Day 31 – Point Two: fairness exists
The point we dare not miss about that story [of the philosophy student and his teacher] is that it pretty accurately depicts how every person claiming to believe that morality is subjective acts when an injustice is done to him or her. –PAUL CHAMBERLAIN
Men and women have forever looked at the universe around them and thought, "That's not fair!" Even people who claim that there is no such thing as justice act as if there is. Take, for example, the philosophy student quoted yesterday. When push came to shove, he accused his teacher of unfairness. He could not apply the premise of his research paper to real life. This, of course, was the point the teacher was trying to make to him, the reason he gave a failing grade. And it is the first point I am trying to make to you. Everyone knows intuitively that life is not fair, and everyone acts in a manner consistent with that intuition.
The second point I want to make follows from the first, namely that it is impossible for something to be unfair unless fairness also exists. I think this is not hard to grasp and should not take a lot of our time. How could you and your friend complain that I was being unfair in Monopoly unless you had some notion that fairness existed? How could I scream through the shut door, "That's not fair!" unless I believed that something else was? How could Hitler, the Islamic terrorists, and the angry mob at the cross consider themselves to be correcting injustices unless they believed that such a thing as justice existed, too? They could not, and neither can you. It is irrational to claim that there is no such thing as fairness in the universe and then say a minute later that something is unfair. That is what the philosophy student tried to do, and he appeared rather foolish in the process. As soon as he complained that the grade on his paper was unfair, he made it clear to the teacher that a better grade, an "A" or a "B", was fair. The whole premise of his thesis, that there exists no such thing in this world as right/wrong or fair/unfair, turned out to be a lie exposed by his very actions.
Unfairness cannot exist without fairness as its standard. You cannot have the first without the possibility of the second. To say that unfairness exists but fairness does not is like saying that bad exists but good does not, hate exists but love does not, losing exists but winning does not, death exists but life does not. Such thinking is nonsensical. It is a waste of anyone's time.
Daily Quotation
Paul Chamberlain, Can We Be Good Without God? (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1996), 51-52.
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