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For a moment in time, the octogenarian and the 3 month old are both in a competition for the same resource, if they both have the same chance of getting it, and
by matte_black 9y ago
For a moment in time, the octogenarian and the 3 month old are both in a competition for the same resource, if they both have the same chance of getting it, and the octogenarian happens to get it, the outcome is still fair within this context. It could just as easily have gone to the 3 month old.
It is not fair to count the octogenarian's past good fortune against them in what should be a fair contest. But we do it, because when handing out organs we don't care about fairness, we care about viable lifetime remaining.
When searching for fairness a lot of people seem to believe that good luck in the past means it should be harder for you to have good luck in the future. Ironically, this is very unfair.
- enord 9y ago"Fair" does not mean "increases entropy" in this context. We can split hairs about what exactly "fair" is supposed to be, it's probably central to this whole nebulous disagreement, but a lowest common denominator would be something like "has higher value than opportunity cost". This may even increase entropy in aggregate. A fair die does not make a fair game.
- Natsu 9y agoHalf the problem is that, in practice, 'fair' often ends up defined as "in favor of my and my in-group's interests" by choosing a principle that coincides with those interests to maximize. It matters whose costs we're measuring here and it matters how we measure that. See what responses you get when, e.g., you change the problem to be deciding who gets the liver among two twins who are identical except that one is, say, a Republican and the other a Democrat, or some other situation where the only difference in utility is which of two opposed groups would be aided by their survival. Then compare the responses you get to how much that person approves or disapproves of the respective beliefs.