It seems that fairness is an idea whose
time has come.
--
True, some
cynics view fairness as nothing more than a mask for self-interest. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw put it,
“The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” But the cynics are wrong. One of the important findings of the
emerging, multi-disciplinary science of human nature is that humans do, indeed,
have an innate sense of fairness. We
regularly display a concern for others’ interests as well as our own, and we
even show a willingness to punish perceived acts of unfairness.
The accumulating
scientific evidence for this distinctive human trait, which is reviewed in my
new book The Fair Society: The Science of
Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice, suggests that it has played
an important role in our evolution as a species. It has served to facilitate and lubricate the
close-knit social organization that has been a key to our success as a species.
Among other
things, the evidence for this trait includes anthropologist Donald Brown’s
finding, reported in his landmark study, Human
Universals, that altruism, reciprocity, and a concern for fairness are
cultural universals. Likewise, in the
field of behavior genetics, many studies have documented that there is a
genetic basis for traits that are strongly associated with fairness, including
altruism, empathy and “nurturance.”
In the brain
sciences, the experiments of Joshua Greene and his colleagues have identified
specific brain areas associated with making moral choices. Another team, headed by Alan Sanfey, pinpointed
a brain area specifically associated with feelings of fairness and unfairness
when subjects were participating in the so-called “ultimatum game” in his
laboratory.
There is also
the extensive research by evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmedes and John
Tooby and a number of their colleagues on what they term “social exchange” (or
reciprocity) – which they point out exists in every culture. Cosmedes and Tooby have concluded that humans
possess a discreet “mental module” -- a dedicated neurocognitive system – for
reciprocity behaviors.
In a similar
vein, the work on “strong reciprocity theory” in experimental and behavioral
economics has repeatedly demonstrated that even altruistic behaviors can be
elicited in cooperative situations if there is a combination of strict
reciprocity and punishment for defectors.
Finally, it has
been shown that even some nonhuman primates display in a rudimentary form some
of the traits associated with fairness behaviors in humans. For instance, primatologist Frans de Waal, in
a classic laboratory experiment, clearly demonstrated the existence of reciprocity
behaviors in capuchin monkeys.
It seems evident
that a sense of fairness is an inborn human trait. It means, quite simply, that we are inclined
to take into account and accommodate to the needs and interests of others. However, it is equally clear that our sense
of fairness is labile. It can be subverted
by various cultural, economic and political influences, not to mention the lure
of our self-interests. And, of course,
there are always the “outliers” – the Bernie Madoffs.
In fact, our predisposition
toward fairness, like every other biological trait, is subject to significant individual
variation. Numerous studies have
indicated that some 25-30 percent of us are more or less “fairness challenged.”
Some of us are so self-absorbed and egocentric that we are totally insensitive
and even hostile to the needs of others. Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s “A
Christmas Carol,” and the banker Henry F. Potter in Frank Capra’s timeless Christmas
movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” were caricatures, of course, but many of us have
seen likenesses in real life.
Thus fairness is
not a given. It’s an end that can only
be approximated with consistent effort and often in the face of strong
opposition. And in the many cases where there
are conflicting fairness claims, compromise is the indispensable solvent for
achieving a voluntary, consensual outcome.
At the
individual level, fairness is an issue in all of our personal relationships --
in our families, with our loved ones, with friends, and in the workplace. We
are confronted almost every day with concerns about providing, or doing, a
“fair share,” reciprocating for some kindness, recognizing the rights of other
persons, being fairly acknowledged and rewarded for our efforts, and much more.
However,
fairness is also an important, “macro-level” issue in our society, and the
debate about what is often referred to as “social justice” can be traced back
at least to Plato’s great dialogue, The
Republic. For Plato, social justice
consists of “giving every man his due” (and every woman, of course). His great student, Aristotle, characterized
it as “proportionate equality.” Plato
also advanced the idea that every society entails a social “compact” – a tacit
understanding about the rights and duties, and benefits and costs, of
citizenship – and he viewed social justice as the key to achieving a stable and
harmonious society.
