Letter 26

“Life isn't fair, and you'd better get used to it!”

As a child, I heard this pretty much daily, as parents, teachers and other bullies tried to force me to accept the idea that fairness really doesn't matter. The power to hurt is the only thing that matters, and it needs no justification in “fairness.”

Oh, you didn't realize that was the lesson being taught?

What other lesson could there be? If fairness doesn't matter, because “life isn't fair,” and then what does matter? The answer, of course, is power.

When I heard, and so frequently hear, “Life isn't fair!” as a justification for the speaker behaving unfairly toward their victims, it seems to me that yes, life isn't fair, because people like them make it so.

The problem here is one that was pointed out by David Hume in his “A Treatise of Human Nature, (1739).” that has been called the “Is/Ought Problem.” I'll spare you Hume's prose, but the basic idea is that you can't rationally go from an “is” statement to an “ought” statement. That is to say, you can't say that something should be a certain way just because it is, or has been that way.

To apply this to our problem, there's quite a bit of difference between:

“Life is unfair,” and;

“Life ought to be unfair.”

When I hear “Life is not fair,” I tend to think, “Why not?” and “What can we do to make it fairer?” I don't know why would should accept the status quo as inherently justified.

“Life isn't fair!” Fine. What are we going to do about that?