Many of us have said, or heard, that something is “not fair” at one time or another. In childhood, it could have taken the form of telling our mother this when she wanted us to go to bed. When we were older, it could have been uttered when we realized that we had a flat tire while headed to an important meeting. Or, we could have agreed with a close friend that their supervisor had not treated them fair in passing them over for promotion. Regardless of when we heard, or spoke it, we were probably certain about what we believed to be true. Fair is deeply personal to most of us.
What is fair? Is it simply treating everyone the same? Or, is it defined by faith, understood through philosophy, or learned by comparing it to past experience, or by watching it on a screen? Economists will tell you that fair is but one of several means to justify the allocation of, always finite, resources. HR professionals might say it involves applying policies without regard to anything but employee performance and/or perhaps longevity. When I was little, I thought fair was what Stan Lee wrote about and his characters, superheroes of course, staunchly defended every month. Growing up in the United States students are taught in school that the country was founded, at least in part, because the colonists felt they were not taxed in a fair way. Fair is many things.
Is what I consider fair about something the same as what you believe? Do your friends, family, or even frenemies, if you have any, use the same standards to measure what they believe to be fair as you do? Is fair the same in other regions or foreign countries? If intelligent life exists outside of the earth, what is fair to them? If you stop and think about it, really think about it, fair is complicated!
Another interesting thing about fair, is that when we focus on it the discourse is mostly about a lack of it rather than an overabundance of it. I mean how many times have you heard someone, anyone, opine that something was really very fair! Granted it does happen, but those conversations, or comments, are more the exception than the rule. Why is that? If fair is so important, as it appears to be, why do we not pay more attention to it when it is present? Is what we believe to be fair so fundamental to us that, like air or water, it is simply taken for granted generally, but felt deeply the instant we perceive it to be lost?
Funny thing is, for a word that most of us are very familiar with, many of us would be hard pressed to define fair in a way that others would readily agree with, though we can spot it in an instant when we see it! Also, regardless of your definition, many people would probably agree that the world is not filled with nearly as many examples of fair as most of us would like. Friendships have been soured, fortunes lost, needless lives taken, and countries throughout history have, and continue, to go to war over disagreements concerning what is considered fair. All of this, over a deceptively simple word that really has no universally agreed upon definition…
When we talk about what is fair, the conversations are sometimes loud, can be emotionally charged, and, as mentioned above, may result in disagreements with negative outcomes for one or more parties. The disagreements can involve anything from how observations of details are perceived to questions about how others would feel if they were on the receiving end of a situation, or decision, that is not fair. Regardless, conversations about what is fair are often not pleasant to have, though certainly necessary, at times, if we are to be true to ourselves and what we each understand to be right!
Given the importance of what we believe to be fair, and the obvious impact that it has on our lives, both positive and negative, I find it truly odd that these aspects of it have not received more widespread attention. Granted conversations about it do happen, mostly in college ethics courses, and I have no doubt that it is written about in low circulation scholarly journals, but those are limited in scope and appear to do little to add to the greater conversation and understanding. I wonder; is that truly fair?
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