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Charles C. Verharen
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Philosophy
Howard University
Washington, DC 20059
Email: cverharen@howard.edu
TITLE: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FAIRNESS: THE VIEW FROM 50,000 FEET
SYNOPSIS
The panel organizers asked me to provide a synoptic view of fairness, the view from “50,000 feet,” as
Simona Combi put it.
Getting the view from 50,000 feet paradoxically requires diving underneath fairness to find its source.
Its foundation could be a god’s divine command. Think of the US Declaration of Independence: We
are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
(or did the first draft of the Declaration say “property”?).
But a divine command can’t sustain fairness in a cosmopolitan nation. This cosmopolis called the
United States embodies many versions of who the divine is and what she might want. Its citizens in
increasing numbers deny or doubt the existence of the divine. (See Will M. Gervais & Ara Norenzayan,
Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief, Science 27 April 2012: 493-496. DOI:
10.1126/science. 1215647.)
The engine of fairness is to be sought in the principles that make life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness possible.
Millions of years of evolution have produced creatures that desperately want life. The best guarantee
of life is liberty, and liberty finds its perfect expression in flourishing or the pursuit of a life of
excellence.
A five-cylinder engine drives survival and flourishing. Three of these most important cylinders are the
following:
• Rationality or the capacity to use our senses, reason and emotions to invent and deploy practical
means to achieve our goals;
• Community bonding to empower the groups that sustain our lives;
• Freedom manifested as the ability to create variation in our lives.
Rationality and community bonding make our freedom possible. These three principles drive our
passion for fairness, justice or equity.
Revolutions in rationality and ethics display the power of these principles. Our rationality increases
over time because reason drives us to higher and higher degrees of generalization. The brain’s quest
to simplify experience drives our explanations of the origin and nature of the cosmos. Seeking the
original principle of the universe, we have moved from animism to polytheism to henotheism to
pantheism and finally atheism.
Striving mightily to increase the fitness of our groups through generalized principles of community
bonding, we see ethics evolving through four phases: egocentrism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism
and finally acentrism. Ethical revolutions start with the conviction that we need not kill strangers.
We advance to the extraordinary conviction that every other human is a member of our most intimate
group. We honor thinkers like Christ and Marx who claim that such principles as universal and
unconditional love and freedom should be the operative for every human being. Preposterous! Yet
our boldest creative thinkers invented these ideas over 2000 years ago in Europe and Asia. Africans
in Egypt offered the first version of universal human rights nearly 3500 years ago in the Pharaoh
Akhenaten’s Hymns to Aten.
Finally we advance our liberty or freedom because of our increasing powers to create variation in our
lives.
The concept of fairness evolves dramatically over time. Was it fair for Aristotle to claim that women
can’t be rational? Was enslaving Africans fair? Is the U.S. criminal injustice system fair to African
Americans? Is the African American male school drop-out rate in inner cities fair? Is killing newborn
children because of their gender or genetic differences fair?
Dramatic, sometimes violent contestations probe the concept of fairness as I write. Is contraception
fair? Abortion? Capital punishment? Is killing animals for our gustatory or aesthetic pleasure fair?
Revolutions in ethics turn commonly accepted practices into acts of extreme barbarism.
Sadly, our mastery of technology, not our glowingly good human nature, creates these revolutions.
As Aristotle said, slavery will disappear when mechanical devices can perform slave labor. A
burgeoning empathy made possible by technology drives what Stephen Pinker calls The Better Angels
of Our Nature.
In conclusion, what should be the practical application of these stratospheric philosophical ruminations
on tax policy?
Edward O. Wilson’s latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth, frames an answer. Wilson based his
early philosophy of sociobiology on inclusive fitness, the power of an individual to pass genes on to
future generations. Inclusive fitness is at bottom selfish. Inclusive fitness dictates that powerful
individuals—the top one percent—should use every means at their disposal to increase their power.
(With his genes widely spread across the globe, Genghis Khan is the perfect exemplar.)
Wilson’s latest research focuses on group fitness conferred by community bonds so powerful they
provoke altruistic behavior—even at the expense of personal self-interest.
