Unfair is Fair

Life is not fair. In other words: in the complex system that is our world, good is not always rewarded and bad is not always punished. You can eat healthy and exercise and still get cancer. You can be faithful and loving and still get your heart broken. There is a degree of randomness which inevitably creates unfairness. But that very randomness is what makes such unfairness acceptable.

But some of the unfairness in the world is anything but random. Specific groups or classes of people face systemic unfairness due to the structures of society which we have created and have control over. When life is not fair in a directed way, the ideal solution is to create fairness. But true fairness is an imperfect concept and impossible goal. Instead we should aim for balance

Imagine you have a workgroup at your company with a lunch meeting once a week. Bob, the head engineer, always picks the food and always picks pizza. You’re a sales rep and you point out that is not fair. Maybe let sales pick lunch this week. That’s when engineer Jim, who loves pizza, chimes in: if someone else chooses it will be just as unfair. We should come up with a system that’s fair to everyone every single week. Sounds reasonable. But there is no fair system. Different groups are different sizes, so do you do proportional turns? Suzy in accounting is vegan, so should we have to accommodate her? Maybe everyone orders their own food - but that would create too many deliveries and be too hard to coordinate times. It would cost more and be less productive. It’s all too hard and since we can’t make it fair we should just leave it as it is. Right?

The problem should be clear: we are left with a situation that explicitly favors Bob and the engineers. Giving someone else a turn would be unfair only in the most limited view, and spreading the unfairness around is actually more fair than leaving it static. We might not be able to find a perfect solution, but we can reduce the systemic unfairness by increasing the randomness of the unfairness.

When you hear people say affirmative action gives an unfair advantage to Black people, or Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs discriminate against whites, or the #metoo movement will result in men suffering from false allegations, there’s a bit of truth in all of them. But that little bit of truth is being used to hide a much larger truth. If change brings less unfairness to the perpetually disadvantaged at a cost to those who’ve enjoyed relative advantage for generations, it’s a worthwhile transaction and better for society overall. A more random distribution of who gets punished and rewarded is actually a step in the right direction. Life is not fair, but it should be unfair equally for all.