Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 3b: Fairness

What about fairness and private property ownership?  In my last post, I mostly focused on applying Prof. Wilson's categories of fairness to relationships between persons.  These are important, and they are often overlooked.  We need to think, probably more than we typically do, about relational fairness between individuals.  But questions about fairness between groups, particularly differences in ownership of property by various societal segments, are also important and happen to be currently at the forefront of national conversation.  So we need to think about that, too.

In this connection, a clarification is necessary to make, for it will help us to see the matter more precisely.  This matter involves two distinct but related concepts:  what decisions we make about fairness and property ownership and how we make them.  Recall that Prof. Wilson's aim in writing is to identify and to explain the moral sensibilities that humans have as part of a larger argument that we do in fact have a moral sense.  A key part of his success in doing so is to discuss how people make the decisions that reflect these moral sensibilities.  His descriptive task covers both what and how.

On how people make decisions about fairness in property ownership, Prof. Wilson writes:  "...however we judge the worth of our fellows, we will tend to consider distributions and obligations just if they are proportional to that worth" (The Moral Sense, 73).  Of the three main categories of fairness that we saw last time that he discerns (equity, reciprocity, and impartiality), this is a view of property ownership based on equity.  It is a view that stems from considerations of merit and value, on one hand, and from proportionality to that merit and value, on the other.  The mostly intuitive, but sometimes ratiocinative, process by which people judge whether one's share is fair is if it accords with our sense of the possessor's excellence or merit.

As he describes this view of how people think about property ownership, Prof. Wilson traces the development of the concept historically in different cultures.  Change has occurred in conceptions of property and fairness over time as civilizations moved from the hunter-gatherer type of society to the fixed settlements type, which "requires less cooperation and permits greater division of labor than being on the move" (73).  Whatever the process of becoming settled (voluntarily, involuntarily, or opportunistically), "the people [who have done so] now live in fixed abodes from whence they herd cattle, raise crops, or earn cash incomes" (73).  Not only do these things require greater cooperation and division of labor than itinerant or nomadic civilizations; they also admit of greater cultivation and protection, as well as a sense of "mine, not thine."

Consider this intersection between Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory and Prof. Wilson's anthropological survey:

The entire Discourses on the Origin of Inequality can be read as a commentary on what we know about the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary societies.  Building huts meant acquiring property, "the source of a thousand quarrels and conflicts."  Settled into those huts, the men "went abroad in search of their common subsistence" while the women "became more sedentary and accustomed to themselves to mind the hut and the children."  Tools became valuable and their possession possible, and so men became beholden to them and alert to the differences in status implied by differences in their ownership.
     The many contemporary followers of Rousseau read these words as an argument against inequality, but if anything, they are an argument against civilization, by which I mean settled living and the division of labor.  (75)

Why would Prof. Wilson take this, if anything, to be an argument against civilization?  According to Rousseau, political societies "'irretrievably destroyed natural liberty.'"  Why?

... because the conditions of settled life forced men to recognize, act upon, and reinforce their natural inequalities, inequalities that hunter-gatherers could afford -- indeed, were obliged -- to overlook.  In settled societies, Rousseau wrote, "equality might have been sustained, had the talents of individuals been equal."  But they are not:  once the division of labor took effect, "the strongest did the most work; the most ingenious devised methods of diminishing his labour." ... Though laws may legitimate and magnify these differences, "all the inequality which now prevails owes its strength and growth to the development of our faculties and the advance of the human mind." (75-76)

One could say that, on this view, differences in property ownership depend to a significant degree on the one who acquires it -- or on the one who builds it, to use the now fashionable idiom.  Developments in society, which importantly can be distinct from government (the two are not identical), may have created the conditions in which property ownership and advancement in industry became possible; however, differences in effort and ingenuity resulted in differences in the goods deemed valuable, desired, and owned.

But are inequalities unfair?  Rousseau's answer is not necessarily.  The unequal portions that he describes are not unjust, and this is because they respect unequal contributions, which lead naturally and rightly to unequal claims.  Civilization entails inequalities.  They are unavoidable.  These inequalities are not necessarily unfair; what is more, they may actually be integral to a key aspect of fairness.