The idea that
there is a more or less explicit “social contract” in every society is more
commonly associated with the so-called social contract theorists of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – such as Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke –
and more recently, John Rawls. Rousseau
fantasized about free individuals voluntarily forming communities in which
everyone was equal and all were subject to the “general will.” Thomas Hobbes, in contrast, envisioned a
natural state of anarchic violence and proposed, for the sake of mutual
self-preservation, that everyone should be subject to the absolute “sovereign”
authority of the state. John Locke, on
the other hand, rejected this dark Hobbesian vision. He conjured instead a benign state of nature
in which free individuals voluntarily formed a limited contract for their
mutual advantage but retained various residual rights.
The philosopher
David Hume, and many others since, have made a hash of this line of
reasoning. In a devastating critique, A Treatise of Human Nature (published in
1739-40), Hume rejected the claim that some deep property of the natural world
(natural laws), or some aspect of our past history, could be used to justify
moral precepts. Among other things, Hume
pointed out that even if the origins of human societies actually conformed to
such hypothetical motivations and scenarios (which we now know they did not),
we have no logical obligation to accept an outdated social contract that was
entered into by some remote ancestor.
With the demise
of the natural law argument, social contract theory has generally fallen into
disfavor among philosophers, with the important exception of the work of John
Rawls. In his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, Rawls’ formulation
provoked a widespread reconsideration of what constitutes fairness and social
justice and, equally important, what precepts would produce a just
society. Rawls proposed two
complementary principles: (1) equality in the enjoyment of freedom (a concept
fraught with complications), and (2) affirmative action, in effect, for “the
least advantaged” among us. This would
be achieved by ensuring that the poor have equal opportunities and that they would
receive a relatively larger share of any new wealth whenever the economic pie
grows larger. Although Rawls’ work has
been exhaustively debated by philosophers and others over the years, it seems
to have had no discernable effect outside of academia.
However, there
is one other major exception to the general decline of social contract theory
that is perhaps more significant. Over
the past two decades, a number of behavioral economists, game theorists,
evolutionary psychologists and others have breathed new life into this
venerable idea with a combination of rigorous, mathematically-based game theory
models and empirical research. Especially
important is the work of the mathematician-turned-economist Ken Binmore, who
has sought to use game theory as a tool for resuscitating social contract theory
on a new footing. In his 2005 book, Natural Justice, Binmore describes his
approach as a “scientific theory of justice,” because it is based on an
evolutionary/adaptive perspective, as well as the growing body of research in
behavioral and experimental economics regarding our evolved sense of fairness
plus some powerful insights from game theory.
Briefly, Binmore
defines a social contract in very broad terms as any stable “coordination” of
social behavior – like our conventions about which side of the road we should
drive on or pedestrian traffic patterns on sidewalks. Any sustained social interaction in what
Binmore refers to as “the game of life” – say a marriage, a car pool, or a
bowling league -- represents a tacit social contract if it is (1) stable, (2)
efficient, and (3) fair. To achieve a
stable social contract, Binmore argues, a social relationship should strive for
an equilibrium condition – an approximation of a Nash equilibrium in game
theory. The rewards or “payoffs” for
each of the players should be optimized so that no one can improve on his or
her own situation without exacting a destabilizing cost from the other
cooperators. Ideally, then, a social
contract is self-enforcing. As Binmore
explains, it needs no social “glue” to hold it together because everyone is a
willing participant and nobody has a better alternative. It is like a masonry arch that requires no
mortar (a simile first used by Hume).
The problem with
this formulation – as Binmore recognizes -- is that it omits the radioactive
core of the problem – how do you define fairness in substantive terms? As Binmore concedes, game theory “has no
substantive content…It isn’t our business to say what people ought to like.”
