fast said:
I'm still having difficultly with the notion of fairness. If I am a business owner and serve white people and refuse service to black people, then under the notion that fairness is a function of treating like cases alike and unlike cases unlike, then as wrong as it may be, I am treating the groups fairly so long as I don't refuse service to a white person or, ironically, serve a black person.
That looks like an unusual usage of “fairness”. At least, using the word as I intuitively grasp its meaning, I wouldn't say you're being fair.
But I guess there may be more usages, so in that case, what's the criteria for “alike”, and “unlike”, under such a conception?
Is it any property?
Let's say that I serve only people whom I feel like serving, but I refuse service to those I feel like refusing service. Then, in a sense I'm treating like cases (e. g., cases of people I feel like serving) alike, etc. But would that be fair under the conception you have in mind?
If so, it seems anything might be fair.
So, it seems to me that the kind of properties that can be used to pick whether something is like or unlike is not any property. Maybe what you have in mind is that it's any property of those people that does not depend on the agent's state of mind at the moment of assessing whether to serve them?
We can still test that too.
As you understand “unfair” (i. e., in the usage you have in mind), would the following be cases of fair treatment?
a. Jack serves people whose national identity card (let's say it's a country where there is one) ends in 8, 4, or 7, and refuses service to everyone else. He knows all of the numbers because he illegally accessed the government's database.
b. Jack refuses service to all people whose name begin with “S”, and serves everyone else (he asks before).
c. Jack serves everyone, but if they pay in cash and at least the serial number of one of the dollar bills of greatest denomination they use, has two sevens, or four fours, he punches them in the face.
We may further stipulate that Jack does not tell anyone in advance how he decides whom to serve, whom to punch, etc.
fast said:
However, there does seem to be a sense of "unfairness" (and not just unrighteousness) as indicated when people use the word "to" when they say the refusal of service in this scenario is unfair to blacks. Wrong perhaps, but how is it unfair? The answer is that they aren't being treated equally, but I'm not so sure unequal treatment is indicative of unfair treatment. After all, we don't treat criminals as we do law-biding citizens. We don't treat them equally, but we do treat them fairly when all criminals are treated like all other criminals ... And when we treat all law-abiding citizens like all other law-abiding citizens.
So, perhaps the refusal of service to blacks is fair yet wrong and with no regard to equality. Or, perhaps "fairness" is one of them emotional terms like " bullying"and "lying"'where people simply abuse them and increase the scope of them with no regard to their accurate meaning. Hence, I know people that will regard any form of deception as a lie, and I know people (here on this forum even) that would regard the denial of fertility treatment to lesbians as bullying. Maybe the mere fact that something is wrong is just being called unfair whether or not the act accurately reflects what the term actually means.
Maybe, but there are alternatives.
a. There is more than one usage of “fair” in colloquial speech.
b. Fairness is a function of treating like cases alike and unlike cases unlike, but the properties that can pick “like” and “unlike” are not any properties, but are a proper subcategory of the category (or class, or whatever you call it) of all properties. Fully assessing which properties are in the subset is a very difficult matter in general – as it is in all cases; I'd say vagueness might prevent it -, but at least, one can tell that some properties are excluded by intuitively assessing hypothetical scenarios.
c. A combination of a. and b. (b. would apply to one or more of the meanings).