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A vigorous challenge to our own hypocrisy

What we really need is more nepotism and less fairness, according to Stephen Asma in his book Against Fairness. Fairness is an unhelpful concept that arises from envy, and when we try to teach our children the importance of fairness by awarding first prize to every competitor in a race we are in fact simply nurturing their feelings of envy and preventing them from learning how to cope with the very unequal way in which the world works.

Many people think that the idea of fairness is supported by the teaching of Jesus, who loved everyone. However, closer examination of the New Testament shows that fairness was not one of Jesus’s professed values. He had one favourite disciple. He told the parable of the workers in the vineyard, which expressly contradicts the idea of fair pay proportional to work done. He taught that nobody earns salvation as a fair reward for good deeds; nobody deserves salvation – it is only available as a free unmerited gift.

Several of the author’s insights come from his multicultural perspective on life. His spouse is Chinese, and he has spent substantial time living in China, where American notions of fairness do not apply. Liberal secular Westerners see morality exclusively as the respecting of individual rights, with fairness being the defining feature. Westerners do not even recognise other cultural views of morality as including loyalty, purity, temperance, obedience to authority and other values.

Our espoused allegiance to the virtue of fairness is often hypocritical. In public we apply equal opportunity, but in private we apply nepotism. We publicly argue for equal rights for all, but privately work so that our family can benefit more than others. Even more hypocritically, we believe that our own devotion to fairness and equal treatment for all makes us feel we are a class above other people.

This is a very thought-provoking and entertaining book. Much of the author’s critique of Western morality is undoubtedly correct. I am not sure that we really need more nepotism, but it does seem that we need to take a broader set of possibly competing values into account when making moral decisions.