The morality of fairness

 

Introduction

The natural home of helping and fairness is cooperation towards a joint goal (Tomasello, 2020).  As such, they are aspects of cooperative morality, i.e., that for which we may be held accountable (Dill and Darwall, 2014) and which has cooperation as a goal in itself (Tomasello, 2016; Perry, 2022).  

The reason for each one is interdependence, whereby I depend upon you to achieve our joint goal(s).  If you are necessary to me, then I need to help you to thrive and survive: hence, the human instinct to help unrelated others (Tomasello, 2016).  

Why do humans routinely insist on being fair to others, even at a cost to themselves? How can such a thing evolve in self-interested organisms that need to maximise their own inclusive fitness?

We may distinguish between evolutionary reasons for the existence of other-directed fairness in humans, and evolutionary reasons for its normativity.

After achieving a joint goal together with my partners, I feel or recognise:  

 

• individual pressure to maximise individual gains
• self-other equivalence
• gratitude and respect for the value of partners and their work (reward-based motivation)
• reputationally concerned to give away enough, the “right” amount (punishment-based motivation)

=>

• “I want for my partners what I would want for myself” (i.e., fairness)

 

Types of benefits

In the distribution of benefits after a collaboration, the benefits can be material/biological, psychological, social, and/or moral.

 

Types of distribution

Alan Fiske (1991) describes “four elementary forms of human relations” that really amount to four distinct ways to distribute benefit and harm:

 

Helping in response to need

Equally

Proportional to input

Authority-ranked

 

Evolution of fairness

In order for the sense of other-directed fairness to evolve, there must have been evolutionary fitness benefits, to the individual, of being fair to others.  In the interdependent social environment of small groups of families thriving, surviving and reproducing together of ancient humans, it made sense to share with each other. Participating in a personal sharing network would have provided fitness benefits to each individual.

Sharing food is rare in the animal kingdom.  It seems to coincide with cooperative breeding, where adults care for and provision the infants of other group members on a cooperative basis, thereby increasing the chances of survival of the young, and allowing mothers to have more than one infant at a time.  Humans are a cooperatively breeding species, along with, for example, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, elephants, parrots, crows, wolves, golden marmosets, and African hunting dogs.  Apart from humans, great apes almost never share food voluntarily, unless they tolerate its being stolen.  

 

Sharing in response to need

The most important evolutionary step in the evolution of fairness was that of voluntary sharing with others.  If I share with you when you need it, you are more likely to survive long enough to share with me when I need it.  The group forms a small-scale, closed sharing network.  In this social environment, distribution is in response to need, with unproductive people (even the lazy) being fed along with the productive (Perry, 2021).  Large kills are routinely shared group-wide, while personally gathered fruits and vegetables are more likely to be kept for the family’s own consumption, unless there is a surplus.  

 

Proportional exchanges

By around 12,000 years ago, with the advent of settled cities, groups began to grow large and mixed, and a population could no longer govern itself morally simply through personal interaction and the opinions of friends.  As a result of this loss of personal interaction, generous small-scale sharing networks had to be replaced by more impersonal interaction, and exchange (or sharing) became more formalised to guard against not being paid back for one’s efforts: there were now expectations that you give and get proportionally in a formal, transactional exchange.  

This idea of proportional exchange extends to sharing rewards after collaboration in an impersonal environment.  I wish to receive the same return per unit of investment as my partners (which is one form of equity).

A study by Schäfer, Haun, and Tomasello (2015) found that:

 

• 4-11 year-old children in a Western industrialised society (suburban Germany) preferred proportional distribution of goods obtained through collaboration;
• 4-11 year-old children in the ≠Akhoe Haiǁom society of egalitarian foragers in a remote part of northern Namibia preferred equal distribution of goods obtained through collaboration;
• 4-11 year-old children in the pastoralist (livestock-keeping) gerontocratic (age-based hierarchical) society of the Samburu in remote north-central Kenya distributed rewards obtained through collaboration randomly, perhaps reflecting the fact that in this society, older people tend to make the important decisions about how resources are distributed, leaving young children relatively inexperienced in this regard.

 

The idea of distributing benefit and harm according to a hierarchy appears in many areas of human life and society.  We rank people all the time, according to an infinity of criteria.  

 

Self-other equivalence

This is the recognition, implicit or explicit, that each partner is equivalent in status from the “bird’s eye” point of view of the collaborative joint agent “we” (made up of partners “I” and “you”).  Each partner is level in status in the sense that:

 

• each is equally a causative agent in achieving the joint goal;
• each is impartially bound by the impartial normative standards of his or her role, the achievement of which are instrumentally required for success;
• each role in the collaboration could in principle be carried out by any of the partners.  From the point of view of the collaborative “we”, individual personnel do not matter: only how well each one performs his or her role.  

 

This factual situation does not carry any moral force in itself. Other motivations are required for it to become invoked as part of the mechanics of cooperative morality.  

