The concept of fair is unfair... no really!

Think about fairness for a moment.. I'll start with an example:

5 people goto the funfair. Whilst everyone is having a go, John wishes to have another ride, but everyone else wishes to move on.

Everyone else says:

"It's unfair for John to have another ride, it means he has had two rides when everyone else will only get one. It is unfair on the rest of us."

However, John has never been to the funfair before, and is very poor and unlikely to be able to afford to go again (everyone else went last year). All the other people have had (in total) many more rides than John.

John explains that:

"Infact to be truely fair, he should have another ride."

However, John is so poor because he has been idle, whilst the others have worked hard. The others have earned an extra ride. So what a third person may know is whats really fair is that 2 out of the 5 have extra rides. Then again, someone aware of still more facts, knows thats what would truely be fair is that they should all go home and pay attention to their relatively abandoned families.. and so on.. and so on... and so on...

What becomes clear, if you think long enough, is that all fairness is based on a point of view, an oppinion and a chosen set of facts / information to back that oppinion.

Fairness is almost always a "personal" thing, or a group thing, or a community thing, or a nation thing. In other words, fairness is usually a political tool to sway the views of others by choosing some facts they feel others will also see and relate to which suggest that other viewpoints are "invalid" or "unfair".

There is one kind variety of unfairness which does matter though, and that is better thought of as being unethical than unfair. Most everything is both fair and unfair, depending on things considered and personal perspective and priorities. 

If something is found to be unfair from very many involved viewpoints then it might well be something unethical.

My advice is to forget about fairness, if you try to deal in fair and unfair you will just be puppeted around by the people most able to provide reasons why what you want is unfair and able to show what they want to be fair.

If you start feeling something is unfair, ask "Why is that unfair?" unwrap the unfairness down to a set of facts which are true for you and why it matters that you want changes. Then debate it from there and look for a resolution to the core of the cause of the feeling of unfairness. Sometimes you may even discover, you are the one getting infact extra-fair treatment (which applied to the entire first-world).

Just thought I'd share the musing with the everyone.