Binmore rejects the very notion that there can be any universals where fairness
is concerned. “The idea of a need is
particularly fuzzy,” he tells us. In
other words, Binmore’s version of a social contract involves an idealization,
much like Plato’s republic, or free market (utopian) capitalism, or Karl Marx’s
utopian socialism. Fairness is whatever
people say it is.
I have taken a
different approach. What I call a “biosocial contract” is distinctive in that
it is grounded in our growing understanding of human nature and the basic
purpose of a human society. It is
focused on the content of fairness, and it encompasses a set of specific
normative precepts. In the game theory
paradigm, the social contract is all about harmonizing our personal
interactions. Well and good. But in a biosocial contract, the players
include all of the stakeholders in the political community and substantive
fairness is the focus.
A biosocial
contract is about the rights and duties of all of the stakeholders in society,
both among themselves and in relation to the “state”. It is about defining what constitutes a “fair
society.” It is a normative theory, but
it is built on an empirical foundation.
I believe it is legitimate to do so in this case, because life itself
has a built-in normative bias – a normative preference, so to speak. We share with all other living things the
biological imperatives associated with survival and reproduction. If we do, after all, want to survive and
reproduce – if this is our shared biological objective -- then certain
principles of social intercourse follow as essential means to this end.
First and
foremost, a biosocial contract requires a major shift in our social
values. The deep purpose of a human
society is not, after all, about achieving growth, or wealth, or material
affluence, or power, or social equality, or even about the pursuit of happiness. An organized society is quintessentially a
“collective survival enterprise.”
Whatever may be our perceptions, aspirations, or illusions (or for that
matter, whatever our station in life), the basic problem for any society is to
provide for the survival and reproductive needs of its members. However, it is also important to recognize
differences in merit and to reward them accordingly. Finally, there must also be reciprocity -- an
unequivocal commitment on the part of all of the participants to help support
the survival enterprise, for no society can long exist on a diet of
altruism. Altruism is a means to a
larger end, not an end in itself. It is
the emotional and normative basis of our safety-net.
As discussed at
length in my book, a biosocial contract encompasses three distinct normative
(and policy) precepts that must be bundled together and balanced in order to
approximate the Platonic ideal of social justice. These precepts are as follows:
(1) Goods and services must be
distributed to each according to his or her basic needs (in this, there must be
equality);
(2) Surpluses beyond the
provisioning of our basic needs must be distributed according to “merit” (there must also be
equity);
(3) In return, each of us is
obligated to contribute to the collective survival enterprise proportionately
in accordance with our ability (there must be reciprocity).
The first of
these precepts involves a collective obligation to provide for the common needs
of all of our people. To borrow a term
from the TV series Star Trek, this is
our “prime directive.” Although this
precept may sound socialistic -- an echo of Karl Marx’s famous dictum -- it is
at once far more specific and more limited.
It refers to the fourteen basic biological needs domains that are
detailed in my book. Our basic needs are
not a vague, open-ended abstraction, nor a matter of personal preference. They constitute a concrete but ultimately
limited agenda, with measurable indicators for assessing outcomes.
These fourteen
basic needs domains include a number of obvious items, like adequate nutrition,
fresh water, physical safety, physical and mental health, and waste
elimination, as well as some items that we may take for granted like thermoregulation
(which may entail many different technologies, from clothing to heating oil and
air conditioning), adequate sleep (about one-third of our lives), mobility, and
even healthy respiration, which can’t always be assured. Perhaps least obvious but most important are
the requisites for reproduction and the nurturance of the next generation. From this perspective, our basic needs cut a
very broad swath through our economy and our society.
The idea that
there is a “social right” to the necessities of life is not as radical as it
may sound. It is implicit in the Golden
Rule, the great moral precept that is recognized by every major religion and
culture. Furthermore, numerous public
opinion surveys over the years have consistently shown that people are far more
willing to provide support for the genuinely needy than the Scrooges among us
would lead one to believe. (Some of
these surveys are cited in my book.)