 

Golden Rule

The instinct that we should treat others as we would wish to be treated, or that we should not do to others as we would not want done to ourselves, is based on self-other equivalence: you and I (collaborative partners) are equivalent, and as we are interdependent, I "owe" you a similar duty of care as myself or my loved ones.  Encoded as a moral rule, this is the Golden Rule.  It is instrumentally normative because in ancient, closely interdependent times, it would lead to an overall fitness reward for the individual, and ethically normative because it is mutually advantageous and therefore cooperative, and not disadvantageous for anyone concerned.  

 

Common standards for all

 

The rules apply to you, and therefore to me.

The rules apply to me, and therefore to you.

 

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.  

Proverb

 

Personnel are in some senses equivalent, and normative standards apply equally to all personnel.  It is consistent with this for humans to feel that the rules to apply to “me” if they apply to “you”, and vice versa.  

Other examples of the application of self-other equivalence are:  

 

“If I were in your position I would have done the same thing”.  

“How would you like it if I did that to you?”  

 

Types of justice

Justice exists in a number of forms, all based on the idea of treating someone as an equal:  

 

• restorative (the victim of an offence is made good in some way)
• retributive (an offender is punished in some proportionate way)
• distributive (goods or burdens are distributed in some fair way)
• procedural (impartially sticking to the rules of a fair procedure that is worked out ahead of time without knowing how it will affect any one person, i.e., under a "veil of ignorance". Whether or not procedural justice has been seen to be done affects how legitimately the legal decision is regarded by those subject to it, and how subjects respect the rules and authority [gov.uk, 2021]. For Her Majesty's Prisons and Probations Service, in the UK, there are four principles of procedural justice: 1) to treat subjects with respect; 2) to be impartial; 3) to ensure that subjects are listened to and have a chance to tell their story; 4) showing and encouraging trust through prosocial interactions by staff with subjects.)
• justice as fairness

 

Alternative view

In the account of morality of André, Debove, Fitouchi, and Baumard (2022), morality is an evolutionary equilibrium between what we can maximise for ourselves, and how little we can get away with giving to others.  

In the present account, this is only partly true: it represents the “stick” or potential punishment of reputational damage if we are stingy, lazy, or self-indulgent: “I don’t want to, but I have to”.  

However, proximately, we also feel positive motivations to be good to our partners: a “carrot” of “I don’t have to, but I want to”.  We assume that it is more likely that this motivation is based on a reward than a punishment.  Wanting to be good to our partners in a fair way is a moral emotion.  Without moral emotions, we would all be ungovernable, seeking only to find a way to avoid punishment.  It is hard to see how moral desires can evolve without a fitness reward in it for the individual, beyond achieving a good reputation.  

André et al. (2022) believe that duties are explained by this evolutionary equilibrium: we do our duty, what is “right”, in order to achieve a good reputation and avoid a bad one.  This is again only partly true.  I also do my duty, i.e. fulfil my role properly, to reward my partners for the way they are helping me to achieve the joint goal.  This would explain the bond of loyalty we see in cooperative partners.  I also want to help to achieve the joint goal, and the ideal standards associated with my role are sub-goals of the overall goal.

It is also hard to see how the Golden Rule could have evolved by a purely reputation-based motivation.

Duty, accountability, and reputation/partner choice are all functions of something deeper: i.e., the structure of morality formed by achieving goals jointly (Perry, 2022).  

 

Without prosocial emotions, we would all be sociopaths, and human society would not exist, however strong the institutions of contract, governmental law enforcement, and reputation.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis - "The Origins of Human Cooperation"

 

To concentrate on the reputation exclusively - to say that all I care about is "shame", my reputation and how much I can get for myself - neglects the role of "guilt", the conscience and the moral emotions of compassion and fairness and following norms.

 

References

André, Jean-Baptiste; Stéphane Debove; Léo Fitouchi; and Nicolas Baumard - "Moral cognition as a Nash product maximizer - An evolutionary contractualist account of morality": PsyArXiv 1-46, June 29, 2022

Dill, Brendan and Stephen Darwall - "Moral Psychology as Accountability"; in Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobsen (eds.): Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics (pp. 40-83), Oxford University Press 2014

Fiske, Alan - "Structures of Social Life: the four elementary forms of human relations"; Free Press, New York 1991

gov.uk web site accessed 12 February 2021: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/procedural-justice

Perry, Simon - “Understanding morality and ethics” (2021); https://orangebud.co.uk/Understanding%20morality%20and%20ethics.pdf

Perry, Simon - “Types and features of morality” (2022); https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/xnh7xr/types_and_features_of_mor ality/

Schäfer, Marie; Daniel B M Haun; Michael Tomasello – “Fair is not fair everywhere”: Psychological Science, Vol 26(8) 1252–1260, 2015

Tomasello, Michael - “A Natural History of Human Morality”; Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2016

Tomasello, Michael - “The moral psychology of obligation”; Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43, e56: 1-58, 2020