What's The Benefit Of Being Fair

Different individuals have different ideas of what is fair.

However, some ideas have certain very practical consequences.. Fair means you're good to those who are good to you and bad to those who are bad to you.

We should be fair within that definition. Why? So people are good to us.

You see, humans are selfish. We maximize our profit. When a person is good to those who are good to him and evil to those who are evil to him, we, in the process of maximizing our profit, will want to be good to him.

Hence, people have incentives to be retaliotary. In other words they have incentive to be fair.

Of course, they also consider other issues. For example, if those who are evil to them are strong and those who are nice to them are weak, some people, will still get mad at the weak.

This has several important applications. One good strategy in business is to just be good to as many people as possible. Chance is, most businessmen will return the favor.

Anyway, let's move on.

What about if everyone is evil to us? What about if everyone is good to us? It takes resources to both retaliate or repay deeds. So what should we do?

A good way is to sort people from those most beneficial to us to those who are the most hostile, or least beneficial. The one least beneficial or most hostile will be our enemies and the one most beneficial, or least hostile will be our friend.

Usually, when somebody has huge bargaining, or militaristic power, such as heads of triads, then people tend to be nice to him. Hence, in order for a triad boss to be good to us we probably need to do more than just nothing. When someone is weak, like businessmen, people tend to be evil to him.

So many people need to do nothing to get donation from businessmen. However, most people will probably have to pay just so a triad boss leave them alone.

However, not being nice to a businessman that give donation and being nice to a Triad that use threat to extract money is not a fair strategy. It'll motivate people to threaten us around. In which case, just make your call.

Now, in ancient time, a bunch of slaves were late for work. The slaves are each asked one another "What's the penalty for being late? Death. What's the penalty for rebelling against the emperor? Death too, so let's rebel."

That was then the beginning of the end of the Chin dynasty. Chinese proverb says, "Even Chen Zeh can be an emperor." That slave, Chen Zeh, then did become emperor by rebelling.

You see, even when people put guns in our head, we always have a choice. We can choose to fight, we can choose to flee, or we can choose to yield. That choice is important so we shouldn't ignore it.

That choice, the choice that we can fight or flee provides incentive for our oppressors for not demanding too much from us.

Countries whose taxes are too high will see their capitals fly to other countries. Countries that oppress consensual acts will be full with corruption and dictatorship. Countries that tolerate murders and burglars but punish porn and prostitution will be full with violence.

Countries that prohibit gambling, liquors, and drugs, will see that such things exist anyway. However, all those protection money will go to corrupt cops and mafia rather than legitimate businesses.

Countries that judge people by their morality and intent rather than by results and productivity will have a lot of hypocricy. If we want people to have good intention, we need to judge others based on result.