Issues with Using the words Fairness and Unfairness
Ideas on how to rethink "fairness":
Potential new phrases as replacement for the word "fairness":
- A strong COMMONS - Too much control by too few people
Terra:I think we should rethink using the word fairness, so as to think of the concept of A STRONG "commons" instead, and/or shift society away from "too much to private control of too few people". I don't want to scare people who are afraid of sustainability...because they seem, in my research, to fear people taking their money, property, whatever, in the name of "fairness". Their concept of fair is that if they "work harder" (in their definition), then they own more stuff. Perhaps use teh word facilitating? encouraging fairness in all of its forms? Critics are all over the concept of "periodic wealth redistribution". I think that we should embrace that, and make references to age old texts, like the Old Testament, which encourage humans to redistribute wealth every 50 years. I think I could get the Southern Baptists to go along with that. I have connections to national level disaster relief managers in Christian networks who seem attune to the need for redistribution. It's just a matter of "how" to do it...] [TF: this is to steer away from criticism that redistribution is about "oh, they just wnat to take your money away and give it to people who don't do any work".]
Joanna: Yes to a better word. But Green-Rainboe Party has been using the word "fairness" in the opposite sense. The Better Budget group spoke of an unfair MA budget because of who it benefitted.
BrianC: I've heard that even pre-verbal infants and non-human primates have strong allegiances to concepts of fairness, in that they/we will strongly object to divisions of goods they perceive as unfair, and will give up a lot to be fair with others when making choices. This allegiance to fairness is an opportunity for us in (re-)building society. We shouldn't throw it away until we've something better to negotiate agreement with. I support using fairness in our outreach; fairness is fundamental to us social beings - it's the basis of how we work together. To those who fear working with others because others may talk of fairness, one might ask, how else would we agree to work together? What other concept but fairness should, could guide our coming to agreement on how to work together? We need not only to embrace fairness, but define it, and explain to those who fear it that, for better or worse, there is no better way to forge a social union than to base it on fairness. Fairness is the root of civility.