Is life fair?

Nope, it’s random.

“Fairness” is a really abstract topic. With random events like sickness and natural disaster, it is tempting to say it is neither fair nor unfair, it just “is.” I don’t feel it was fair that I got sick when I was 14 but it wouldn’t be more fair for my sickness to have gone to somebody else (if it worked that way).

I think when most people say “fair” they mean “undeserving.” No child deserves an abuse; we say such an event is unfair. The same phrase could be applied to a positive event, like a windfall going to someone who never worked a day in their life.

In that sense, no, life isn’t fair, because chance doles out sentences to people who don’t deserve them all the time.

As my uncle used to say, “You pays your nickle and you takes your chance” (that “s” at the end of each verb aren’t typos, that how he said it).

In other words, life’s a crapshoot. The Universe has better things to do than pick lottery winners.

Fair? I believe, seriously, that thinking in this way is completely detrimental. Fair has absolutely nothing to do with the topics you brought up. ‘Fair’ assumes that someone or something is controlling things and most things in life just ‘are’. People, in their actions, can be fair or unfair. Laws can be fair or unfair. Your question is invalid, I’m afraid.

Shit happens, plain and simple. Rape happens, murder happens, cruelty happens, exploitation happens, crime happens.
I always liked the saying that instead of saying “Why Me?” say ” Why NOT me?”
Sure, some of what happens to us is about choices, but most is random and there is no rhyme or reason why some seem to live charmed lives and others get the smorgasbord of hardship.

While I do believe we are the creators of our own reality on an internal, psychological level, the real reality is random more often than not. It’s what we do with our reality that counts.
I think this is where some of the new agey bullshit really reeks of bullshit. Like the movie ” The Secret.” Sure, we can visualize and think positively all we want but shit still happens.
This is the fatal flaw in new age philosophy.

Don’t you think that mother in Iraq gazes up at the heavens and tries to visualize a better future for herself and her child? Prays to her “god.”
Right before her baby is blown to bits in her arms. Pffft!

No. It is not. And it is made more unfair by human interaction.

It is human nature to attribute one’s own success to hard work, and one’s own failure to bad luck.

Along these lines, many who are successful, project outwards when they are successful, thinking that those who are unsuccessful are lacking in moral fiber.

Witness Mitt Romney. Born Rich, given a million dollars by his dad in college, and receiving a job offer due to the genetic lottery of being born the son of a powerful man. He then spends his life making money by laying people off.

In his mind he is a maker, and other people are takers.

Strictly random. There is no such thing as fair. It is a human construct.

Life is equally unfair to everyone, even if it favors some one it is all random. So thus it is fair. Fairly Unfair.

An expectation of fairness is the work of the ego-mind. It is the product of (mis)identifying the self as one’s mind and letting the mind take the lead in deciding what reality is or what it should be despite all the evidence. It is the struggle of using a hammer to smooth crumpled metal, because everyone believes a hammer is the best tool in the toolbox and that crumpled metal must be made smooth. It is the belief that I am a good hammer, maybe even a special hammer, and all good hammers deserve some crumpled metal that will cooperated in its inevitability of being made smooth by a good hammer.

When someday, you come to see that you are not the hammer, that the hammer is merely one of the tools in your toolbox that sometimes is useful and sometimes is not, and that the crumpled metal maybe is there only for the sake of teaching you through repeated experience that there must be another way to regard its place in your life, or that maybe the hammer isn’t the appropriate tool, or that smoothing isn’t the appropriate expectation, or perhaps that its crumpled nature is the byproduct of our collective suffering and attachment to reality. Maybe the point of the crumpled metal is to teach us through attrition (or suffering) to see ourselves for what we are—to see our true nature.

If you’ll forgive my presumption, what we are are souls (for lack of a better word). We inhabit our bodies. We have use of our minds, but it seems the common experience is to identify as the mind. When you can step away from that identification, the question of fairness disappears. Events happen and churn like the stuff in a lava lamp. When you identify as a mind to whom the lava stuff affects with its churning, then you are upset and happy and have expectations of what the lava should do. When you identify as a soul, then the lava stuff is just the experiences of inhabiting a body in a world. There’s no upset, because there’s no expectation that the lava will do what it should do according to rational thinking and morality and the absence or presence of the Problem of Evil. It’s just what this plane of existence is. It’s just the contemporary human experience—and in some ways, it’s just the experience that hammer/ego-minds cling to—which is maybe just one of the many journeys taken by the soul.

That being said, it can be a real struggle to step away from identifying oneself as the hammer. Maybe it takes lifetimes to do so. Among other things, it is really trippy when you do.

Nope, life is about as fair as it is between two starving children in Somalia. The fact that I have never gone hungry without some way to get a little something, is that fair?

