The Idea of Fairness

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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“That’s not fair.” This, as every parent knows, is one of the earliest sentences a child learns and, ideally, it stays with us for the rest of our lives. A sense of justice or fair play, of right and wrong, is fundamental to human social life: without people acting fairly according to a consistent set of rules, a society won’t last, it must soon be brought down by its own contradictions. A standard definition of fairness is: “Impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination.” If that were applied rigidly, it would mean everybody on earth would have the same assets and facilities, the same rights, duties and opportunities, and all would be quiet and peaceful. Would that it were true, but it ain’t, never has been and, almost certainly, never will be: who would enforce equality, and who would watch over the enforcers? Straight away, that would seem to imply some unfairness in the power structure. So what’s fairness, and why are we so concerned about it?

First point is that although children seem to have some innate sense of fairness, it generally doesn’t survive intact to adulthood. Human societies have always been grossly inequitable, with the poor, if not actually enslaved, living precariously at the whim of their masters. In Calcutta, I’ve seen people, mostly young men from rural areas looking for work, who live on the pavements and own just the worn and dirty clothes they stood in, a few rags to keep warm at night and a couple of battered plastic containers for the food and water they may or may not get that day. Perhaps they have $1.00 in total value. On the other hand, Bro. Musk is now worth about $400billion and has just signed a contract that may give him $1trillion. Royals continue to live like kings (and behave like them) while the international 1% are doing everything they can to gouge more and more money from the 99% just so they can buy more yachts and politicians.

Everything seems to be heading in the direction of greater and greater inequality, and we all know where that ends. As the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions showed, the concept of fairness has real significance, but in order to forestall such mighty explosions of rage, it has to be agreed, codified and then enforced, better known as the law. Over centuries, the world’s states have built up hugely complex systems of laws. The US Tax Code, for example, is a portly 6,871 pages, with more added each year. For legal systems, the ideal is to satisfy the majority’s wishes while protecting the rights and interests of the minority, i.e. to treat citizens fairly, although there are plenty of states in which that isn’t true.

Law is a moral system, based on “This is what you ought to do,” meaning it makes no claim on being true. Truth and fairness occupy separate realms of discourse, which people often forget. They are, however, linked in that each realm consists of sets of beliefs, as in “I believe it is true that Antarctica is the driest continent,” and “I believe everybody should help keep national parks clean.” These aren’t quite the same but that’s good enough for discussion. In philosophy, sets of beliefs come under the heading of epistemology, usually defined as “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.” That sounds fairly high powered but it’s important in daily life, as people constantly mix up fact and opinion, or can’t tell the difference between truth and falsity – often with terrible consequences. Nazi race science, for example, was based on the idea that there is a hierarchy of races, with the superior Aryans destine to rule over the inferior others. This was accepted as scientific truth, completely beyond dispute, and led to the mass slaughters of different races in Europe. They did not see that it was in fact an opinion, just prejudice bolstered by poor quality science, but they weren’t alone. At the time, every member of the Western elite believed it. Similarly, the Imperial Japanese were totally convinced they were a superior race who were entitled to enslave the Chinese and anybody else they fancied. Beliefs count, and we need to understand them.

The philosopher, Donald Davidson (1917-2003), is widely regarded as one of the most influential American authors of the second half of the last century. His 1970 paper Mental Events [1], has been praised as “... arguably the most debated paper in twentieth century Philosophy of Mind...” I think that’s a bit over the top but we take the point. Unfortunately, his style was convoluted to the point of opacity, as even his friends and admirers admitted. He was very widely read, including Freudian psychoanalysis, but always came back to concepts of true belief: what is truth, how is it established, how does it relate to belief, etc? He firmly believed three things: that there are mental events; that some mental events can cause physical events and vice versa; but if so, there has to be a strict causal law relating them; but if there is such a law, then free will is impossible. Philosophy, he argued, has to reconcile these apparently contradictory facts.

