Reducing Unfairness

In my last blog post, I said that life isn't fair and that it's never going to be. I'm afraid that what I said in that blog post could be interpreted in some fatalistic way, as though the fact that life will never be perfectly fair is a valid excuse for being unfair. For the record, I don't think that the unfairness in life is a good thing. It may be necessary, in that it's impossible to eradicate all unfairness, but it's not good. But while it's not possible to eliminate all unfairness, it is possible, and good, to reduce unfairness.

Now, I don't mean to say that we should steal from the rich and give to the poor. We should only do one of those things (and I don't mean the former). Stealing, besides being against one of the ten commandments, is also unfair. Instead, we should acquire what we can fairly and then share what we can spare voluntarily. Charity is good; making it mandatory isn't.

And I also don't mean that we should tear people down. Taking advantages away so that all people are equally disadvantaged is nowhere near as good as giving people advantages so that we're all equally advantaged. Of course, true equality, even just equality of opportunity, may be impossible, but creating an abundance of opportunity is a worthy goal to strive for.

We can't completely eliminate inequality, but we can and should reduce it, not by force, but by choice; not by tearing people down, but by building people up. My hope is that we can improve the lives of everyone on the planet. We may not be able to get everyone onto the same playing field, but we can raise the playing field for everyone. To some extent, we have already done this, but we can always do more. My hope is that those of us who have advantages will choose to help others, reducing inequality and making life better for everyone. That may be a pipe-dream, but in my opinion, it's less of a pipe-dream than hoping to make life perfectly fair.