|
p.5 Users of the postal system who have franked their letter feel equally entitled to the delivery service irrespective of whether the letter is going across the town or across the country. But users of the telephone system do not (at least as yet) claim an equality of entitlement irrespective of the distance involved.
[JLJ - The Net Neutrality debate of 2017 perhaps continues this discussion at a higher level of technology.]
p.5 People must be systematically precluded from any prospect of unmerited benefit by unduly exaggerating their claims. The old Roman legal maxim, ex turpi causa non oritur actio, applies here in the construction of "no valid claim arises through an improper act."
p.12 Fairness... is a matter of suitable honoring of appropriate claims.
p.13 Fairness, at bottom, is a matter of equity of process... that identically situated people should be treated identically.
p.15 Why pursue fairness? Because fairness is an essential component of justice... Only in a setting where fairness prevails can we manage to live satisfying lives.
p.17 fairness requires deliberation... It is certainly not the case that life awards people the fate they deserve by proportioning goods and evils to people's appropriate claims.
p.21 Fairness is no respecter of persons as such, but rather a respecter of their claims.
p.22 What impartiality demands is not uniformity of treatment but a uniformity of treatment-governing principles - objective standards of assessment that are applicable to all parties alike.
p.26 Fairness... depends critically upon the determination of claims.
p.32 Irrespective of results, there is no fairness in the absence of an equitable proceeding under the aegis of uniformly applied general principles.
p.33 The fair allocation of a given dividendum must be based upon claims and claims alone. It is thus crucial to fairness in distribution that insofar as there is a difference in outcome no other factor save differences in claims come into its determination.
p.46 Fairness, to reemphasize, requires commitment to what is impersonal and impartial.
p.59 A distribution of any sort of value (subjective or otherwise) is equitable if it is claim-proportionate.
p.62 As Aristotle emphasized long ago, the balance that lies at the core of the ideas of justice and fairness cannot be achieved in the absence of impersonal and objective standards.
p.79 Fairness as an aspect of impersonal justice has to proceed on the basis of objective value. If I have to make restitution to you for a broken vase, it must be done on the basis of its market value
[JLJ - I disagree - if a claim can be made that the vase had sentimental or other value then restitution would have to be made on that basis as well. So if I understand Rescher's thinking, if a thief breaks in your house and steals an irreplaceable family photo, he merely has to replace it with the market value, or perhaps even a photo of another family, in order to be fair.]
p.79 people's personal evaluations help to set matters into motion. Only if you prefer having my a while I prefer your b will we trouble to make the exchange.
p.81-82 Suppose that a game of dice has reached a stage where only two players, A and B, remain as contenders, and where winning all or nothing is to be decided by A's getting three or five. But suppose further that the game has to be broken off at this point. How should the stakes constituting the "pot" now be divided between A and B? Since A's winning has the probability 1/3 and B's the probability 2/3 - so that A's chances of winning are exactly half of B's - it seems proper and sensible to divide the stake between them in the proportion 1:2... The approach at issue accordingly stipulates that in gambling situations a participant's appropriate share in the overall stake is to be simply the probabilistically determined mathematical expectation (expected value) of the gamble for this particular party.
[JLJ - Not so fast. What if one of the gamblers is using the Martingale betting system of doubling each losing bet, and has already lost 6 times in a row? This player has a lot of money riding on the present outcome and is using a system which attempts to recover losses in subsequent bets. Simply giving the player the expected value of his bet is not letting him use his system. Perhaps the truly fair thing to do is to state ahead of time what happens if the contest underway is suspended - perhaps with one player having accumulated an advantage of some kind through strategy or just plain luck. Why not just resume the contest at a later time, or as in Baseball just replay the game if less than 4 1/2 innings have been played, otherwise letting the score as it stands on game suspension stand. In the dice game above, why not refund each player's initial wager, or suspend, then resume play at another time or place, or substitute another game (player A draws a number 1-6 from a jar as a substitute dice roll), or even an impartial judge rolling a single die and reporting the outcome as a substitute roll of the die. Or even perhaps, open an envelope kept in a safe with a random die roll pre-recorded on a slip of paper, etc.]
p.82 It was, in fact, this general issue of the proper division of stakes for prematurely terminated games that provided the launching impetus to the development of the calculus of probability.
[JLJ - Rescher idolizes Leibniz and no doubt champions Leibniz's claim with this regard.]
p.83-84 It would be more correct to say that while Leibniz did not initiate this idea, he promoted it beyond the level of earlier treatments, insisting that one should recognize expectations-based distribution as an instrument of vastly diversified applicability and utility.
[JLJ - Ha! Some fairness in assigning credit is finally observed. I would argue instead that mathematical expectation is only a rough guide to distributive justice - it has a side-effect of generating fake or exaggerated claims, since it is the claim itself that is used in the proportioning of resources.]
p.85 Leibniz viewed the principle of probabilistic proportionalism - the allocation of shares in line with mathematical expectation - as a general principle of ethical practice, able to provide appropriate guidance not just for the division of goods in gambling situations but to serve as a general instrumentality of distributive justice.
[JLJ - ...and I would add, as a general approach to game theory, complex games of strategy included.]
p.86 As Leibniz saw it, the expected value idea of multiplicative conjoining of probability and magnitude affords a tool of impressive versatility and power in the allocation of goods and evils in general.
p.89 The trouble with the expected-value approach of Leibniz and Keynes is that it rushes the recourse to probabilities. As emerged in the deliberations of chapter 2, probabilistic distributions enter into a just allocation process only late in the game - at the very end of the line, so to speak. To view them as an appropriate vehicle of share determination in general - from the outset as readily as from the end - is simply a violation of due process in the context.
[JLJ - An expected value can be used to guide an investigation - all other things being equal, but it cannot tell you in the end what that investigation will uncover - it is no crystal ball.]
p.91 Two very different approaches to distributive justice in the face of competing claims can plausibly be contemplated: the one based on proportionality, the other on predominance... Traditional legal practice firmly opts for the second, leader-takes-all predominant approach when it comes to dividing contested property.
p.93 where there are as yet no pre-established ownership rights upon the scene, but only a plurality of competing claims to be accommodated, it seems altogether just, proper, and reasonable to effect a proportionate division in line with the respective strength of these variable claims.
However, a very different sort of situation arises where a proprietary interest already exists, but there merely is evidential uncertainty regarding the identity of the actual owner... In all such cases, the actual practice in legal systems of every sort is to recognize the ownership of the party whose case is the strongest.
p.101 In matters of inquiry it is clearly preponderance that counts: When we have questions and need to have them answered that proposition deserves acceptance as the best available answer to our questions which has the strongest evidence in its favor. Here the strongest arguments deserve to prevail
[JLJ - A similar case would be a traveler coming to a fork in the road that is not shown on his map - he would need to determine which path currently facing him is the most traveled. He would not 'split the difference' and travel in a line equally between both paths, nor would he travel off-road 70% in the direction of the larger path, if road traffic suggested 70% went one way and 30% another.]
p.116 Getting people to try to do the proper thing will generally optimize the chances of success.
p.119 In practical contexts alone action is paramount and matters must be decided one way or another, predominantism is clearly in order. But in purely theoretical matters where there is no need to "rush to judgment" probabilism is a sensible policy.
p.121 the reality of it is that different rationales for allocating positivities and negativities are in order in different domains in line with the differences in aims and objectives of various human enterprises
p.122 the pragmatics regarding the functional teleology of an enterprise both explains and validates its relevant allocation principles.
|