No. “Life isn’t fair.” – My old man

Everyone has their cross to bear. To some it may look like one person’s burden is ridiculously heavy or light compared to their own, but to the person bearing it, it is just as serious and intense as everyone else’s is to them.

Not that I’ve noticed. I think we can affect some aspects of our life by the choices we make, to have children or not, move to a new city or stay put and on. But a good deal of it just is and what I have always tried to do is to make the most of the opportunities that present themselves. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, I don’t know if that is fair, it just is!

“Fairness” is subjective and post-hoc. It has no bearing on the external world. That means life is fair if you decide that it is, and isn’t if you don’t think so. A lot of concepts work this way, and most of them aren’t very useful as far as I can tell.
The value of “fairness” is that you can perceive an action or situation as unfair and act to remedy it. This is a two-edged sword, of course. Ego-driven ideas of ‘fairness’ are likely to lead you to actions and attitudes which others will perceive as unfair.

Life isn’t fair, life is just life. We can try to deal fairly with one another, or we can act overly selfish or overly altruistic. As with many other things, balance is important.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies

Your examples are in an artificial environment (human construct) which means fairness is determined by ideals of a particular culture.

What man can’t perceive, or can’t find and evaluate the patterns within it, he defines as chance. Chaos factors in.

Are North Koreans unhappy for their inability to compete with U.S’s standard of production and consumption?

You need to define responsibility, its relation and uses.

Responsibility is accepting blame and accountability for who you are and what befalls you.
Although unforeseeable events occur constantly and this is what is called flux, or, in relevance to the topic, its called life. When one accepts the world, one accepts his own participation in it. This participation is (inter)active, as one being lives in a bubble. This participation includes all that is known and unknown, therefore, when one considers an event and its positive and negative possibilities in regards to the individual himself, one considers his own actions first and foremost and then his assessments and choices before he considers anything else.

In the case of a natural event, a chance event, called chance because a mind could not consider all of its parameters and so could not predict it, the healthy mind first considers the possibility that he could have foreseen, or deduced, the probability of the event occurring, and then accepts the outcome as being a part of existing, even if he concludes that the event was unforeseeable. Any personal culpability acts as a lesson informing all future actions, choices, decisions. This is called experience.

If it were not the case, then everyone would expect the world to be as he or she preferred, or wanted, or dreamed, or hoped it would be in his/her naive inexperienced state and would demand nothing of himself/herself. He or she would be the eternal victim, blind, naive, innocent, because he or she refuses to take on responsibility even if it is the acceptance of another’s whims which had not been understood correctly. There would be no growth because the blame would be placed entirely on the other and it would be he or she who had to adjust to the individual’s expectations. The individual would never have to change, or learn, or grow.

If the event was the result of an other’s willful actions, choices, decisions, then the healthy mind considers its own culpability in knowing, and understanding this other, before he considers the culpability and responsibility of the other. To then seek retribution is not irrational, for to do so is to prevent or to decrease the probability, that it will repeat itself.

Fate can be divided into two categories.

1. The fate suffered due to a non-willful event – a natural disaster, a phenomenon, an illness etc.

In this case one must accept it as a natural part of being alive and must either learn from it to prepare for any similar event in the future or make decisions that will decrease the probability of suffering due to similar events.

To be alive is an aggressive activity. To live entails constant struggle and fighting. Simply taking up space is an act of force. When I breath in, I deny this breathe to another. That oxygen is abundant, still makes us forget this fact. Place two men in a airtight box, then this fact reveals itself. When we get a job, we deny it to another. When we eat, some living organism must die. When we buy shoes, some poor sap is making it for peanuts in some third-world country. When I drive my car, some family had to be killed to ensure the rights over an oil-field.

2— The fate suffered due to willful events.
This includes the choices, actions, decisions of another and of yourself.

For example, if I’m a girl who chooses to go out to a bar, at night, populated by strangers, amongst whom are males, wearing nothing but a bra and panties; flaunting my sexuality, expressing myself as I will, then suffering the consequence of another who also wishes to express his sexuality is to be taken as a probable repercussion. If I feel invulnerable because I feel protected by an overseeing Will, expecting others to tolerate my displays, while I do not have to fear suffering any probable consequences, then I must admit this fact.

If, for example, I decide to swim in the Great Barrier Reef wearing nothing but meat strapped to my ass, expecting the police to stop me before the inevitable, or the probable occurs, then my choice should be considered my responsibility. Whether I am protected from my own bad judgment, my own ignorance, my own stupidity, does not factor in. Ignorance is not an excuse.

If, I choose to live beyond my means and then I lose my job, forcing me to go bankrupt and lose everything, my ignorance is not an excuse. If I am sold on materialism and given loans by banks I can barely afford, then as the one buying, I am the one responsible for my purchases. The seller is simply soliciting me, trying to seduce me, manipulating me using my weaknesses.