His solution was what he called coherentism, that beliefs are rendered true just because they’re coherent or consistent with all the other beliefs that surround them. Each belief is joined to and justified by the beliefs that preceded it and those that follow it, rather like a string of sausages. He did not allow independent facts to get in the way: “… nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. Its partisan rejects as unintelligible the request for a ground or source of justification of another ilk.” [2, p141]. I see a lot of problems with this stance, like how do beliefs start, how do people end up with self-contradictory beliefs, and why do some people believe nonsense? However, his approach can’t be dismissed as I believe it provides a very good account of paranoid states, certainly better than the trite “chemical imbalance of the brain” trope [3]. It says that a paranoid person’s brain is normal, not defective in any way; that intelligent people can weave more complex and plausible paranoid systems that can then convince waverers; and, above all, that the paranoid state is self-reinforcing. Oh dear, does that mean we’ll all end up under the paranoid spell? Well, we already are, we all have to be a little bit paranoid to survive, but we have to learn how to keep it under control.

But back to the question of how beliefs start, in particular, how does the belief in fairness start? How do we get the notion itself? A lot of people would say it’s innate, an instinctual urge for justice, but that doesn’t survive its first brush with reality. Moreover, even quite small children are very good at telling when something isn’t fair – for them. They’re not good when the tables are turned. They have to be taught to be fair, to share and so on. When our daughter was barely three, I wanted her to share something: “Come on,” I reminded her, “sharing is caring.” “No!” she replied very firmly. “Sharing is screaming.” The little darlings have a much better sense when something is unfair for them than when they need to be fair to others. I suggest this relates to two of our fundamental drives, territoriality and the urge to be dominant.

Territoriality relates to places and things: This is my place, these are my things so nick off and don’t touch. That is, “In this place and over these things, I have total control; I am dominant and I will resist intrusions to the end.” Fairness becomes a matter of finding a balance that safeguards my wishes and reduces your need to try to take over my stuff. It’s an intellectual exercise but it’s intimately related to the sense of well-being that comes from having a secure area, and to the sense of outrage that boils up when that area is threatened in any way. All things lead back to the dominance drive, the urge to get to the top of the hierarchy in order to lord it over everybody else just because it feels so good. Coupled to that is the even stronger urge to resist being dominated and shoved down the hierarchy. The slave may smile and bob a bow and say “Yessir master, right away,” but inside, he isn’t smiling. He’s saying “One day, boss man, I’m gonna get you and then you’ll find out what it’s like to be crushed underfoot and humiliated.” That’s inevitable. While the desire to dominate is strong and people love to indulge it, the urge to resist is stronger and never wears off. Resistance to domination is absolutely predictable.

The child’s sense of fairness, then, is just the urge to resist being dominated in action. This much is intuitive: all animals have the same sense, i.e. show the same behavioral constellation. Its biological basis in the testosterone economy is well-known; it amounts to an inclination to act in a certain way but, unlike the need to breathe or eat, it’s not a fixed law. We can turn it on or off and, to a large extent, socialisation is just the process of learning when to be firm and decisive and when to be polite and yielding. Trouble is, we have largely built our societies around the concept of dominance hierarchies without understanding its significance. We are taught from infancy that competing is the natural order of things, winning is wonderful, everybody loves a winner, don’t be a loser and so on. Competition has been elevated to the level of a semi-divine moral imperative, quite forgetting that the very concept of winning drags in its wake the concept of losing. There can’t be winners without losers, and losers don’t like it, they get angry and want to retaliate. Resistance is totally predictable, a biologically-determined rule of nature. We ignore that rule at our peril but one clever way we ignore it is by turning it from a matter of DNA to a matter of morality.

Fairness says only this: Don’t try to be dominant all the time, let other people have a go otherwise they’ll get angry and hit back and then you could lose everything. On this bit of common sense we have built a vast superstructure of laws and rules intended to stop people taking more than they’re entitled to just because, without those rules, society will fracture and fall apart. Granted, the rules aren’t perfect, they often leave loopholes that clever lawyers hired by the wealthy can exploit or that governments can use to keep the population down but, ultimately, nature will prevail, it has to prevail. One fine day, the downtrodden will reach the point where they have nothing left to lose, and then the heads will roll. Are there any lessons in this for today’s world? What a dumb question.

