Prologue

Fairness has been one of the eternal topics throughout human history, and it is a simple but most confusing concept to most people as well. Fairness operates at every level of social activity, from the trivial daily activities of individuals to serious international events, and thus we could feel its influence in every aspect of human social life. Without fairness we cannot talk about freedom because in a socially interactive world, the freedom of one person may come at the cost of the freedom of another; without fairness we cannot talk about democracy since democratic practice in principle should be a fair representation of public interests; without fairness no rewarding and punishment system would work properly; without fairness we cannot talk about team-work since team-work is dependent upon fair utilization of talents and mutual respect between team members; without fairness there would be no meaningful politics or governing practices since, at least, among politicians and those in the governing class fairness would be demanded throughout daily events; without fairness trading and business transactions would be meaningless; without fairness we even cannot have basic interpersonal trust, and thus any social community would cease to function properly.

The world in which we are living is a complicated multi-layer dynamic system. The lowest layer is the physical world, and on top of the physical world is our social world constructed, which itself is another complicated multi-layer dynamic system. The lowest layer of the social world is a network of people connected by human languages, and on top of this layer is the cultural system constructed (within this cultural system are the economic system, political system, educational system, and many other systems, along with all the cultural artifacts accumulated throughout the history), and fairness is one of the fundamental elements of this cultural system. By studying the dynamic feature of fairness, we could acquire a better understanding of the mechanism by which the cultural system functions. In fact, Intellectual quest on fairness could be traced back to ancient Greek times. Countless works on the topic could be found from library. However, the main stream understanding on fairness is still quite rudimentary. Many basic features of fairness still need to be unveiled, so does the dynamic impact of fairness on socio-eco systems.

Fairness is a duality of objectiveness and subjectiveness. Under many particular circumstances we could find out or agree upon objective standards of fairness, while the judgment on what is fair and what is not fair is always a subjective process. Historically the main interest of the quest on fairness has been focused on searching for its objective foundation; however, the subjectiveness of fairness might play a much more profound role in our civilization, which is the main subject of this book.

Very often when we talk about fairness we might refer to social equity. This intrinsic relationship between fairness and equity has been a philosophical topic for thousands of years, but the relationship between fairness and inequity is still not very well aware of among most people. In this book I would not only review the relationship between fairness and equity, but also discuss how fairness could create and maintain social inequity. Other issues covered in this book would include how to identify falsified fairness as a part of evil devices, how to understand the process of social selection, how to balance current welfare and future prosperity, and why the study of fairness is important, and more.

This book would be organized into following chapters:

Chapter 1: The Meaning of Fairness. This chapter would provide an in depth analysis of the nature of fairness, including the objective and subjective natures of fairness.

Chapter 2: Fair Games. This chapter would demonstrate, by analysis of games, some basic characteristics of how fairness functions.

Chapter 3: Fair Choice. This chapter would examine the effect of fairness from a more fundamental point of view of personal choice, and would discuss how this personal choice for fairness would influence the process of social selection.

Chapter 4: Entropy of Fairness. This chapter would discuss an important social dynamics driven by fairness.

Chapter 5: Social Justice. This chapter would discuss the relationship between justice and fairness.

Chapter 6: Fighting against Cheating. This chapter would provide some insight into the tricky relationship between cheating and fairness, and would discuss how to fight against cheating.

Chapter 7: Fair Trading. This chapter would provide some analysis on the significance of fairness in socio-eco system.

Chapter 8: Fairness for the Future. This chapter would discuss the philosophy about the subtle relationship between current welfare and future prosperity, based on the understanding of fairness, including how to view and handle risks in our life.

Chapter 9: Original Denial of Fairness. This chapter would discuss some general denial of fairness and its impact on human life.

In the final closing epilogue of this book, I would summarize the ideas presented in this book, and would also review some of my personal experience in writing this book and in my own philosophical life as well.

Over the past several decades people have been confused about how to name this contemporary historical time. With different ideas in mind, people have been using “modern”, “postmodern”, “postmodernist”, or “postmodernity” to name this historical era we are living through. The reason that contemporary people are feeling compelled to give a special name to this era is not because they are too much proud of it, but because they have witnessed very distinguishing characteristics in today’s global culture compared to several decades ago. However, what most people have not been aware of, or have been reluctant to pay attention to is the philosophical challenge this so called postmodern time has brought us to face to. Unlike any of our precedent times in history, all the driving forces behind human civilization have moved us to a time of philosophically second order logic, which means superficial straight common sense way of thinking would not be enough to meet our daily social life challenge.

Originated from ancient Greece, the western philosophical thinking has always been characterized as starting from some basic concepts with clear meanings, and then by applying some logic reasoning reaching the final conclusion. This typical western way of thinking has very successfully led our civilization to the great scientific achievement and economic productivity. However, after we entered the postmodern era, people started to realize that the so called basic concepts might not be so pure and independent as we might have thought before. The meanings of those basic concepts normally mingle with the use of languages, which could evolve as time goes by. As a result, we might not be able to give a clear definition to some word that is widely used as a basic concept in many contexts. Fairness is a typical case of this situation. After thousands of years of using fairness in everyday vocabulary, we would find that giving a general definition of fairness could be a difficult work. For example, one dictionary definition of fairness is “conformity with rules or standards”, but we might find that in real life this is not always agreeable because the explanations of and the processes of applying the rules and standards are not always fair and also because from time to time the fairness of the rules and standards themselves could be questionable.

The above mentioned defect in our philosophical thinking system might sound quite trivial previously. But the broader awareness of equal rights of all people among all nations, the rapid growth of educated population, the burst of information technology, and the economic globalization have all elevated human cultural sensitivity to a new level. Ambiguity in formerly considered clear concepts might lead to lack of harmony when cooperation between people of broad range of cultural background is warranted. Meanwhile, the development of human civilization, especially in postmodern sciences, has enabled us to look more deeply into the relational mapping between our conceptual perceptions and our cultural practices, and thus we might acquire some more profound understanding of the dynamics in our cultural system from bottom up. This brings a great challenge to us: how should we re-organize our philosophical thinking system so that we could have a fundamentally consistent cultural system for human civilization by and large, which requires a methodological breakthrough at the high end philosophy side so that it could then be brought to our low end everyday life practices.

Just like at the turn of last century when we were facing the need to look into the natural world in a mathematically nonlinear way, this time we have to look into the social life we are living through day by day in a philosophically non-trivial way. The approach employed to study the nature and the dynamics of fairness in this book provides an example of how social analysis might be done in this new philosophical era. Hope this book would bring some enjoyable reading time to philosophy-loving readers.