Even more
compelling, I believe, are the results of an extensive series of social experiments
regarding distributive justice by political scientists Norman Frohlich and Joe
Oppenheimer and their colleagues, as detailed in their 1992 book Choosing Justice. What Frohlich and Oppenheimer set out to test
was whether or not ad hoc groups of “impartial” decision-makers behind a
Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” about their own personal stakes would be able to
reach a consensus on how to distribute the income of a hypothetical society. Frohlich
and Oppenheimer found that the experimental groups consistently opted for
striking a balance between maximizing income (providing incentives and rewards
for “the fruits of one’s labors,” in the authors’ words) and ensuring that
there is an economic minimum for everyone (what they called a “floor
constraint”). The overall results were stunning: 77.8 percent of the groups
chose to assure a minimum income for basic needs.
The results of
these important experiments also lend strong support to the second of the three
fairness precepts listed above concerning equity (or merit). How can we also be fair-minded about
rewarding our many individual differences in talents, performance, and
achievement. Merit, like the term
fairness itself, has an elusive quality; it does not denote some absolute
standard. It is relational, and
context-specific, and subject to all manner of cultural norms and
practices. But, in general, it implies
that the rewards a person receives should be proportionate to his or her
effort, or investment, or contribution.
A crucial
corollary of our first two precepts is that the collective survival enterprise
has always been based on mutualism and reciprocity, with altruism being limited
(typically) to special circumstances under a distinct moral claim -- what could
be referred to as “no-fault needs.” So,
to close the loop, a third principle must be added to the biosocial contract,
one that puts it squarely at odds with the utopian socialists, and perhaps even
with some modern social democrats as well.
In any voluntary contractual
arrangement, there is always reciprocity -- obligations or costs as well as
benefits. As I noted earlier,
reciprocity is a deeply rooted part of our social psychology and an
indispensable mechanism for balancing our relationships with one another. Without reciprocity, the first two fairness
precepts might look like nothing more than a one-way scheme for redistributing
wealth.
As detailed in
the book, a greater emphasis on reciprocity in our society would include such
things as a more equitable tax code, higher taxes as necessary to support the
basic needs of the 30 million (plus) Americans who suffer from extreme poverty,
and a lifelong public service obligation beginning with a year of national
service for everyone who is able to do so, or two years for those who receive special
benefits like educational assistance.
Some critics
might object to such incursions on their freedom, but John Rawls’s definition
of fairness under a social contract provides a definitive rebuttal, in my
view: “The main idea is that when a
number of persons engage in a mutually advantageous cooperative venture
according to rules, and thus restrict their liberty in ways necessary to yield
advantages for all, those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right
to a similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their
submission.”
To conclude
then, what the biosocial contract adds to Plato’s great vision is the
recognition that there are in fact three distinct categories, or types of
substantive fairness and that these must be combined and balanced in
appropriate ways. The substantive
content of social justice consists of providing for the basic needs of the
population, along with equitably rewarding merit and insisting on reciprocity.
The biosocial contract paradigm also enlists the growing power of modern
evolutionary biology and the human sciences to shed light on the matter, and it
identifies an explicit set of criteria for reconciling (if not harmonizing) the
competing claims that have been promoted by political ideologues of the Left
and the Right.
I believe that
this framework offers our best hope for achieving and maintaining that elusive
state of voluntary consent that is the key to a harmonious society – a Nash
equilibrium writ large. This is an ideal
worth striving for, because our own survival, and more certainly that of our
descendants, may well depend upon it. As
the great American public park designer Frederick Law Olmstead put it, “The
rights of posterity take precedence over the desires of the present.” Nothing less than our evolutionary future is
at stake.
--
Dr. Peter Corning is the Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems. He was Professor in the Interdisciplinary Human Biology Program at Stanford University and is the author of over 150 scientific articles and books, most recently “The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice” (University of Chicago Press 2011).
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