American Want Fairness

Fairness is a big cultural value of Americans. It is one of the foundational assumptions between our idea of justice. Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind shows how for individualist westerners the basis for our assumptions about justice are the two concepts of fairness and harm. We imagine morality is defined as seeking our fairness for individuals and that individuals are not harmed.

For many Americans fairness trumps other controlling concepts. One example of this is the idea of cultural relativism. In order to be fair and avoid harm we must respect the cultures of others. The prime directive of modern anthropology is to study the culture of the group they are examining, not to judge or to change it. Western missionaries have been regularly criticized for colonial cultural imposition that has happened in their attempts at proselytizing people of other cultures.

It is also true, however that westerners who embrace cultural relativism will attempt to impose their ideas of justice upon other cultures for the sake of fairness. There is a lot of attention today on laws in much of the world against LGBTQ concerns and equal rights for women. In this article an anthropologist processes the dilemma and basically decides that when justice issues as she construes them are in conflict with the prime director of her academic discipline she will pitch the prime directive and attempt to impose her ideas of justice upon her subject culture. Colonialism, apparently, is not as dead in us as we wished to imagine.

God Cannot Be Found or Agreed Upon

Many atheist and agnostic friends of mine repeated point to the obvious in defense of their resistance to belief in a god. No god can be found? We don’t find him/her living anywhere on the planet. We didn’t see god when we were able to go into orbit or go to the moon. We can’t see heaven in our telescopes. If we demand that this god show himself he don’t accommodate in a way that would demonstrate to the world that he exists. Like sasquatch this god is a no show. Why should we believe in such a being and why should we let what people say about this being dictate so much of life, which is what religions do.

They also quite rightly note that their skepticism about such a being or our need to let this being dictate our behavior or society is fueled by the pluralism surrounding religions. Religious people all over the world can’t seem to agree on what kind of being this is, what he/she/it demands if anything. Given the obvious inability of religious people to agree upon god or transcendence why should any of this be given public weight or respect at all?

Many will assert that god is a made up concept, fabricated by human minds and societies to bring comfort, power and order.

Fairness is as Fictitious as God

If we compare these complaints against God we might see that they in fact also apply to fairness.

Science cannot find fairness. You cannot find fairness living on the planet, or located up in space. There is very little, in fact, in nature that exhibits fairness. The fairest thing about nature, in fact, seems to be death. All living things die and all states of being seem to come to an end.

Ideas of fairness also seem to culturally relative. Ideas about what is fair seem as cultural relative as any other. The caste system in Indian culture hardly seemed fair. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the status of one’s birth should dictate the condition of your life. Even in our own culture we have a matrix of laws and assumptions that to a space alien might seem enormously unfair. We eat plants and animals that are related to us as living things. Things like passport and papers dictate who lives and who dies in this world. If you have insurance bought by paper you can receive medical care. If you have one kind of passport rather than another your quality of life and life expectancy varies enormously. Who your parents are dictates much of how you are treated. Our system of fairness seems enormously relative.

Fairness, from an evolutionary sociological perspective seem no different from religion in terms of a socially constructed system that we have created to achieve certain goals in order to thrive and survive as a species. Nature cares not a bit for this concept of fairness that we carry around with us in our highly evolved brains. You might just as well being in a sky god, the tooth fairy or Santa Claus as believe in the mighty idea of “fairness”.

Again we see Nietzsche as being one of the most perceptive of all atheist philosophers. All “oughts” are convenient human fabrications created by people to advance their own interests. All that remains is “can”.  That must be true if the atheists are right about god and right about what and who we are.