Because life and the rules of the universe are not a human creation. Fairness is a human concept, in which we decide what that means, and it tends to vary decade to decade and culture to culture. Also worth noting, rules are not necessarily fairness (lots of animals in nature have automatic instinctual systems or rules of how they exist, without a consciously thought-out system of defined fairness).
It's a matter of the order of things. Life can't be fair by default because it's not subservient to fairness, it's the other way around. The concept of fairness derives from existence, it doesn't come before it. It takes a great effort to create and sustain large systems of fairness as entropy is constantly acting to undermine our efforts and destroy us (while we simultaneously deal with irrationality, chaos, scarcity, injury, etc etc). On this planet, only humans expend such immense energy attempting to accomplish elaborate systems of fairness, while trying to strive toward even greater fairness (learning from and applying, attempting to improve over time; our charitable systems for example have radically improved over the last few hundred years).
When a dolphin murders a porpoise for fun, or a troop of chimps raids another territory and murders competing chimps, is it fair? Fairness has no role to play, because it's a human concept. Humanity is still subservient to the greater rules and limitations of the universe, which means our best efforts at applying fairness can inherently never be perfect or ideal. Just the fact that we act against an erosion by entropy at all times guarantees that outcome (to say nothing of the inefficiency thrown into the equation by routine imperfect human judgment).
Do you argue that hospitals shouldn't provide emergency treatment to people with heart attacks on the same grounds?
I'm also going to call bullshit on your entropy argument: the accumulations of wealth we see are unnatural, and a product of artificial social choices about policing. Your entire argument is nonsense post-hoc rationalization about what's "natural".
In a natural setting, things would be fairer because we'd have already murdered a bunch of rich people.
In stark contrast to your claims, it's the inequality and present social order that's artificial and unnatural.
I'm confused by your comment. It feels like you're upset about the parent advocating for unfair life, but I think they're merely pointing out what they're observing, not making any moral arguments of what should be.
Are you saying that life is actually fair, and thus the parent is arguing in the wrong direction? Or do you agree with the parent that life is unfair, but think that alternative arguments should be used to argue for it?
I think primates are innately fairer than modern society is, though they're not totally fair. I don't think we even want things to be totally fair (I don't for instance)... Just fairer.
If you poll people, almost everyone thinks things should be more fair -- to the point that some are nearing violence over the issue. I think it's quite unnatural for things to be this unfair, and requires elaborate orchestration to keep it so.
I also don't think the idea was a principled attempt to model the situation -- I think it was a post-hoc justification for why it should be as we see, and not an actual attempt to explain why things as they are. Nobody raises "well, it's just natural" for why we shouldn't try to stop heart attacks (and particularly, I've never heard it for why we shouldn't try to reduce the number of heart attacks, as it was used here about unfairness) -- only things like equality, gay marriage, etc. Which happen to all be things that align with the speakers' beliefs (either for or against; I've heard it both ways).
I think pointing out facts like primate fairness is missing the forest for the trees. [1]
To me the crux of the argument is that the environment of a new lifeform isn't constant. Indeed, it's pretty much guaranteed to be different for every live entity. One beetle may live a happy resourceful life, another one may get hit by an asteroid.
Lifeforms aren't provided equal opportunity by the universe. The default state is one of unfairness. However some intelligent lifeforms like primates, and indeed humans, have taken it upon themselves to artificially move the needle towards more fairness.
I too would like to see more fairness. I also think that things are unfair by default, and I don't consider this as moral justification for social policies that keep it in the natural unfair state or worse. While I don't know @adventured's moral policies of whether unfairness is justified, I have re-read the comment a few times and I still see it as purely a description of the situation with no moral judgement at all.
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[1] It's possible that we're having trouble here due to semantics. When answering why life isn't fair, both my arguments and seemingly @adventured's entropy argument are talking about life as a sub-phenomenon of existence (which is to say, the widest scope). However if we're talking about life as limited to social structures, then I can see how any talk about natural unfairness can seem absurd.
You're wrong in your broad, abstract argument in a really obvious and shallow way:
It doesn't explain why the predominant strategy of life at all scales is mutualism and synergy between scales and kinds of life.
In no particular order, your "technical" argument fails to explain: eukaryotic structure, multicellular life, the interplay of fungii and roots, forests (which are more than adjacent trees), and really just about anything we see in the natural world. (Ed: I've thought of another 5 or 6 examples if you want to protest those -- mutualism is pretty easy to pick out in nature.)
And that's because you've failed to account for localized regions of stability able to ratchet themselves to greater and geater levels of stability -- and these metastable systems are the model we see on every scale of existence. Life does this as well, which means that we always see stable collaborations outpace competition (and unfairness) on an asymptotic scale. You literally failed to account for how life does work in your argument.
So I still don't believe you're advancing either a genuine observation (ie, it doesn't match fact to say it's unfair in general) or a principled theory (ie, it doesn't actually seem an internally consistent model -- at least, if you believe in physics).
I think you're trying to build a post-hoc justification for the human system being as it is.
I never set out to explain strategies of life, and I'm not sure why you thought otherwise. My argument is much more simpler than that. Like I said, it's about the environment. It doesn't really matter what strategy a beetle or its friends take, if it gets hit by an asteroid it didn't get equal opportunities compared to beetles who didn't, and that's not fair.
I am getting the impression that when you're talking about fairness in life, you're talking about how one lifeform treats another. Am I right? Life as an actor vs. life as a state of existance. When I'm talking about fairness of life, I'm talking about the latter, so I also include all the non-live entities (e.g. asteroids, or sulfuric acid if you want something more common) and how they affect the fairness.
Looking at this whole discussion in summary, I'm increasingly feeling like we don't really disagree on much. As best as I can tell, we both think life is unfair. Perhaps we even agree on the amount of unfairness. It feels more like you're describing the situation as a cup half full, and don't like that I describe it as half empty.
It's a matter of the order of things. Life can't be fair by default because it's not subservient to fairness, it's the other way around. The concept of fairness derives from existence, it doesn't come before it. It takes a great effort to create and sustain large systems of fairness as entropy is constantly acting to undermine our efforts and destroy us (while we simultaneously deal with irrationality, chaos, scarcity, injury, etc etc). On this planet, only humans expend such immense energy attempting to accomplish elaborate systems of fairness, while trying to strive toward even greater fairness (learning from and applying, attempting to improve over time; our charitable systems for example have radically improved over the last few hundred years).
When a dolphin murders a porpoise for fun, or a troop of chimps raids another territory and murders competing chimps, is it fair? Fairness has no role to play, because it's a human concept. Humanity is still subservient to the greater rules and limitations of the universe, which means our best efforts at applying fairness can inherently never be perfect or ideal. Just the fact that we act against an erosion by entropy at all times guarantees that outcome (to say nothing of the inefficiency thrown into the equation by routine imperfect human judgment).