The tension as ever is between the pursuit of individual versus group interest. Humans have moved
from a handful in Africa some 200,000 years ago to over 7 billion strong because of the power of
altruistic groups.
Our capacity for empathy drives our expression of altruism. The human capacity for empathy will
govern the fate of the earth. Do enough of us care enough about the lives of our children to sacrifice
some part of our freedom for their future? Remember that the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution
reminds us that the purpose of our “more perfect Union” is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” not
simply for ourselves but for “our Posterity.” (Perhaps climate change deniers might pay more
attention to the Constitution.)
Altruistic groups require six fundamental goods for every member’s very survival: clean air,
temperature control through clothing and shelter, potable water, nutritious food, healthcare and
education. These objectives are ranked in descending order of importance. What do you want more
than anything else in your life? Your next breath! Unless….
Altruistic groups require five additional pursuits for their flourishing or well-being: rationality,
community bonding, freedom as the exercise of creativity, pleasure and introspection or meditation—
the ability to exercise control over one’s attention. (Even Republicans are beginning to meditate now—
witness Paul Ryan.)
Every group member must have access to these seven goods if the group is first of all to survive. And
groups ensure their survival through their flourishing. A survival ethics system of triage must dictate
the order and urgency of their pursuit.
For philosophical tax policy purposes in a nation committed to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, every citizen must have access to health care, education even through university levels,
economic security in a sustainable and just environment, and equitable political power.
These conditions are moral absolutes for any nation dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. That is not a matter of divine command. Neither is it a matter of debatable political
philosophies on the side of libertarians or communists, Republicans or Democrats.
These conditions are simply facts of life, amply demonstrated in hundreds of thousands of years of
human cultural evolution.
TEXT
Like John Rawls and Nietzsche, I’ll define justice as fairness. The best explication of fairness is in
playground behavior: He didn’t follow the rules! She cheated! He got more than I did!
The best trope or metaphor for fairness is Rawls' veil: if a society is just or fair, any rational person of
good will should be willing to assume any role in that society, from flipping burgers at Mickey D’s to
driving garbage trucks to working as a rock star, psychoanalyst, rocket scientist, astronaut, race car
driver or neurosurgeon—like Buckaroo Banzai in the eponymous movie.
BF Skinner worked out imaginative logistics for fairness in his Walden II. If virtually no one wants to
do a job or assume a certain kind of role in society, then that should be the highest paid job or role in
the community!
If that doesn’t seem fair, then everyone in the community should rotate through the most hated jobs
to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
This kind of equity or fairness works if we can assume that everyone in a community has comparable
intellectual power, ambition and drive, education and a common standard of fair play. Eugene
Steuerle calls this kind of fairness horizontal equity. Equals should be treated as equals.
Sadly, life is not like that. We are all unequal in virtually every aspect of life—thanks to the role of
variation in natural selection. Our only guarantee of equality comes from constitutional documents
honored more in the breach than the observance. “All men are created equal….” “All have equal
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness….” Not! Not in any real life. Only in celestial
political theory! Only at 50,000 feet, high in the stratosphere!
Equality, equity, fairness, justice: All take their rise from rhetoric, not reality.
The view of fairness from 50,000 feet, then, wants to know why we cultivate this obvious myth. Are
we driven to create and exercise the myth as a result of evolutionary processes? Did we receive the
myth through divine revelation, discretely revealed to the diverse cultures declaiming variations on
the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…?
Or is the myth simply a part of the human landscape, a brute fact, inescapable? Could fairness simply
be a part of the “moral law within,” as self-evident, as obvious, as the existence of the “starry skies
above” as Kant was fond of saying.
REASON AND FAIRNESS
To bring up this old German ghost in the machine of European philosophy is to discover one cylinder
of the real engine of fairness: rationality. To be rational is to use appropriate means to reach a
desirable end. The instrument of human rationality is reason, the capacity to connect our experiences
by means of patterns, concepts or ideas.
To reason is to universalize. It is our essence or nature to universalize. If we are to act in accordance
with our nature, then we must universalize. Kant’s conviction about our rational nature leads him to
his first formulation of a hyper-generalization that commands all possible human actions: Act so that
the maxim whereby you act can become universal law. In English, if it’s ok for you to do something
for a reason you think to be a good one, then it must be ok for anyone to do the same kind of thing
for the same kind of reason.
