Common barriers to striving for a fair/just world

Here I will go into three issues that represent barriers towards creating a fairer/more just society.

1.  Rewarding people according to how much they self-sacrifice, rather than how much they benefit others.

This is nothing new- it has been around since the days of humans and animals being sacrificed for the "benefit" of some greater power, typically a god or goddess.  What it means is that people are rewarded primarily for making their own lives worse, rather than for helping to make others' lives better.

For example, in industry it is normal for employees to be rewarded and judged primarily according to how much of their time they set aside for work, rather than the quality, quantity and value of their output, even in jobs where, above a certain point, there is no need to have regimented "office hours".  Mothers are more likely to be highly-regarded for making heavy sacrifices to their careers, interests and friendships for the sake of putting family/children first, than for putting a lot of effort into making their children happy.  When we have conflicting priorities A and B, and B is more important than A, we are often more highly-regarded if we sacrifice A, than if we find an effective method of fully addressing both A and B.

Sometimes self-sacrifice can be correlated with making others' lives happier, but the emphasis is wrong- the healthiest approach is to emphasise rewarding people for the extent of their positive contributions towards others.

2.  Aiming for equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity

Yes, it can be annoying when certain people seem to get more than they deserve, but I would argue that, if it isn't at anyone else's expense, it's not necessarily a bad thing, for although it results in inequalities, it adds to the collective well-being of society.  It is people getting less than they deserve that is by far the bigger problem.

It is hard, and sometimes impossible, to achieve equality of outcome without bringing everybody down to the lowest common denominator ("If some can't have it, why should anybody?").  In particular, different people have different strengths and weaknesses, so it is not possible to make everybody a "winner" in any one subject area.  The most effective way to get as near as we can to a society of "winners" is rather to help give everybody the opportunity to make the most of their individual strengths.

One example of such a failed "equality of outcome" policy was New Labour's drive in the UK to get everybody into university, which has resulted in a significant devaluing of university degrees (as university used to be primarily the domain of people who are strong at academic subjects, and we had to introduce vocational-oriented degrees to enable the less academically proficient to get into university).  The government has then struggled to find funds for the spiralling numbers of university students, resulting in tuition fees rising to £9,000 per year.  Far from making it "fair", this policy has ended up grossly unfair on the people who struggle with being burdened with large debts, and the strong academics who were always destined to get into university but now have to deal with much larger student debts and a devaluing of their degrees because of a failed government policy.

3.  "Nice guys finish last"

As I hope I've established above, a "fair" society (or the nearest we can get) should have winners and losers- in an ideal world, we should all get the opportunity to make the most of our strengths, with the winners being those who make best use of their strengths, and the losers being those who don't bother.

But in the real world, the "winners" are often the people who know how to bend rules to their advantage and bully others into submission without infringing on any higher authorities' rules, while the "losers" are the ones that they trample on. 

I've often read that in relationships, "nice guys finish last" in the sense that women tend to want "nice guys" as platonic friends rather than as boyfriends, which makes it harder for "nice guys" to find partners.  I think there may be some truth in this, but I associate the concept more with the sort of "nice guy" who respects women's desire to be friends with him, and then pays for it when a gang of bullies destroy his reputation by circulating rumours that he secretly wants to have sex with them and the masses believe the rumours.  

This is something that needs addressing because it encourages people to try to become "winners" by bullying people rather than being nice to them.

Political implications

I suggest that many "socialist" ideologies fall down because they encourage a significant element of point 2, while many "capitalist" ideologies allow the problem outlined in point 3 to persist without opposition, while point 1 is a recurring problem across most political ideologies.  Food for thought perhaps.

Thoughts on justice, fairness and equality

Some thoughts on "fairness"

"Unfairness" generally refers to the sense of people getting more or less than they deserve.  And indeed, life isn't fair, and a certain amount of unfairness is unavoidable, e.g. some events have a large element of unavoidable random chance, which will result in more favourable outcomes for some than for others.  Sometimes, "fairness" can also be a complex issue, where depending on how one perceives justice, trying to be "fair" in one way can end up being "unfair" in other ways.

But we have a common problem where many people use "Life isn't fair" as an excuse to justify being awful to each other.  Or, being awful to each other with the aim of "teaching" them to realise that life isn't fair.  Or, justifying keeping unjust rules and double standards in place- if the rules are unfair, tough, life isn't fair.  The mentality is, "Life will never be fair, so therefore it isn't worth trying to make it any better than it already is."  There is a mentality that "looking on the bright side of life" is about trivializing injustices, not letting them get to you, and being thankful for the good things that you have, but the downside of that way of thinking is that we become reluctant to support positive change, preferring to make do with less.

No, the fact that life is unfair should be a wake-up call.  There are always going to be unavoidable situations where we get less than we deserve, so why add to the problem by actively creating avoidable ones, and hiding behind "Life isn't fair" to justify keeping them in place?  We don't need to create injustices of our own to teach people that life is unfair- there are enough unavoidable injustices in life to refer to as examples of why we have to accept that life is unfair.  Positive thinking should be about striving to make life as "fair" as we can reasonably make it, creating as many positives as we can to offset the inevitable challenges that life is going to throw at us, and focusing on those positives.

The key part of my manifesto on justice is the following argument:

People should generally be rewarded according to the extent to which they contribute positively to society, the effort that they put in, and the extent of their positive intentions.

Not only does this ensure that people who make positive contributions are rewarded the most, it also provides people with a strong incentive to contribute positively, because if you do, chances are, it will pay off and you will get positive recognition and rewards for it.