enormous chunk of its article on egalitarianism detailing the problem. In egalitarian thought, it’s usually known as the “equality of what” query, which can be the title of a well-known Amartya Sen lecture on the query from 1979. Within the lecture, Sen rejects “utility” and Rawlsian “major items” in favor of his personal “primary capabilities” as one of the best unit of equality.
If the advocates of “fairness” had a particular unit of equality that they had been constantly pushing, then it might be pretty simple to clarify what it’s. You’d simply say “fairness means equality of X” as contrasted with different models of equality like Senian capabilities, Rawlsian major items, Dworkinian assets, and so on.
However advocates of “fairness” as an alternative use the phrase to imply “equality of the proper unit of equality” the place “the proper unit of equality” adjustments speaker to speaker and case to case and is usually not really outlined in any respect. And given this actuality, it’s genuinely tough to reply the query “how does fairness differ from equality” when requested within the common manner Maher did.
As a closing word, I’ll say that there’s one factor that barely annoys me in regards to the meta-discourse on this alternate that focuses on the worth of educational language. This can be a worthwhile discourse usually, nevertheless it really has it barely backwards on this case. The educational discourse on egalitarianism is each attention-grabbing and clear in tackling the “equality of what” query. What now we have with “fairness” is non-academics who clearly don’t have any familiarity with the related educational discourse arising with a half-baked and badly-theorized model of it.
