If life was 100% fair...

[Mr Rayon]

If life was 100% fair would it make this world a better place?

 

In what ways would attaining fairness be desirable and in what ways would it not?

[Marat]

Since there are fundamental disagreements about what constitutes fairness, it seems impossible that life could ever be 100% objectively fair in such a way that we could all agree and recognize it as such. Thus today, while some people feel strongly that everyone should be treated equally in all competitions, others feel just as strongly that there should be affirmative action compensations to adjust rewards given in some competitions for some kinds of disadvantages. So if the world were designed to achieve either of these inconsistent alternatives, it would still seem ethically arbitary to some people.

 

Another problem is that we would then have a world which would be governed by ethical rather than by physical laws, in contrast to the world in which we now live, where events occur according to physical laws to which we then apply ethical interpretations which are themselves often refuted by actual events. You often hear on the same day the story of two buses travelling in southern France, one taking nuns to a religious shrine, the other taking gamblers to Monaco, and the nuns' bus crashes but not the gamblers.' But if the universe obeyed moral rather than physical laws so that everything was fair or ethical, then our science and our world would be radically different, and in essence the natural science of predicting events would be moral science. A rocket obeying Newtonian principles would crash if its inventer didn't deserve a successful flight, while a rocket designed to follow the rules of Aristotelian physics would be successful if its inventer deserved a success. But how could we know the true moral desert of every person? Our inability to measure this, in contrast to the way physical reality can now be measured, would mean we would have no science.

 

We would have something like medieval law, where people proved their cases in court by a 'wager of God,' where they would stake the justice of their assertion on their ability to perform some task better than their opponent, and it was seriously expected by the judicial system that God would intervene to produce the fair result, rather than that physical laws would decide the issue.

 

Since morality and physics would always coincide in their results, we would simply lose the distinction between them and become unethical, since 'morally fair' and 'a valid prediction of what is about to happen' would be equivalent concepts.

Edited June 30, 2011 by Marat

[Moontanman]

We would have something like medieval law, where people proved their cases in court by a 'wager of God,' where they would stake the justice of their assertion on their ability to perform some task better than their opponent, and it was seriously expected by the judicial system that God would intervene to produce the fair result, rather than that physical laws would decide the issue.

 

Marat, do you have a link to the source of this, i am interested in knowing more.

[Ringer]

I've heard a similar thing except I thought it was usually a dual and not really a wager. If one side won it was because the gods or God was on their side and were justified. I think the name was trial by combat

[imatfaal]

Trial by Ordeal was a regular and prescribed method of determination of guilt - wukipedia has a nice introduction to it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_ordeal

 

A lot of the actual law of the medieval europe are available on line (in both fascimile and transcipted form) - I can dig out my list of sources if you want to have a read.

[Marat]

Even in Ancient Roman law they had an institution in which opponents in a law suit would challenge each other to a 'proof' of what they were each asserting by each person saying, "May the gods strike me dead if I am lying." Interestingly, this procedure was rarely elected, since people were so superstitious that they did not even want to tempt fate if they knew they were right, since they might be mistaken in their understanding of the truth compared to what the gods would think was true. Still, if one person in a civil suit was willing to take that oath and tempt the gods to destroy him if he were lying, but the opponent did not swear that oath, then the person swearing the oath would autonmatically win the case.

 

Some of the ordeals used in medieval law to let God manifest his choice between opposing parties in a law suit were: having both parties reach into a bucket of boiling water to find and lift out a ring; having both parties hold a searing hot knife in their hands to see on whose hand the resulting wound healed less well; throwing an accused criminal in the water to see if the water would 'receive' him by allowing him to sink -- if he did sink he was innocent, since nature had not found him too revoltingly criminal to swallow up; if he didn't sink but floated, nature had rejected him as too evil so he was guilty.

 

If you truly assume that God is the master of the physical universe, the cooperation of the universe with his divine order and sense of values should be expected, so not only should these ordeals show who was guilty or innocent, but also miracles should routinely manifest to show God's approval or disapproval of what was happening. It is odd that today believers no longer expect that a God who is materially real and controls the material universe should somehow be so detached from it that miracles no longer happen.