What is this key aspect, and how how does this relate to contemporary discussions of fairness, both what it is and how people judge it to be so when they see it?

First, inasmuch as this theory of fairness in property ownership is one based on equity, not equality, it challenges a commonly-held view of what constitutes fair shares.  What is fair is not always what is equal; what is fair is perhaps more often what is equitable.  This is an important point.

On this, Prof. Wilson elaborates.

Equality is a special and, as it turns out, rare and precarious case of equity.  Settled living, and in particular the accumulation of private property, makes equality of outcomes impossible because inequality of contributions becomes manifest.  The task of settled societies is to devise ways of assuring that outcomes are proportional to worth, reasonably defined.

     The only way to attack inequality fundamentally is to attack private property directly. (76)

This, attacking private property directly, Karl Marx did but not many choose explicitly to do.  A chief reason is that measuring fairness in property ownership by contributions is not just a doctrine; it is also a basic thought process of contemporary life.  It is not only what we frequently say about fairness; it is also how we regularly think about it.

Imagine one's place in line, say, a long line at the debut of a movie.  If someone arrives before I did, it would be unfair of me to cut in front of her.  But if I could sufficiently demonstrate that I actually had preceded her and had only just stepped away for a moment to use the lavatory, then I might have a prior claim on the spot in line closer to the entrance.  The point is that our sense of fairness about positions in line turns on our sense of contributions, or proportionate worth:  it is the worth or contribution of making the effort to get to the movie theater earlier than others that entitles me to a position closer to the front of the line.

The woman in front of me and I would both cry foul ("Hey, that's unfair!") if the last arriving person intruded ahead of us both (because that's not equitable either), or if all people somehow were permitted to enter all at once to find our seat regardless of arrival time (because, although based on equality, it is neither practicable nor equitable).  We think that we, as it were, own our position in line, as our temporary possession, which is proportionate to our arrival time.   (The basic example is from The Moral Sense; see 77-78.)

Not every instance of fairness in property ownership is one of equity.  Neither Prof. Wilson nor I wish to be mistaken as excluding a sense of fairness as equality.  There are occasions when fairness in possessions can only be practiced as equality.

Consider differences in collaborative roles in the family between husband and wife, father and mother.  Different contributions to the family may be fair based on equity (i.e., each person doesn't have to do the same thing for the family to operate fairly).  However, these collaborative differences in contributions to the family unit and its shared goals do not -- or, better, should not -- necessarily give the family's sole wage-earner an exclusive property claim on that particular financial asset.  That would be equitable, or proportionate, strictly speaking, but it is mistaken because too myopic.

A mother, in this scheme, bears, nurses, nurtures, and cares for a child in greater temporal quantity than the father; the father provides the monetary means for the family's collective livelihood.  The mother who does not earn a monetary wage is no less entitled to the family's income and assets than the father who directly earns them in his daily work.  He, likewise, is no less a parent of the child than the mother simply because the time he spends with his son is necessarily less than that of the mother.  Enforcing those forms of equity in this situation would result in a perverse understanding of the family unit.  Hence, fairness may not only be fully consistent with equality in property ownership (i.e., an equal sharing between parties despite different contributions) but actually require it.  The example of the family above is one such case, and perhaps a special case.

The main point, however, is just that when it comes to how we think about what is ours in most cases, about property ownership generally, the natural, intuitive, habitual way in which we do think about it is in terms of equity.  And equity has some notable benefits, especially when conflicts arise about property:

Private property, though the enemy of equality, is the ally of equity.  It gives men the motive to supply contributions of efforts and a yardstick to judge the allocation of rewards.  Ownership leads to disputes, but property individually held produces fewer disputes than property commonly held.  Property rights supply a basis for settling disputes that is fairer than the feasible alternative, which is brute force, whether that force is the mailed fist of a monarch or the velvet glove of the legislature. (76)

This is a second point of contact with contemporary discussions about property distributions.  In civilized society, understanding property ownership in terms of equity facilitates a fair and workable system of property rights and laws for the regulation and resolution of ownership claims.  It is not difficult to envision disorderly disagreements in the absence of an operative equity principle.  It is also rather easy to conceive of unfair policies and distributions by governments without one.

