Contra Private Fairness

Bart Wilson

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: This paper attempts to clarify our understanding of the everyday use of fair as we apply it to economic behavior. I first examine the decomposition of fair into its semantic primitives and discuss implications of recent research which indicates that the word is untranslatable into any other language, i.e., the concept of fair is distinctly Anglo. I also make a Wittgensteinian appeal to context and human sociality as an indispensable tether for what we mean by a fair experience and what we epistemologically know about fairness. The principal implication of this is that rules that guide fair behavior are not located in an individual’s private utility function but instead reside in the connections that the individual has to his cultural environs.

Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.chapman.edu/ESI/wp/Porter_GroupPredictionInformationMarkets.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Contra Private Fairness* (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:08-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Megan Luetje ().