Kant calls this formula a categorical imperative: you must act according to this law regardless of your
circumstances. And you will act according to this law because you have good will. Forget heaven and
hell as motivators!
We should need no motive to do the right thing other than the fact that it’s the right thing. And it’s
the right thing because we are rational beings, universalizers.
If Kant truly believed this feeble story, then he could have stopped there. But he offers a second
formulation of the categorical imperative: Never treat rational beings merely as a means to an end,
but always as ends in themselves. Why? As rational beings, we use means to achieve ends. But
rationality is the highest virtue of life on the planet, so persons who exercise rationality must be ends
in themselves.
LOVE AND FAIRNESS
Not convinced? Try this! Kant was a pietist, a committed Christian. By the exemplar of Christ, we
are committed to love one another as Christ loved us. The supreme act of love is sacrificing one’s own
life for the sake of another—even one’s avowed enemy, as in Christ’s crucifixion. We are ends in
ourselves, objects of infinite worth, precisely because God created us in Her own image and likeness.
The essence of Christianity, then, is love for all God’s children. And what a strange love it is! A love
that is both universal (we must love all, even our enemies) and unconditional (regardless of what
those enemies are trying to do to us!). Most unnatural! Millions of years of evolution have
conditioned us to want to survive. And self-defense—even to the point of killing one’s attacker—is the
ground of survival. Think of the “stand your ground laws” as natural expressions of “survival of the
fittest.” If to be a Christian is to be a universal and unconditional lover, then the Florida of Travon
Martin must be a most unchristian state.
The second cylinder of the engine of fairness is love. But to this point it looks like fairness has only a
mythological status, propped up by thousands of years of religious conviction widely distributed
throughout the history of cultures—whether African, Chinese, Indian or Semitic (in the largest sense
to include Jews, Christians and Muslims). (I omit First American and Oceania cultures only because of
my lack of knowledge of them.)
Can we peer underneath the mythological grounding of fairness to find evolutionary reasons for
believing in and practicing fairness? Are Kant’s two cylinders of the engine of fairness rooted in
evolutionary biology rather than religious mythology?
Being fair means treating equals in equal ways. Fair laws are generalizations over behavior. Our
capacity to generalize is one of our most important means of self-defense. As early humans, we
defended ourselves against other top predators like lions, tigers and grizzly bears by the power of
reason. Our wits so overwhelmed our competitors with their much more powerful senses and
muscles, jaws and claws, that they survive now only at our will.
Wits alone are not enough to ensure human survival, however. We triumphed over our competitors
because of our extraordinary ability to form tightly bonded groups. Love is in fact the answer! Well,
perhaps not the answer, since love must be coupled to rationality. Love has its own engine in the
phenomenon of empathy. Think of the most extreme example of the expanding human capacity for
empathy: Pet Rocks!
FREEDOM AND FAIRNESS
A third cylinder of the engine of fairness is what Eugene Steuerle calls individual equity, the removal
of all restraints on personal exchanges consonant with the well-being of the group. As John Stuart Mill
argues, all cultures are experiments in living. The greater the variation produced by humanity’s
collective cultures, the better the chance that humanity will survive as a species. Liberty as the
freedom of creativity can best defend itself as a lynchpin of survival.
If rationality, love or empathy, and freedom are three cylinders of survival’s engine, then history
should disclose their origins and evolutions over our five thousand years of recorded history.
In fact, we should be able to find evidence of revolutions in all three cylinders. (I apologize for the
pun.)
REVOLUTIONS IN REASON
Revolutionary changes in reason are evident. The brain, as Aldous Huxley put it, is a “reducing
valve.” The brain simplifies experience by abstracting patterns from experience. The brain’s
unification of experience through concepts (literally from the Latin, “grabbings together”) allows us to
predict and thereby control our experience.
The history of thought demonstrates the evolutionary progression of the brain’s principle of reduction.
Virtually all ancient cultures begin to explain their experience through principles of animism. All
beings, whether animate or inanimate, are driven by a soul or principle of thinking. Just as we control
our bodies’ movements through a thinking process, so every being whether animate or inanimate
must in turn be driven by an anima or soul.