What some object to currently in the United States is perceived unfairness even when, or maybe because, the principle of equity is operative.  The complaint is that an unchecked principle of equity, or proportionate rewards for proportionate contributions to the generation of income and wealth, results, or has resulted, cumulatively in massive unfairness in the distribution of income and wealth.

I have written about this topic previously in several posts.  I may return to this question subsequently, for I do continue think about it practically and in connection with political theory.  For now, we may simply agree with Prof. Wilson, who notes, I think unexceptionably, that

Though private possessions are not the enemy of equity, severe inequalities in their ownership are often the cause of political discord. ... The overly wealthy tend toward arrogance, the overly indigent toward malice; the former will be consumed by contempt, the latter by envy. ... severe inequalities distort the evaluation of contributions by both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, leading to outcomes that are unfair as judged by the natural standards of equity that develop in the household. (77)

To acknowledge these phenomena, however, is not to affirm as a solution and an alternative in all cases equality in property ownership or to insist upon some mechanism which tends toward that.  It is, rather, to be frank about situations that may compromise the fair sense of equity that is both just and prudent to promote in society.

Further, to acknowledge that severe inequalities may cause political discord is not to say that there is fundamentally something wrong with the principle of equity.  The passage quoted above is informed by Aristotle and observes not a defect in equity as a principle of fairness but a defect in humans.  These defects are displays of behavior that we rightly judge to be immoral and unethical:  arrogance and malice, contempt and envy.  It is these human mindsets and dispositions that impair the moral sense about fairness of those who harbor them.  They affect a person's evaluation of fairness.

If we naturally judge the fair ownership of property according to principles of equity, and if we rightly do so, we must ask both what threats there are to maintaining equity as the generally right standard of evaluation.  Threats come not just from wide disparities in ownership but also from human responses to them.

Disparities themselves may develop according to fair principles of equity and thus be fair in themselves as equitable outcomes.  Robert Nozick has articulated one such way to view this.  His Harvard colleague John Rawls famously offers another way to view the inherent fairness of the existence of significant disparities in income and wealth, as well as other possessions, among members of a political society.  Their arguments are well-known, and it is not my interest to rehearse them here.

I do wish to emphasize the moral element enmeshed in our responses to perceived unfairness in property ownership.  Whether a given state of affairs is fair, how do we check the appropriate response that we should have to it?  In asking about means to redress unfairness in property ownership when and where it exists, we first must sort out our own moral feelings.  Is our policy suggestion motivated fully by virtue in accordance with fairness?  Would that it were so!  This eventuality is probably more ideal than real.  Or is our policy suggestion based on mixed motives:  prompted partly by a genuine desire to right a perceived (and maybe real) wrong, but also fueled partly, and in some cases mostly, by vicious feelings of arrogance and contempt, if we are advantaged, or malice and envy, if we are disadvantaged?

In other words, what is the proper proportionate, or equitable, distribution of our moral feelings in our pursuit of fairness?

In asking this question, or in putting the matter this way, it could seem as though I am glossing over -- or, worse, accepting -- unfairness in property ownership and placing the accent on our response to whatever situation exists, even if it is an unjust one.  Last fall I was accused of doing just this by a friend in a conversation about the Occupy Wall Street movement.  But this is mistaken.

What I am doing is connecting theory about fairness to our practical wisdom, or phronēsis, which is indispensable to our personal virtue.  We must not only be able to discern what fairness is and why we judge it to be so; we must also be able as much as possible "fairly" (i.e., disinterestedly, evenly, and objectively) to evaluate our motives, our complicated impulses, and our actions in response to what we judge to be fair or unfair.  We must understand the what and the why of ourselves as much as the what and the why of fairness.  

This is a necessity if we are to be scrupulous in cultivating our right moral sense.  To be desired in all this web of fairness is a positive feedback loop.  We wish for our moral sense about fairness to manifest itself through what we judge to be fair (or unfair); knowing how we arrived at that judgment of fairness (or unfairness) will help us to know what sort of response is appropriate; practicing an appropriate response will inculcate in our thinking as much as in our lives virtue in accordance with fairness; and virtue in accordance with fairness will become a more finely tuned habit, which will continue to manifest itself through what we judge to be fair (or unfair); and so it goes ...