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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (93492)	11/3/2008 9:45:13 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541513

>>Fairness is generally considered to be a "good" emotion. It has excellent PR. Some people like it so much that they want to build political systems around it, like socialism. Or they use it to manipulate the public, like race or class baiting. That is what I dispute. I don't think it's helpful as a political metric. It's fine in small groups, maybe even positive, and it's useful for designing some of the simple protocols of civilization like queuing up to vote. But I think it is a problem causer, not a problem solver, in politics. I think we should discourage it, not give it favorable treatment.<< Karen - I can understand, to some extent, your objections to the use of nebulous concepts of fairness with respect to things like tax policy. But I can think of examples of where applying the basic principle of fairness seems to be a good idea. Take the idea of equal pay for equal work. On what basis can one argue against paying women less than men for doing the same job? If that's not a question of fairness, what is? Going back to the distribution of property when a couple separates, I'm still not quite sure why you object to the word "fair." However one applies logic to the situation, it would seem that the goal would have to be one in which neither party is disadvantaged by the outcome. And isn't "fairness" just a shorter way of identifying that goal? - Allen

To: Lane3 who wrote (93492)	11/3/2008 10:07:30 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541513

You might make similar arguments about the emotion of love. In fact, various people have tried to do that claiming that rational thought is the REAL basis for true human love. The fallacy of that is easily seen in looking at books and movies. For each book or movie exalting emotional love, how many do you find exalting the supremacy of "rational" love? Its quite possible that any given individual, by tint of many hours worshipping various books of philosophy might convince themselves otherwise, that their real true happiness IS in fact based in formal rational thought, but the vast weight of evidence says this is not the case for our species. My money is always on biology. There is a lot of interesting research being done in the field about how we think, and the trend is towards more understanding that much of what we claim as unique "higher" rational thought is actually instead based on a very long tail of evolutionary development. Remember that humans functioned quite well long before we developed formal rules of logic. If anything explaining formal logic is much easier than explaining the mechanisms that came before. In fact, our own creations, computers, can pretty much beat us now at all the "higher" rational thought processes. Its the instinctual intelligence side that we have pretty much drawn a total blank on in terms of understanding. The stuff we formally teach ourselves, we can formally teach computers. The stuff we innately learn, we often have no clue how to "teach" a computer.