Being naive, inexperienced, or stupid, or weak, or ignorant is not a way of avoiding responsibility.

Now you need to define innocence, its relation and uses. Innocence in relation to human ideals is a sign of guilt and shame. There is no guilt in nature. In nature, there are only actions and reactions. The outcomes that follow are then interpreted and labeled as good or bad by humans. Nature does not care about human innocence. If a man goes for a swim in the ocean only to be devoured by a shark, is the shark guilty? Is the man innocent? Was that fair? Does nature give a damn? No, but man does because man can project himself and empathize with the ignorant victim, pitying himself through the other, being, then, filled with anxiety towards a world he can never fully know. The mind reacts in resentment, in hatred, declaring himself a poor innocent man that should be protected. Protected from himself, first and foremost.

Innocence is also used as a substitute for ignorance. For example, children don’t know how the world operates which is why parents protect their ignorant children to allow them to mature, but if protection is prolonged, their mind retains in a state of puerility, i.e., a man-child.

Unfortunately, in the current state of affairs, a man-child’s ignorance is used as an excuse to absolve itself of all liabilities. The weakness of ignorance is used as a reason to maintain it, to protect it, to stunt it, so that it does not face the harsh reality of adapting or dying. The false notions expand to “we’re all innocent”, “we do not choose to exist” and “we’re all ignorant”. The governing body, under the moral code of protecting the weak, expands to “we must all be protected from our ignorance”. Why? To help us remain infantile forever because infants are much more easily manipulated and controlled.

Also, regarding artificial, tool using is common in many species, but only man intervenes upon his environment to such an extent that the fabricated environment influences him more than the one he intervened upon. This is a cocooning, institutionalization, domestication.

Check out Nietzsche’s books. He speaks bluntly on the inherent unfairness of nature and hierarchies. As does Steven Pinker in one of his books – The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Nothing is fair, perhaps the law of Karma explains this somehow!?

@ZEPHYRA there is no ‘Law of Karma’.

Life has no emotions, It just exists. Suggesting that it could be “fair” or “unfair” assumes emotions and deliberateness.

@tomathon “Your examples are in an artificial environment (human construct) which means fairness is determined by ideals of a particular culture.”

The “artificial” construct of a lottery is designed from the beginning to emulate chaos. The chances of a child dying in a car accident, or falling prey to an abuser are also chaotic, presenting no ability to foretell a mathematically accurate prediction from the beginning of that child’s life.

I chose these examples specifically to relate chaos upon human constructs. They are, in a microcosm, chance events which attempt to replicate natural chaos of the universe. They are impossible to predetermine the outcome in advance.

I don’t see these examples as any different from calculating the likelihood of random molecules coming together to form a human dna chain. They are no more staged by humans than a parental dna recombination is staged. No one can foretell the outcome.

I get your point about responsibility, and mostly agree with it. But that’s a different topic than what I’m questioning here.

@Dutchess_III So a “living” cancer cell is neither fair or unfair, because it cannot express intention or emotion. The proclamation of fairness comes later, when a being capable of expressing emotion passes judgement upon the event. Is that what you’re saying? Basically, that fairness is subjective, while life remains objective.

Life is not ‘objective’ either. ‘Life’ has no point of view. It is just like the honey badger… it doesn’t even have a care to give. People say things like, ‘Oh, how unfair that that child died.’ Is it ever fair that a child dies? Some writers, like Stephen King and John Irving often play with that idea of fairness over loss and how it turns into a punishment for some social construct being broken by a parent, but all of that is simply a constructed philosophy that has absolutely no scientific or mathematical proof. Death, illness, accidents, they are all just a part of what happens because we are alive. Every potential aspect of what can happen to a person, good or bad, is life.

I used to resent my parents and say how unfair it was that I was born into my family. (stupid and rather unfounded rantings of a middleclass white girl from a small town) In the universe, there is no fair or unfair about the family you are born into. It is simply life and simply one small aspect of it. If I wanted to get hung up on that point and feel sorry for myself (which, I did as a normal adolescent does) and see it as some how ‘unfair’ then I would have to accept that, perhaps other bad things that happened to me were somehow fair because of transgressions I had made. Brilliant Catholic guilt leftovers, but still bullshit. No one is keeping a secret scorecard on your soul.

@cazzie “Life is not ‘objective’ either. ‘Life’ has no point of view.”

That makes it objective. Having a point of view, would be subjective.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I always think of ‘objective’ as a point of view someone tries to have based on facts rather than emotions and that being ‘objective’ is never perfect because it still seems to have a connotation of having some sort of ability to weigh up facts and ‘life’ doesn’t have that ability. Perhaps I am missing a dictionary definition, but saying life is ‘objective’ still sounds like anthropomorphising it.

