Thomas Sowell on Fairness

Thomas Sowell recently wrote a four-part series on "The Fallacy of 'Fairness,'" which you can read here, here, here, and here.

Being already quite familiar with much of Sowell's work, nothing I read was that surprising. I have always enjoyed Sowell's contrarian nature, his common-sense debunking of starry-eyed liberal optimism, and his extensive knowledge of economics that he brings to bear on current issues.

However, Sowell deserves a good critique, coming not from the Left but from someone who is at least moderately conservative in outlook. He certainly has his points, which I don't mind agreeing with, but what ties all of his arguments together is a philosophy of individualism that I fundamentally disagree with.

First, the points I don't mind agreeing with. Sowell is right to point out that equality of treatment does not necessarily lead to equality of results, and probably never could:

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results."

This is absolutely correct, and Sowell is extremely good at conjuring up numerous examples along these same lines to demonstrate his point.

Sowell is right to criticize the overeager Left for wanting to pull the "discrimination card" all too often.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups.

Perhaps the best thing about Sowell is that he really is firm on saying it isn't your fault if you were raised in a poor neighborhood or a broken home; likewise it isn't your virtue if you were raised in a rich family with two parents. Circumstances are inherited, and there's nothing you can do about that. And the same goes for natural ability.

Mixed up with the question of fairness to individuals and groups has been the explosive question of whether individuals and groups have the innate ability to perform at the same levels, if they are all treated alike or even given the same objective opportunities.

Intellectuals have swung from one side of this question at the beginning of the 20th century to the opposite side at the end. Both those who said that achievement differences among races and classes were due to genes, in the early years of the 20th century, and those who said that these differences were due to discrimination, in the later years, ignored the old statisticians' warnings that correlation is not causation.

So before one makes a shallow argument against Sowell as just another conservative with prejudices against people he thinks are lazy, one should really look carefully at what he is saying. He is not saying that a person's misfortunes are all his own fault; far from it. He simply objects to innocent people having to pay to correct misfortunes they had no part in causing.

Finally, Sowell gets to the heart of the matter, which is the problem of misdiagnosing society's condition:

It is certainly a great misfortune to be born into families or communities whose values make educational or economic success less likely. But to have intellectuals and others come along and misstate the problem does not help to produce better results, even if it produces a better image.

Here I still very much agree with Sowell. For instance, I have seen first hand how many students in lower income neighborhoods are unable to succeed, not simply because they are poor, but because studying is not a cultural good for them. I suppose innate ability might occasionally have something to do with it, but as there is absolutely nothing we can do about innate ability, we ought to focus on what we can do, which is try to teach the value of learning. But to do this is to admit that there's something wrong with the culture in which these kids have grown up, which is potentially a difficult admission in today's politically correct climate.

However, here's where I part with Sowell. He says,

Political correctness may make it hard for anyone to challenge the image of helpless victims of an evil society. But those who are lagging do not need a better public relations image. They need the ability to produce better results for themselves-- and a romantic image is an obstacle to directing their efforts toward developing that ability.

I've added emphasis to this statement to clarify what I think is wrong with Sowell's philosophy. I do not think life is fundamentally about what each of us can do individually. Our collective identity also has meaning.

That's not to say I'm a "collectivist," which is what the Right often accuses the Left of being. No, indeed, I think the false rhetoric of the Left comes out of the same individualist mindset that plagues the Right.

Think about it. Instead of appealing to our sense of corporate identity as Americans to help less fortunate groups of people, the Left more often cries "injustice" as if certain individuals had been personally wronged. As Americans, we can't help but be outraged at personal injustice. So the Left basically keeps lying to us and telling us it's still all our fault--we're still discriminating against minorities, etc.

The tragedy is that there would be no need for this kind of rhetoric if we had more of a collective sense of success and failure. This is a fundamental question we should ask ourselves: How do we measure the success of our culture? Is it in the ability of individuals to have upward social mobility? Despite what many on the Left seem to say, I do believe America wins in that category.

Yet where we fail is to deal with the philosophical question of how we ought to truly measure success, and I'm not sure it should be limited to the success of individuals. Anyone who has ever been on a sports team or something similar (for me it was drum line in high school) knows what it means to succeed or fail as a team. "You're only as strong as your weakest link" was what I always heard. It doesn't matter how good your best player is; what matters is whether the group as a whole succeeds.

Along with this question of how we measure success comes the question, who is "we"? We know to be responsible for certain people in our lives--our family, our close friends, and if we are Christians, members of the church (many equivalents exist for other faiths). But what does it mean that we're all Americans? Does that mean we're responsible for one another? Are we in any sense a family? These are tricky questions.

I am certainly far from suggesting that we all ought to be by law responsible for one another in every way. Certainly there are limits to this idea. But I think conservatives do wrong to keep insisting that America is strong because it lets every man be an island.

Doubtless conservatives will tell me yes, we agree that it is good and right to care about others, but we believe that should left up to the individual, you see, for it is a greater moral good when it is not coerced by the government. There is a certain ring of moral truth in that, but on the other hand, at some point shouldn't all societies have ways of enforcing some sort of moral standard of caring about other people?

To be sure, no one is so omniscient as to know how to balance individual freedom with collective identity. Maybe in the Kingdom of God we somehow see both perfectly. After all, God is Trinity, and while each person in the Trinity is genuinely individual, yet the Trinity is a perfect collective, since the Trinity is One God. Maybe our failure to understand that paradox also leads to our failure to have a just political order.

But my point is that conservatives can't make a coherent political ideology out of pure individualism. It doesn't work, and it's immoral. Sowell's purist version of fairness as treating everyone exactly equally is not the ideal. When someone in your family is in trouble, you don't treat that person the same as everyone else; you go out of your way to help him.

Likewise, in any society that views itself in at least somewhat familial terms, certain people will be treated "unfairly" precisely because they are in need. Of course there are limits to this, but that doesn't mean we just throw out the whole idea of collective responsibility.

And if Sowell insists on throwing out the idea of collective responsibility, then I wonder if he is all that different from the intellectuals he is always criticizing. After all, like them, he seems willing to put abstract ideas before flesh and blood human beings.