Fairness

I’ve been thinking about this concept of fairness.

This question came to me in the most trivial way. Each morning as I wait for the bus into work there is a small depredation if this question of what is fair as people show up to wait. There isn’t a formal line to establish order for who gets onto the bus first. But there is a sense of the order based on this lose idea of who has been waiting the longest. This unordered order is the only thing keeping our little space of society together. When this system is violated by someone that cuts through this unstructured line you can see the collective sense of unfairness on the faces of my fellow commuters. There is of course a set of understood exceptions. Older people are expected to get on first. You see this whole unwritten system is all about limited resources. There are a limited number of seats. And this limit is not known to us as we wait. If we all knew that the bus was close to empty then the implied order would be unnecessary. Since the bus is so full there is a chance, based on where you are in line, that you may not be able to get on let alone have a seat.

Of course our sense of fairness is not limited to public transportation. It shows up in many parts of our days. And if you have children, especially more than one, the topic of what is fair will be a continual discussion. We humans not only have this need not only to feel that we are receiving our fair share but that others are not getting more than us. There was a study that asked people if they would take an amount of money, and they were given an option where they would get even more money if they would give a higher percentage to someone else. And most people would take the lower amount for themselves rather than allow the situation where the other person got more than them. Our mind plays tricks on us this way. We are not rational actors.

Taking fairness into account as we think about these little interactions in the grand scheme of this limited life we have something to consider how much we are going to let this stress us out.