It’s no different than saying the universe is objective. Being that, it doesn’t need me to confirm or op/ed its existence. That does not mean however, that the universe has the ability to express objectivity, or judge objectively, which would indeed personify it. But it is, nonetheless, an objective truth.

Such is life.

Life’s what you make of it despite what shit may be thrown your way, quit whining & get on with it, fairness simply doesn’t enter into it.

It’s not fair that one of my Lemon Cucumbers in the garden is failing to launch.
It is the weakest of them all, adapt or die. lol

An equivocation on the word “fair”

“Fair is a weather condition.” ~ Best. Teacher. Ever. Thanks, Mr. McE.

Life is neither subjective or objective. That requires an opinion or an act.

My point is that all truths (truth statements) are subjective, or objective. Hence, the truth about life, is either subjective or objective. Notice my last post, second to last sentence, states objective “truth”. Sorry, I take for granted the word “truth” is associated with subjective and objective, as they are central philosophical categories. I’ll remember to consistently include the word truth in the future.

I propose the truth statement that “we are alive” suggests that life would be categorized as a self evident objective truth. Fairness of life, would be purely subjective, and perhaps require mistakenly personifying it. Unlike say, the fairness of a board game, where defined rules of engagement determine exactly when a player is cheating or following the rules.

Over the course of 80 years it’s more fair than one might think. Cheaters might get away a few times, but over the long run…

OK. An F4 tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma yesterday and wiped out an elementary school, killing 50+ adults and children. Was the tornado being unfair? Was it being objective or subjective?

I think the lottery isn’t a good example of life in general. Life is more like a basketball game, i.e. somewhere between the lottery and chess. Only a certain amount of bad luck or luck is involved.

Some tornadoes are extremely unpredictable with warning times of less than a minute. That is bad luck. That is extremely unfair. In general, weather forecasts have greatly improved over the last 50 years. Thousands of lives are being saved every year. This isn’t the lottery. It’s the chess game. And humanity becomes better at playing it.

@mattbrowne – I like that answer. There is always an amount of luck involved but also a good dose of self accountability and choices. Yep, life is like a basketball game, thank goodness I have always been an excellent 3 point shooter!

Gong back to the question “Is life fair.” Yes, there is that which we humans perceive as luck and bad luck, fair and unfair but “life” itself has nothing to do with it. It just is what it is. What is bad luck for one is good luck for another.

In the case of a tornado I don’t think self-accountability plays any tiny part in whether it kills you or your family or not.

@Dutchess_III More to the point, 20,000 men women and children starve to death every single day of the year, and it could be prevented. Is that fair?

No, of course not. I’m not saying that there is no such thing as “fair” or “unfair.”

The more I learn about the Moore tornado, the more I get convinced that bad chess players are to be blamed as well. It wasn’t just about bad luck when playing the lottery. Unfairness plays a much smaller role after all. As I mentioned in the other thread: How can Oklahoman politicians refuse to raise taxes in order to pay for the building of shelters in every school inside Tornado Alley? How can Oklahoma citizens vote for politicians that do not make building shelters for school children a top priority? The more I think about the event, the more I am convinced that we can’t just blame nature for the death of the school children. We have to blame the adults. There will be more EF4 and EF5 tornadoes in the future. Especially in Tornado Alley. In Moore there was one in 1999. Why didn’t the local people learn from this? I’m stunned. I saw a lot of expensive damaged cars. Plenty of gas-guzzling SUVs. Why not drive smaller cars and spend the saved money on shelters? People should get their priorities straight. The dead children should be a dire warning.

@YARNLADY – Same thing. We can’t blame the children in Africa. But we can blame some of the adults. The corrupt politicians. The lazy men who let their women work in the fields. The people who disseminate superstition and reject science. In a book I recently read one professor found veneration of the dead cults as an important source for poverty. Of course we in the West are to blame too. We subsidize our farmers thereby harming African farmers. Corporate greed damages Africa as well. There is such thing as “fair” or “unfair.” Not everything is fate or bad luck. I believe in the power of self-efficacy. Africans should learn from positive examples like Ghana. As a result fewer children will starve to death.

Oh, I agree. Totally @mattbrowne. But honestly the chances of an elementary school getting wiped out like that is almost zilch…about equal to the chances of a sink hole opening up and eating your house with you inside. However, I’ll bet they start making changes now, and here in Kansas and Texas too. I wouldn’t think it would be that expensive.

Yes. But I think “fair” includes so many issues. It’s connected by your effort, luck, choice, etc. I just know if you are optimistic, you can be fair enough.

Dutchess_III, the chances are exactly ONE because it happened. Politicians rely on an innumerate public so they can ignore spending money on overhead costs. If people are bad at understanding risk assessment, life becomes more and more cheap.