029 - Fairness and Equality

Fairness and equality are two popular, but often opposing concepts, and one of the rare cases where two such concepts are viewed as both being positive by a majority of people. The question of when and how to favor one over the other is critical to ethics.

Unfortunately, that question is often answered with an emotional response, as these are emotionally charged and polarizing concepts. This is ironically a recipe for cognitive bias, the enemy of both concepts. For any system to be ethical, or even minimally biased, the question must be answered logically, with a far more rigorous and consistent method than emotions offer.

Equality as a concept is baked into society at many levels and across history, from the concept of "Human Rights" and "all people being created equal" as it was famously put, back to the first traces of democracy in ancient Athens, and perhaps before. Even some species of birds and chimpanzees have demonstrated a strong compulsion favoring equality, expecting to be rewarded equally for the same efforts, and protesting if they are not.

The critical factor for Equality is that people are rewarded equally for their efforts, and the domain where this takes priority is when they have the ability to choose. Thus, Equality is a constant factor, as it applies to all equally.

Fairness as a concept acts as a sort of balancing factor for equality, compensating for circumstances where one or more parties don't have the same choices or capacities available to them. Someone in a wheelchair may need a wheelchair ramp just to get in the door, and someone on the Autism spectrum produces less natural melatonin than their peers, requiring supplements to get the same healthy sleep quality. These circumstances disrupt an individual's ability to choose and/or function normally, by placing hard limitations on them that don't impact others equally.

The critical factor for Fairness is that people are given the same spectrum of choices as those without limiting factors, to whatever degree is feasible at any given point in time. Thus, Fairness is a moving target, as it migrates with changing feasibility.

Many factors negatively impacting a minority of the population and causing unfair circumstances, like various handicaps and rare diseases, could be treated and/or cured with gene therapies. Cognitive Biases have driven strong emotional and irrational aversion to progress in that domain, very directly promoting unfairness and deeply unethical behavior.

Consequently, meaningful progress in Equality and Fairness requires applying methods of reducing the impact of cognitive biases on humanity's decision-making processes. Half-baked solutions in this domain often cause as much harm as they resolve, if not more, because they present the illusion of progress while shifting the damage caused by a process into new unknown, and unevenly diluted states.

Systems to detect cognitive biases that apply collective intelligence to reduce their impact on decision-making have been developed. Once they are deployed, humanity may be much better equipped to integrate the concepts of Fairness and Equality.

*Side Note: Someone has been "revising" ancient Greek history at a rate that raises some red flags. Take anything you read about the subject today that wasn't pulled from the Internet Archive's records with a big grain of salt.