Fairness as a value

Came across this article about how fairness is perceived differently by conservatives vs liberals. One way to parse the difference is that liberals want to satisfy needs, e.g., hunger for the poor (provide aid where it is needed). For conservatives, this is modified by whether those getting aid are deserving of  the aid, i.e., are they / have they worked, contributed, ... to deserve any aid.



We can think of this as a general construct that there is a pull to satisfy a need on the part of conservatives and liberals. To this dynamic, add the notion of sensitivity to context. Liberals are less sensitive to context, i.e., whether the need is justified, fair, warranted, earned, ... For the conservatives, the context has much more of an impact. The pull to satisfy a need is moderated by whether the need is warranted in the context of equity. This reminds me of the primate experiments where a monkey rejects a cucumber when a fellow monkey is given a grape (more preferred than the cucumber). This is known as social inequity aversion.

In computer science, language grammars are classified as context free or context sensitive. We have a tendency to categorize in a binary fashion - this or that. However, we can think of context sensitivity as a spectrum. People have less or more of it in different contexts. Which leads to the thought - how far do the turtles go - context sensitivity is dependent on the next layer of context , ......

Another notion that can be added to this model is Lakoff's notion of framing. Framing provides a context to interpret. So,  the same phenomena / process can be changed from fair to unfair or vice versa by how it is framed. For example, providing aid to able bodied homeless people is unfair as they can work and they are getting an unfair handout that could be better used by hard working people. This can be reframed as a great number of homeless are veterans who gave their livelihood, comforts to go to war to keep us safe. They have earned the right to be taken care of by shouldering  the ptsd and other wounds to help protect us / the county. I expect there are better examples of reframing for this model. I'll think about that and see what I can come up with.