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You are here: Home / Archives for fairness

A Class Apart

September 17, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What we want in America is a fair chance to succeed. On the other hand, imposing economic equality through the redistribution of wealth has always seemed un-American. But there is a place where the needs for greater equality and a fairer playing field converge, and we are in that place today.

A good life and good work are not possible without the opportunity to make enough to meet our basic economic needs. In other words, every American needs a fair shot at the American pie, as opposed to an increasingly small piece of it. As the nation’s wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, fair opportunity disappears and makes the need for a national conversation about greater economic equality more pressing.

“Fairness” (in terms of opportunity) and “equality” (as a way to distribute wealth) are not the same thing.

Surveys regularly find that Americans accept a certain amount of inequality when it comes to wealth because of factors like individual merit. When one study asked about their ideal distribution of wealth, most responded with an allocation that was far from equal. People in the top 20% could have three times as much wealth as those in the bottom 20%, they said. In the article that reported these findings, this study’s author described the majority’s comfort level as “not too equal, but not too unequal.” By contrast, 84% of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top 20% today compared to only 0.3% in the hands of the bottom 20% (or more than 250 times as much)—an almost textbook case for “too unequal.”

In order to focus debate on this vast disparity of wealth in America, it will be necessary to bear in mind the differences between fairness and equality, because the distinction:

allows us to zoom in on certain critical questions that have long been of interest to political scientists and moral philosophers. When is it unjust to treat people the same—that is, which factors (hard work, skill, need, morality) are fair grounds for inequality and which are not? Which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit?

We can accept inequality under certain circumstances, but extreme disparities in wealth offend our basic sense of justice and fairness.

The richest 20% seem to know that there is something offensive about the gulf that exists between them and the other 80% of Americans. There was a piece in the New York Times last week that had a great deal to say about their (or our) discomfort with what the author called “the moral stigma of privilege.” Interviews with wealthy New Yorkers revealed that they routinely:

-take price tags and labels off expensive purchases so housekeepers and nannies can’t see the “obscenely high” amounts that they pay for items like “six dollar bread;”

-describe themselves as “comfortable,” “fortunate” or even “middle class” instead of rich or upper class;

-point out how “hard-working,” “charitable” and sensitive they are about “not showing off” what they have.

Their consideration, lack of ostentation, and other personal qualities seemed to be offered so that the interviewees can be seen as “worthy” of their privilege. “If they can see themselves [and the rest of us can see them] as hard workers and reasonable consumers,” the author notes, “they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American ‘middle,’ while remaining materially at the top.”

Whether rich people are also “good people” simply obscures the important issue however.

[W]hat’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.

So the issue isn’t whether rich people are also nice and hardworking. Instead, it is whether we should tolerate a small percentage of our citizens having so much more than everyone else. Is this state of affairs “good” for us as citizens and as a country?

With more wealth concentrating at the top of society, it is hardly surprising that the populism behind movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party became even more pronounced in the last election. Wealthy, often urban professionals on the right and left coasts may be puzzled by it and disgusted with some of the key players, but somewhere within this political upheaval is the desire for a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work. To realize that desire will mean reducing the economic divide after an honest discussion with these same wealthy, often urban professionals about the inequality that benefits them most.

“A shot at the American Dream” was the chance that every returning soldier wanted to take in 1945. The G.I. Bill after World War II reduced economic inequality by providing a fairer opportunity (with the possibility of college and home ownership) to the mostly white men of every economic class who were coming home. After their own struggle for greater equality, women and minorities secured a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and work after the Great Society programs of the Sixties and the women’s movement of the Seventies. Indeed, many of the men and women who benefitted from that 30-year push for greater equality made it into today’s wealthiest class, or lived to see their highly educated children enter it.

Today, there is once again an urgent need to confront the economic disparities that have become entrenched since our last conversation as Americans about greater equality in terms of wealth and class. For the vast majority, a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work will not be possible until we do.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: American dream, class, equal opportunity, equality, fair opportunity, fairness, good work, inequality, moral reasoning, values, wealth, wealth disparity

A Child Expresses Your Hope That The World Is Worth Your Engagement

July 23, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In a short article this week, a philosophy professor wondered whether the risks of living today are so daunting that you need to pause before bringing another innocent child into the world.