The world today is in a state of intense instability. That we are surviving is a matter of luck, not because our “leaders” are doing a good job of keeping us on the road. For an explanation of the chaos, we could ask our leaders but we know what they’ll say: “It’s all those bad people. They hate us and they’re trying to bring us down.” GW Bush said this after the attack in New York. Addressing Congress, he said, apparently without bursting out laughing:

How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am -- like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.

If he wanted to know, he should have read Bin Laden’s letter to America, in which he set out his group’s complaints against rapacious western colonialism. In a few words, they hated the US because it tries to dominate everybody, everywhere, all the time, in every conceivable respect and to make the oppressed pay for the pleasure. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what its motives are, how much money the US says it gives away, whether Coke is the Real Thing or what, all that counts is that people don’t like being dominated and. They. Will. React. So simple. International politics in one sentence. What we see today is a number of countries who are sick of Washington’s attempts to dominate and control them and, to Uncle Sam’s great indignation, are pushing back. Even more embarrassing, they’re winning. We lesser mortals, whose opinions are never solicited, can only sit back and watch how it pans out. This time, though, it seems the US has bitten off far more than it can chew.

Meantime, the Middle East is on fire again. Still. Armed and paid by the US, Israel is back at its long term project of building Greater Israel in the heartland of the Arab-Muslim world. Even though they weren’t so open about it in the past, anybody with a few minutes to spare and a skeptical attitude has known of their plan to take control of a vast area, easily ten times the area allocated to them in the UN partition of plan of 1947. Turns out, according to Mr Netanyahu, it’s more like a hundred times bigger, and they want it free of all the usurpers and interlopers who have the effrontery to claim that because their people have been there for thousands of years, they have some sort of claim on the territory.

Greater Israel will include the whole of Lebanon, the southern half of Syria (including the Arabic city of Damascus), Iraq across to the Euphrates and down to the Gulf coast, all of Kuwait and the northern third of Saudi Arabia and its fertile Red Sea coast, the whole of the Sinai peninsula and the eastern half of Egypt across to the Nile. What will happen to its 100million indigenous inhabitants isn’t spelled out but it doesn’t sound promising. Just what 7million Israelis will do with it also isn’t clear but what is clear is that the indigenes are not going to take it lying down. We can put aside all historical claims and counterclaims, all mythical figures and religious texts, all practical issues about who can manage it better, all questions of whose side God or history or righteousness are on, because all that counts is that the locals will fight back. That’s genetic. To every act of oppression there is an opposite reaction for liberation, as Newton might have said. The Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto did it in 1943 and the Palestinians are doing it now. Of course they are, and if I were in either of their positions, so would I. The more you oppress people, the harder they will try to turn the tables.

There will be no peace in the world until humans stop trying to dominate each other. Unfortunately, a quick glance at our history as a species says this isn’t going to happen soon. Even Ötzi, the paleolithic man frozen in an Alpine glacier, died 5,000 years ago with somebody’s arrow buried in his back (more details of ancient human aggression in [4]). Also, an even quicker glance at our “leaders” shows that none of them has the wherewithal to make a determined stand against this madness. We can all live satisfying, comfortable, productive lives without having to grind our neighbours underfoot. In fact, if we stop wasting the $19trillion a year that militarism costs, we can all live very much better lives. Who knows, some of it may go to Mr Musk and he could live his fantasy of being a trillionaire. God alone knows why he would want to, there are far better things to do than count money, but whatever turns him on. As long as it doesn’t involve putting other people down, because they don’t like it, and they will inevitably resist.

References:

1. Davidson D (1970) Mental Events. Reprinted in Essays on Action and Events (2001). https://doi.org/10.1093/0199246270.003.0011

2. Davidson D. (1983) A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge Chap. 10 in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective: Philosophical Essays, Vol. 3. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198237537.001.0001

3. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

4. Spindler K (1994). The Man in the Ice. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.