Fairness in sport and life
Here’s a random thought about minority rights and sports. Note, I’m not making an exact parallel here, and in fact the two situations are different, as evidenced at the end of the post.
So, when I watch sports, I tend not to like things like play review in football, where it takes an age for a guy in the booth to decide whether the ball was caught, or dropped, or whatever. When people say, “but what about eliminating the unfairness of referee error”, my response is as follows:
A) You’re never going to eliminate unfairness altogether - that is simply the way of sports. This is not to say that reducing unfairness is not a laudable goal, but you have to accept that you will never be 100% successful.
B) In the long term, things mostly shake out. So you get robbed of a championship one year. Well, maybe you got lucky on a dodgy penalty call the year before. Over time, you’re doing OK.
C) Given A and B, I’d much rather watch a game where people just go along with the referee’s decisions, and things shake out in the end, than an endless legalistic back-and-forth of arguing over whether the ball was caught or not.
Now, minority rights. I personally think that affirmative action is necessary, because of structural disadvantages that are faced by minorities. But, is affirmative action a perfect system? No! If you’re poor and white, for example, you may well find that you are somewhat at a disadvantage at some stages in your life to an equally poor black person (e.g., applying for higher education financial aid).
On the other hand, being white might help you in some other situations, due to the stubborn persistence of low-level racism, e.g., in certain job hiring situations.
So here’s the difference between sports and the real world: In the real world, you can’t assume that the system as a whole is unbiased. Again, this is why I think that affirmative action is necessary. Of course, the ideal situation would be to have “unbiased refs”. But, failing that, you can really only look at long-term outcomes: “do things shake out over time”?
Given that, at the moment, certain minority groups still tend to do worse than the majority, this tells me that the system needs further tweaking to assist those groups. It certainly doesn’t need to be changed in the direction of some artificial notion of “fairness”.
I suppose, in the end, what I’m saying is that, for me, fairness is defined and decided by the output of a system, not its initial configuration.