As if I needed reminding, I’d just seen A World in Disarray with Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair, Samantha Power and others arguing about why global stability seems to be a thing of the past. As if Syria, the Ukraine, the South China Sea and North Korea weren’t enough, it was also another week of politics, of Delaware-size pieces of Antarctica breaking off, of hearing about ISIS fighters slipping into the general population.

Is this a place to bring an innocent child? And if you’ve decided to do so, what (if anything) is your responsibility for exposing her to risks that may include the very destruction of the world you’ve brought her into?

I have an extended family member whose own experience of life has been so harsh that he has refused to marry (despite tremendous interest) or have a child. I have a life-long friend who is probably in the same situation, although we’ve never talked about it. So it’s not just the risks “out there” but also how you’ve experienced them yourself which sometimes answers the question.

The philosophy professor I mentioned above is Rivka Weinberg. She posted an article at quartz.com this week called “Is it Unethical to Have Kids in the Era of Climate Change?” Before trying to puzzle my way to an answer, I thought to myself we’ll all be done in by authoritarian leaders or cyber warfare long before we’ve killed our environment but I’d still been seized by her premise.

A year ago, Weinberg had written at length about the quandary.

In The Risk of a Lifetime, my book about the ethics that can guide our decisions about procreation, I argue that when we have children, we impose life’s risks upon them. Therefore, we ought to consider the nature of those risks in advance, in order to figure out whether they are fair to impose.

It’s where Weinberg began her analysis that probably caught my eye. When we decided to become parents and have a child, my first thoughts weren’t about the risks she’d be facing but The Gift she was going to be. (How do I appreciate the wonder of her arrival? How do I care for something so precious?) Focusing on the risks that we’d be asking her to shoulder never entered my mind at the time, though it’s harder to dodge the question now.

As Emily grew up, my priority was wonder management until risk management reared its head–but not as a series of global threats. Instead, it was when I discovered one of her elementary school friends cutting off the heads of Barbie dolls in a room upstairs; when 5th grade girls with Netflix accounts found Sex in the City during a sleepover; and when middle school boys were grinding like gangstas in our kitchen. Not to dwell on it, but there is almost nothing more shocking to a girl-power dad than walking in on your 10-year old when she’s somehow watching Samantha on her TV. That cat can never be put back in the bag.

So I tried to fend off risks that she was facing closer to home, but what did I do—what should any of us do—to make it fair to impose the rest of the world’s risks on an innocent child? Beyond the bounds of family life, what is any parent obliged to do?

As I thought about it, bringing a child into this world only becomes fair when parents confront its terrible risks along with their children. In other words, it’s an obligation that extends across generations. You assume this responsibility with a hope that is durable enough to face those risks while you actively work to reduce them. You do it so your child never has the burden of facing those risks alone.

A writer named Jurgen Moltmann has spent a lifetime of scholarship describing the kind of hope that is necessary to drive an obligation as big as that.

He was a young man from Hamburg when his activism made him a German POW during World War II. Suffering during his imprisonment and feeling responsible as a German for the War’s atrocities left him feeling desolate, with little will to live, when the War was over. Moltmann realized that he could only go on if his hope in the world was strong enough to confront the magnitude of what he’d experienced—that is, where hope and suffering reinforce one another, so your hope always knows what it’s up against and never becomes false.

This hope challenges you to respond to the world’s suffering as best you can and (in Moltmann’s words) to “be a combatant” in the battle “to overcome death with life, violence with peace, and hate with love.” In other words, your hope is also reinforced by your actions. You have work to do when you see the world as it really is but believe in it enough to refuse to be crushed by it.

Of course, work that you do to combat a risk-laden world also helps you discharge your responsibility for bringing an innocent child into it. Like Moltmann, you fight for your hope in the worth of the world, while also fighting for hers.

Sometimes we trick ourselves into believing that we’re safe from the suffering and the risks that are everywhere around us. Or because the enormity of it is too much to contemplate, we put it out of our minds altogether or lose ourselves in distraction to avoid having to face it. But bringing an innocent child into the world changes everything because (in fairness) it’s not just about you any more.

Your child becomes an expression of your hope that the world is worth your engagement while you fight to reduce its terrible risks. It’s an obligation that’s everyone’s job, but even more so when you become a parent.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself Tagged With: ethics, fairness, hope, Jurgen Moltmann, parental obligation, parenting, procreation, Rivka Weinberg

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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