As the brain’s reductions evolve over time, animism is converted into polytheism. Rather than having
innumerable souls controlling every possible being or function in our experience, we assign groups of
actions to the responsibility of “over-souls,” powerful beings capable of controlling vast ranges of
comparable kinds of experience. The gods of fertility, war, rain and the like emerge in this second
phase of reduction.
The next phase of reduction is called “henotheism,” or the view that while many gods are required to
explain the varieties of experience, one god must be paramount.
Monotheism follows henotheism. Pantheism or the view that there is no separation of god from her
creation succeeds monotheism. Pantheism devolves into atheism which is the view that only the
physical universe and its contents as we experience them through our senses, reason and emotions
truly exist. (Ancient African cultures worked out all these variations—except for atheism—starting
nearly 5,000 years ago. Philosophy foreshadows the future in wondrous ways.)
REVOLUTIONS IN ETHICS
The revolutionary changes in our concepts of love or empathy are superbly self-evident. Our
ancestors for our first 200,000 years or so since our origin in Africa lived in small groups tightly
bonded by genes, language and culture.
Like our fellow intra-species killers, wolves and chimpanzees, our ancestors survived by defending
their territory against neighboring groups. They thrived by enlarging their groups through conquest of
territory, often killing or enslaving all neighboring males, children and sometimes women in the
process.
The first ethical revolution was the conviction that we need not kill strangers. In fact, taking strangers
into our tightly knit groups actually strengthens our groups because of increased genetic, linguistic
and cultural variation. (Visiting a remote mountain village in Papua New Guinea years ago, I waited on
my bus for half an hour while the villagers decided whether to welcome a stranger. In older times the
process could have taken a week.)
The second revolution in ethics was the conviction that all humans, regardless of their biological or
cultural differences, constitute a single group.
The third revolution is the conviction that the binding force of a single universal human group must be
a single philosophical principle. The global success of Christianity and Marxism must be due in part to
their binding principles of universal, unconditional love and freedom. (It is ironic that libertarians and
Marxists have the same absolute goal. Marxists are much more aggressive than libertarians. They
favor not simply the limitation of state power, but the very abolition of the state.)
The fourth revolution is seen most clearly in the experience of “two warring souls,” W.E.B. Du Bois’s
characterization of African American double consciousness. The founder of my philosophy department
at Howard, Alain Locke, puts it best: the binding force of global communities should be the very fact of
their cultural differences.
Our survival depends on genetic and cultural variation.
These revolutions in ethics cycle through four principal phases. Egocentrism is the conviction that I
and the family members that make my existence possible must be the primary focus of all my ethical
decisions. Egocentrism demands self-sacrifice (including death) only for the sake of those most
intimate with myself.
Ethnocentrism expands beyond the self to admit all members of my genetic, linguistic and cultural
groups. The survival of my group commands the sacrifice of my own life for the sake of the group.
Anthropocentrism expands beyond the ethnic or political group to include all humans. Witness the UN
Declarations of Universal Rights.
Finally, acentrism abandons the idea that ethics must be grounded in core human values. Rather
ethics takes its rise from the very structure of the universe. Just as our genes are a gift from the
universe, so our ethics are a gift of our genes. Variation in ethical behavior is a function of variation in
physical and cultural environments.
Contemporary cutting-edge ethics stress the moral standing of living organisms other than humans
(biocentrism) and the moral standing of the earth’s inorganic features (ecocentrism). Ethical
acentrists like Peter Singer argue that animals are sentient beings. Under the guidance of President
Evo Morales, Bolivian representatives to the United Nations are now lobbying for a fourth UN
declaration of rights for Pachamama, the earth mother that has given birth to all life.
The concept of fairness evolves dramatically over time. Was it fair for Aristotle to claim that women
can’t be rational? Was enslaving Africans fair? Is the U.S. criminal injustice system fair to African
Americans? Is the African American male school drop-out rate in inner cities fair? Was killing newborn
children because of their gender or genetic differences fair?
