Born Fair

Here's an interesting article about whether animals share a "human" sense of fairness. I say "human" because it's not clear if the people considered in the studies were from any particular culture or if this is really a universal. But it does make the point that you have to have a very careful experimental setup to determine in a monkey is really objecting to unfair treatment or not.

Imagine that there was no second monkey in the experiment, just one monkey and an experimenter with a bowl full of cucumbers and another full of grapes. If the monkey were given the cucumber as a reward in that case, she might also object to it — not because it was unfair, but just because the cucumber doesn’t seem very appealing once the monkey knows there are grapes to be had. The monkey who rejects cucumbers may be less like a political protester and more like a two-year-old swatting away a proffered apple slice when a well-stocked candy jar is in full view.

But hang on, surely giving a lesser reward when you could easily give a better one is every bit as unfair as giving different rewards to different monkeys. That monkey and the toddler are both equally justified in throwing a temper tantrum, because their handlers are both being jerks. From later in the article, what I think the author is driving at is that the monkeys who receive grapes also don't object, even though their treatment is just as unfair as the ones given cucumbers.

Plato all but equated justice with happiness. He thought that so long as everyone was treated fairly, happiness would surely follow. But I am not so sure. Fairness is important, but then again so are grapes. I do not think the majority of people would be unhappy to receive a grape if it meant someone else had to be given a cucumber (or even a kick in the teeth) instead*. The base desire is to receive the best reward possible, regardless of fairness. We are very much more concerned with "fairness" when we're being given cucumbers - it takes some real commitment to principle to object to one's own unfair receipt of a  grape.

* With the major caveat of visibility. If you can see someone else being treated worse for no reason, I think this is very different from the vague awareness that some anonymous schmuck got shafted with a cucumber** instead of rewarded with a tasty grape instead.
** Literally.

On the whole, evidence for fairness in other primates is much more limited than it is in adult humans. Monkeys and apes don’t reject an unequal distribution if the food is freely given rather than paid out in exchange for a task. In the lab, they generally act in their own interest when choosing how to dole out resources, while people are more likely to share equally with a partner. And they don’t turn down unequal offers in a task known as the “ultimatum game,” in which one partner decides how to divide up some resources and the other partner either accepts the offer or decides that neither partner will get anything. People often sacrifice resources in order to express contempt for an unequal offer, whereas chimps typically take what they can get, fair or not.

The general state of an animal is hunger, so it makes sense to accept any food on offer. I don't think I would snub an offer of a cucumber if I was really starving or unsure where the next meal was coming from even if someone else was being given grapes (I might still feel rather cross about it though). And I don't even like cucumber very much.

But studies show that it takes a surprisingly long time for children to incorporate fairness into their own actions. Three and four-year-olds do readily object to an unequal distribution of resources if they’ve received the short end of the stick. But, like non-human primates, they rarely protest when they’re on the winning end of an unequal distribution. This makes it hard to know whether it’s unfairness that they dislike, or simply getting less than others.

That last sentence is a bit confusing, but I suppose if you want to say it's really unfairness that someone dislikes, it has to be symmetrical. You can't say you value fairness if you don't also object when it works in your favour. So you can't measure it one direction. You have to measure both aspects of unfair treatment to know if there's really a moral principle at work here.

Interjection by Terry Pratchett :

“O’ course, I still hung up my stocking on Hogswatch Eve, and in the morning, you know, you know what ? Our dad had put in this little horse he’d carved his very own self...”
AH, said Death. AND THAT WAS WORTH MORE THAN ALL THE EXPENSIVE TOY HORSES IN THE WORLD, EH?
Albert gave him a beady look. “No!” he said. “It weren’t. All I could think of was it wasn’t the big horse in the window.”
Death looked shocked. BUT HOW MUCH BETTER TO HAVE A TOY CARVED WITH —
“No. Only grown-ups think like that,” said Albert. “You’re a selfish little bugger when you’re seven."

Which is apparently true (though whether it's cultural or not is another matter). First on kids being selfish little buggers :

In fact, in deciding how to distribute resources, preschoolers strongly favour divisions in which they come out ahead of others; not only are they likely to claim more than their own share, they even show a spiteful tendency to sacrifice resources if it means that they can have more than someone else. A recent study by Mark Sheskin and colleagues showed that when given a choice between allotting two prize tokens each to themselves and another child and claiming one for themselves while giving none to the other, 5 and 6-year-olds preferred the latter. 

And secondly on adults thinking differently, though not always in a better way :

As they approach adulthood, children show a steadily increasing tendency to distribute resources equally or even altruistically. But paradoxically, they may become less egalitarian in certain ways over the course of their development. Ernst Fehr and his colleagues found that children were more likely to deprive their peers of resources, even at a cost to themselves, if they were told that the other children came from a different school than if they were told that they belonged to the same school. This bias against members from a different group increased with age into the teen years, even though on the whole, teens were much less likely than younger kids to behave selfishly.

Is there a direct connection here ? Perhaps it mirrors some historical trends in ancient societies. It seems popular to shout down "individualism" as though it were necessarily an evil thing and invariably opposed to collectivism, which must therefore be a good thing. But as mentioned previously, thinking of oneself as an individual first and foremost may encourage thinking of others in the same way. When you identify yourself by your group membership, you may be predisposed to dealing with other groups more harshly, whereas if your group is less important to you, you may be less inclined to view other groups unfairly. Very crudely, individualism = selfish but fair, tribalism = cooperative but unfair. Maybe.

Presumably, it ought to be possible to treat each other as individuals but not put our own needs ahead of everyone else. What we want is for everyone to value each other as much as they do themselves, to adopt Epictetus' strategy of identifying their own self-interest with that of each other. This seems to be tremendously difficult in practise though.

Was the Golden Rule Born in the Mind of a Monkey?

As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality is bad for national economies—and bad for their citizens. A captivating video clip of monkey behavior (see below), taken from a 2011 TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal, has become a surprising piece of ammunition in this discussion.