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Different Kinds of Fairness - by Roy

rbaumeisterexistentialcontrarian.substack.com · 1,274 words · saved by 1 readers

There is a marvelous and provocative 2015 paper by Marie Schäfer, Danual Haun, and one of my favorite social scientists, Michael Tomasello. It is called “Fair is not fair everywhere.” They went around to many different cultures and asked individuals to resolve a problem of fairness: how to divide resources. The majority resolution was different in different cultures. Members of different cultures looked at the same problem and came to different conclusions about what was fair. I have read this paper several times and thought about it in various contexts. Most recently, it seems to pose a partial challenge to some of my arguments in the earlier Substack post, “Religion was invented, morality was discovered.” The idea was that morality derives from what behavioral norms enable a human society to flourish, thus from the basic principles of what makes a successful social system. But why would those be different? These principles for what enables a society to flourish, even just in terms of

There is a marvelous and provocative 2015 paper by Marie Schäfer, Danual Haun, and one of my favorite social scientists, Michael Tomasello. It is called “Fair is not fair everywhere.” They went around to many different cultures and asked individuals to resolve a problem of fairness: how to divide resources. The majority resolution was different in different cultures. Members of different cultures looked at the same problem and came to different conclusions about what was fair. I have read this paper several times and thought about it in various contexts. Most recently, it seems to pose a…

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