Fairness and agency

"The world is unfair" is an obvious statement to make. How you react to it is however, not. A recent Innate candidate told me this during an interview, "We can't really solve this issue, but we should be mindful of it". Is that enough?

Your reaction to this fact says a lot about you. It varies wildly between people.

Yes, the world is unfair. Sometimes this is nature—the randomness of inherited disease or talent. Sometimes we call it "the world" when it's actually other humans creating the unfairness. Either way, standing in front of it and deciding "it is what it is" is a dumb and weak thing to do.

It's a moral failure to accept it as inevitable. It's even worse to use it as a justification to act unfairly.

We humans have the power of choice. We can choose to realize when there is a lack of fairness, and to choose to account for it. To help those who didn't get lucky. It is being strong to realize that yes, you're going against a state of fact that has been randomly decided by nature, and you're doing it because you're human. It is the same fight as to constantly oppose the natural decay of things. To look at the world in its eyes and say "I won't let you be unfair".

This means fairness is not passive. It requires active judgment. It is not being nice or kind all the time; it is also being willing to condemn and punish. It is having a moral compass and applying it by taking action.

You might hope that rules and laws will usually take care of delivering fairness, but they can't do it alone. Sometimes, even laws are unfair. They can either be exploited, or misapplied. Misapplied like in the many ways we can punish a poor child for stealing food. Or kicking out an undocumented immigrant for being here while working hard for their host country. Exploited when some find legal loopholes to save taxes, or escape conviction on a technicality like a cop forgetting to read their rights.

A fair ruler (or ruling system) should be able to see through it and punish such behavior, but it can't always do so. Fairness depends on us all choosing to embody it.

In fact, a healthy society depends on it. Being fair holds societies together. It is what makes great cultures. It is celebrating those that make the most effort for others, but also not granting them the power to be above rules that apply to the masses. It is wanting more Frank Caprio judges to be understanding of unfortunate circumstances. More Teddy Roosevelts to set rules against the concentration of power.

Now, in our current era we are rewarding more and more agency as the number one quality. The best leaders have this quality. They seemingly surpass obstacles and do things deemed impossible. Harnessed properly, agency leads us to a better future.

However we overlook that agency can be used for evil these days. You can be high agency and fair, you can also be high agency and a complete criminal. Not respecting any rule and law is maybe the highest signal of agency.

Agency without a moral compass is corrosive. Celebrating successful people for their ability to go around moral, fair, implicit rules, we risk destroying the fabric of our societies. There is a lot of doers in this world, and many of the high-agency ones are in their ranks. We should just remember that the ability to do things is not per-se a sign of goodness. It's a pre-requisite to being a leader, not necessarily a good one.

If you're reading this and want to do things, I applaud you, and I urge you to be fair. The world is the beautiful place it is today because millions of people before you strived to make it work for everyone. It needs to stay like this. So stand in the way.