Dramatic, sometimes violent contestations probe the concept of fairness as I write. Is contraception
fair? Abortion? Capital punishment? Is killing animals for our gustatory or aesthetic pleasure fair?
Revolutions in ethics turn commonly accepted practices into acts of extreme barbarism.
Sadly, our mastery of technology, not our glowingly good human nature, creates these revolutions.
As Aristotle said, slavery (chattel slavery only, not wage slavery) will disappear when mechanical
devices can perform slave labor. A burgeoning empathy made possible by technology drives what
Stephen Pinker calls The Better Angels of Our Nature.
To simplify my conclusion, revolutions in ethics and morals take place because groups that can
increase their (1) numbers, (2) their bonding principles and (3) the excellence of all their members
stand a better chance of surviving and thriving than their competitors.
Humans realized this principle implicitly some 2500 years ago in the ethics of ancient Egyptians and
Ethiopians, Buddhists and Hindus, Greeks and Semites to name just a few cultures.
FAIRNESS AND TAX POLICY
To bring this 50,000 foot, stratospheric view down to earth, what are the practical consequences of
revolutions in ethics for fairness in tax theory? I should leave that to my colleagues who are
professionals in the devilish art of tax theory. However, I can’t resist indulging myself in the
philosopher’s avocation—telling other people how to run their business!
Edward O. Wilson summarizes his latest research in The Social Conquest of Earth. As the founder of
sociobiology, he used to believe that individual fitness was the engine of evolution. He now believes
he was wrong. Altruism in his early view was a function of genetic payback. I would give up my life
provided only my sacrifice would assist the continuity of my intimate gene pool.
Wilson now argues that humans have evolved what is called eusociality or the condition where group
members tightly bonded through multiple generations are inclined to perform altruistic acts.
Eusociality has evolved rarely in the biological record, but eusocial species are extremely successful.
Witness the human population moving from a mere handful to over 7 billion strong in around 200,000
years.
The tension between self-interest and group-interest does not disappear with the evolution of
eusociality: “Individual selection…shapes instincts in each member that are fundamentally selfish….
Group selection shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another (but not
toward members of other groups). Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin,
while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue.” (Imagine! Republicans as sinners!
Democrats as saints!)
Political policy is the perfect expression of the tension between self and group interest. A political
policy that increases the size of a group (even through immigration policy reform) consonant with
social justice and sustainability enhances the group’s fitness. A policy that strengthens the binding
forces among group members does the same. And a policy that enhances the excellence or well-being
of each of its members increases its competitive edge.
Tax policy is the anvil on which self and group interests are hammered together. In the short run, a
preponderance of freedom defined as self-interest satisfies our instincts for personal survival. But in
the long run, a preponderance of freedom defined as group interest confers better chances of survival
and flourishing.
The human capacity for empathy will dictate the fate of the earth (absent Apophis, the large meteor
named after the Egyptian god of chaos, impacting the earth…). Do enough of us care enough about
the lives of our children to sacrifice some part of our freedom for their future? The Preamble of the
U.S. Constitution reminds us that the purpose of our “more perfect Union” is to “secure the Blessings
of Liberty” not simply for ourselves but for “our Posterity.” (Perhaps climate change deniers ought to
pay more attention to the Constitution.)
Tax policy that promotes the interest of the few (the top 1 %!) rallies around street protest cries:
“What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!” Tax policy that promotes the interest of
every member of the group offers a much enhanced freedom—but only on a far horizon.
Freedom rests upon commitment. Every commitment entails a sacrifice of freedom. But the right kind
of commitment is our only guarantee of a massively enlarged freedom.
Roosevelt talked about the four freedoms. Freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want
and fear. A tax policy committed to survival and thriving grounds itself in the four pillars of freedom:
universal health care, universal education (even, in the eyes of W.E.B. Du Bois and Fidel Castro,
through university levels), equitable and sustainable economic (not excluding taxation!) and political
systems.
These pillars are moral absolutes for any nation dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That is not a matter of divine command, as our Declaration of Independence suggests. Neither is it a
matter of debatable political philosophies on the side of libertarians or communists, Republicans or
Democrats. These pillars are simple facts of life, amply demonstrated in hundreds of thousands of
years of human cultural evolution.