On The Nature Of Fairness

The world isn’t fair and neither is nature. People are born with varying genetic combinations, talents, intelligence, looks, ranges of opportunities, and so forth, and yet a sense of fairness is usually developed in childhood by the age of about six or seven. Having developed a sense of fairness, it’s not hard to see why we’d keep passing that on to our children, generation to generation, and fairness would be a common value in humanity.

But I wonder where the sense of fairness first came from in human evolution. I can see why, in the inceptive stages of learning, it would be beneficial to adopt a sense of fairness in order to begin to thrive through mutual cooperation. But there is little that is egalitarian about nature, so it’s not obvious where the idea of fairness even came from.

All things considered, I think our concept of fairness has a twofold, proximal and distal cause. The primary cause is that we are created in God’s image, and we are reflecting God’s sense of justice in our very being. And I think the proximal cause is part of an evolved, learned phenomenon emanating from our hunter-gatherer era, where concepts related to fairness were developed in relation to trade and cooperation. Cooperation increases the likelihood of survival and advancement for the group, so it would have positive reinforcements, and the opposite would be true for uncooperative behaviour.

Further, the development of language helped us crystallise this concept of fairness into a more refined consensus, and our conscience helps direct us towards it. And given that we are all evolutionarily related, it is to be expected that crude notions of fairness are to be found in many of the sentient species too (especially other primates), just not at our level of sophistication.