Is the world fair? - Essay Sam Zhang Its not fair! Heard it said many times? What is fairness?

Princeton Universitys WordNet defines it as free from favouritism or self-interest or bias or deception; conforming with established standards or rules1 Dictionary.com describes it as free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice2 Can we say that the world is fair according to this? No; even in an affluent nation like Canada with an average income of $40,000US (2009 value) per capita3, we are not fair in context with these definitions. It has been shown that the average income for women in Canada is less than men, by quite a margin4. There are different levels of wealth in Canada5, and with that, different social levels. There are even people whom have no income at all, and no permanent home. This is only a manifestation of the problem. Imagine this on a global scale, where millions make less in a year than what the average person in a developed country can spend in a week, or even a day. Fairness is also a word that has sparked genocide and racism; used in the past and even the present to classify human beings by skin and hair colour6. But contrary to the facts above, people and associations that inspire global community are working to make the world not a world of self-interest, bias and giant margins, but a world of equality and fairness7. This reasons below are why this dream will not come to fruition soon. Fair used to be a word that implied racial superiority. Back then in the days of World War II, persons of fair skin color, fair hair, and blue or gray eyes were considered the superior sub-race above all races by the Nazi regime8. Today, fair has evolved to a much more politically correct word, but this proves one point; Human beings deduct things from very biased viewpoints. Opinions are very dangerous things. For example, according to a peer-reviewed editorial on BMJ (British Medical Journal), it has been hinted through studies that genetic factors do not contribute much, if at all to criminal predisposition9, but because of racial stereotype, many believe otherwise10. Can fairness be achieved if the very foundations of fairness are corrupted with bias? Human beings have always lived in the spirit of dominance and labelling. We have a natural instinct to lead, and whomever has a stronger leadership skill forms a government, whether democratic, monarch, sovereign, etc. Until recently, the world has mostly been a world dominated by empires, some very large, some small. A lot of them have collapsed to be replaced by another system, but one of the things we carried over is labelling based on social class. Back then, we had rich lords, common citizens, peasants, serfs, and on top of that whoever ran the empire, be it king, queen, emperor, etc. Today we have three main classifying factors based on income: poor, commoners, rich, and in-betweens like poorcommoner or rich-commoner. We have always labelled people by their occupation and income, and based on historical evidence, this will not stop soon.

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http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fair http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fair 3 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ca.html 4 http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/labor01a-eng.htm 5 http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/famil105a-eng.htm 6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_race 7 http://www.un.org/ 8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_race 9 http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/310/6975/272 10 http://crx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/3/286

Not everyone can be affluent. In order to sustain a lifestyle many people in developed countries enjoy, we need people from third-world countries to do the things we dont want to do. To keep commodities cheap and profit margins large, we usually pay the workers very little and overwork them11. Likewise, in a developed country, we need people to do jobs that others with higher educations dont want to do. Some of those jobs of course pay reasonably, but some like manual labour where people have to work long hours and usually dont have the convenience of sitting in an office chair all day, pay minimum wage or barely above it. Likewise, if we paid those people fair wages to the rest of the population, prices of commodities will shoot up because of the profit margins the companies want to keep. No one wants to pay more for commodities. Its a pretty interesting catch-22, and another reason why fairness is very hard to achieve. Fairness is a major issue in this world and it would be great if it could be achieved. But there are obstacles to overcome. In the true sense of fairness, we would need to rebuild our very foundations of society, our governmental systems. We would need to create a sustainable system where everyone that works gets an equal wage for their contributions to society. We would need to abolish racial and sexual stereotypes. Would this be easy? The answer is a simple no. Fairness in the world where every human being gets an equal opportunity free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice is very far off at most. Deducing from the points given above, it would be very hard to achieve a fair world in the foreseen future.

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http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_48/b4011001.htm