Most of the time, I know exactly what sparks off one of these articles. I could be a conversation I had, something I saw in the news, or an advertisement. Any and all input gets me thinking. But this particular idea just dumped itself on me, and I have no idea where it came from. It is the concept of fairness.

Fairness is often defined in terms of justice: every should get equal treatment and no one is above the law. Our world is imperfect, and so while we strive toward these things, we’ll never have them. The danger with discussing ideals is that everyone will agree they exist, but nobody can agree how to get there. In some cases, not everyone agrees on what the ideal is—even worse is when people just assume that everyone else has the same ideal they do, when, in fact, this is never the case. But the most dangerous thing of all is wasting time discussing ideals which do not exist.

Fairness does not exist.

If you poll people on fairness, everybody is all for it. The problem is, nobody actually knows what sort of fair they want, and nothing ever gets resolved, at least not as it relates to this ideal. For any example you can find about how something is fair, there is someone else who doesn’t think that it is fair at all. I’ll discuss it in general, abstract terms before getting to the specifics.

Imagine a level playing field. It’s not a literal field, it’s just that everyone is at the same starting point. Now pick an activity; it doesn’t matter what it is. Running. Throwing a ball. Painting a picture. Reciting the alphabet backwards. Eating. Holding your breath. Calculating square roots. Deducing intent by reading ones’ face. The activity is irrelevant, but you must agree with me one thing: there will always be people who will do it better than others. Even among basic human things that aren’t skills—like breathing, or your heart beating or any rubric you care to measure—there will always be some people better and others worse.

Given this scenario, most people will say that nobody should be handicapped, and everyone should have an equal opportunity to do their best. (Not everyone thinks this, though, which is where the idea of “fair” as an ideal begins to break down.) Even so, let’s run the simulation. Regardless of the activity, there will always be people who come way out far ahead all the time, without even looking like they’re trying at all, and other people who will exert and exert and get nowhere.

If the activity is something inconsequential, like Scrabble, no one is going to complain about it. But as soon as you move away from that into things that are important, a completely different sense of fairness takes over. Let’s talk specifics.

Brains. Everyone’s got one (thought it may seem some only have half), but not everyone is equal in intelligence. Some people learn quickly and others not at all. Aside from the fact that public schools as they are today are quite possibly the worst way to teach anyone anything, what you’re going to end up with in any school are people who do really awesome without trying, and other people who fail all the time, regardless of level of effort. What’s the point of putting slower people in easier classes and smarter people in harder classes? The answer is obvious: because it’s more fair to those involved—except it’s not because now the playing field isn’t level.

Here’s a personal example with multiple instances of “fairness” involved. In seventh grade I had a typing class. This was a class that was not broken down by ability; you just got stuck in it wherever it fit your schedule. Today, most everyone can type, but when I was in middle school, it was still unusual that most people had computers, not to mention actually spending any time learning to type on them. I was one of the few that had been exposed to computers since birth, and I knew how to type at a rapid clip for a seventh grader, which was about 45 wpm at the time.

I would do all sorts of things to entertain myself, including figuring out how far I’d have to type in a given time to average 35 wpm if I stopped. (35 was an “A”—as if grading by speed is any sort of way to measure success in a typing class.) My teacher hated me for it. If I had a paragraph of, say, 500 words and I had to average 35 wpm over five minutes, I would count out the first 175 words, type until I got to that point, then just stop. Then I’d sit there, and he’d look at me and say, “what are you doing!? Keep typing!” And I’d shrug and say, “I already got an ‘A’” and he would concede that was true but told me that I should keep going, regardless, because it wasn’t fair that I should sit there doing nothing while the other kids were still banging away.

At the end of the class, we had this sort of Typing Olympics where everyone was supposed to compete. The winner got five extra credit points. Everyone knew at that point that I was the fastest typer in the class, so the teacher (who already hated my guts) told me that I wasn’t eligible to win. Of course I didn’t need the extra credit, and I didn’t really care because I had my A—but what was interesting was the rationale: “it’s not fair to the rest of the class”.

Now, this is interesting because in one sense, it really wasn’t fair. I had a computer growing up while other potentially fast typists might not have had access to that. But that’s about where the comparison ends. There was one star soccer player who’s father was the soccer coach. That was basically the same thing, but not not-fair, evidently. What was really not fair was not letting me test out of the class. But, this is very interesting—I was told later that no one could be allowed to skip any required classes like that because “it wouldn’t be fair”.

I was required to take the class, even though I knew the material, because it wasn’t fair otherwise. Although I was required to take the class, I wasn’t permitted to excel, because that wasn’t fair, either. When I excelled anyway, then I wasn’t allowed to compete, because that wasn’t fair.

And therein lies the fallacy of supposing a level playing field. It never exists. There is no level playing field, because parents pass their gifts, knowledge, and wealth onto their children, who pass them on to their children forever after—to the point where, even if the playing field had been level at one point, it wouldn’t even be close after only two generations.

It would seem, then, to be a waste of time to try and level the playing field at all—as is the case with redistributions of wealth, tiered tax brackets, easier and harder classes for students, and so on—because as soon as we get it level, someone else is going to come along and screw the whole thing up. Besides, having a level playing field in all aspects of life is the basis for much dystopian fiction, so it certainly has been explored to death. Read, fool, that thou mayest see this is a crappy idea.

That being said, it can hardly be considered fair that some people are born into great opportunity, and others are born into great poverty—so much so that if you’re even reading this sentence on a computer on the internet, you can’t imagine it. We can’t figure out how to do anything about this, except try and fix it before people are born. This is the basis for “Robin Hood” style fair where we take from the rich and give to the poor. Which raises the question: what have the rich done to be punished for excelling? True, they don’t need what they have, but what sort of life is it where people get only what they need?

Well, it is life. Living. Because how can anyone with any amount of money and comfortable living continue on in that lifestyle when other people are dying of starvation? I’m guilty of this as much as the next person; I enjoyed my Starbucks this morning, thank you very much. And while I did, dozens of children died of starvation. That isn’t fair, but I’m not stepping up and doing anything about it, which also isn’t fair. Then again, I was privledged to be born into a life where I don’t really have to do jack shit on a day to day basis, and still live more comfortably than almost every homo sapien ever, ever, ever. The playing field isn’t level, and this doesn’t have anything to do with me.

The cliche goes, life’s not fair—but not for the reason one might suspect. Life isn’t fair because there’s no such thing. Fairness is a subjective value based on your position. It’s not fair to take things from people who worked hard for them and did well for themselves; neither is it fair that these people can sit idly by while others die in squallor. It’s not that these actions aren’t justifiable; both have been successfully defended, and destroyed. But in terms of what is fair—that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t even make sense to complain that life’s not fair; the statement just doesn’t have any meaning. It is equally fair and unfair to every single person, because as your status in life rises, the amount of “fairness” shifts proportionately from the liberal sense (share the wealth) to the conservative sense (live the dream).

It’s impossible to integrate these various ideals of fairness. The concept is meaningless.

-Ted