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John Rawls - Eine Theorie Der Gerechtigkeit ALS Fairness (German, Paperback)

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Gerechtigkeit als Fairness (Book, ) [www.farmersmarketmusic.com]

At a typical average apeaking rate of words per minute, one fair in 15, words would be one fair per minutes of talk. Given three to four hours of conversation time per day to minutes , which seems to be about average though the distribution has a lot of variance , this would be around 2 uses of fair per day.

Putting it all together, it seems more accurate to say that "if you're like most Americans, you probably hear or speak that word a couple of times a day". Depending on how much and how fast you read, you'd get a few more by eye as well as by ear. Did you know that fair is […] distinctly Anglo in origin?

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And it's clear that Wilson's summary gets some of the facts wrong. Wierzbicka analyzes the OED's citations for forms of fair and unfair going back to the 9th century, and argues that "the familiar twentieth-century sense of unfair as, for example, in unfair competition emerged and spread widely only in the nineteenth century", with the earlier uses that seem similar being in fact a vaguer and more general word of condemnation.

This seems to be true, but her argument about fair struck me as much less convincing. Equitably, honestly, impartially, justly; according to rule. The earliest examples that sound "modern" in their use of fair are those with the phrase fair play , attested from the end of the sixteenth century onward. In fact, however, even the phrase fair play is misleading as putative evidence for a pre-eighteenth-century emergence of the modern concept of 'fairness': In fact, one can speculate that the notion of 'fair play' as a whole played a significant role in the emergence of the new concept of 'fair': To put it differently, the notion of 'fair play' appears to have become absorbed, as it were, in the meaning of 'fair' itself; the meaning of fair , as applied to all types of human interaction, appears to have been built on the model of 'fair play'.

In the first place, the relevant sense of "fair play" seems to start about a hundred years earlier than the OED citations than Wierzbicka relies on. A bit of search on LION turns up e. Not only are these examples earlier than Wierzbicka's "end of the sixteenth century" — and certainly well before the "late eighteenth century" and "industrial revolution" times periods that Wilson cites — but they're all figurative, applying the notion of "fair play" outside of a literal game-playing context.

And whether or not the word fair was used before in this sense, outside of its collocation with play , Wilson's concept of fairness-with-respect-to-social-norms is clearly present. I'd be surprised, furthermore, not to find things from the same period in French or Italian or Dutch expressing similar sentiments.

Arguably, the emergence of the concept of "fairness" reflects a shift away from absolute morality to "procedural and contractual morality," and from the gradual shift from "just" to "fair" can be seen as parallel to the shifts from good to right and also from wise and also true to reasonable: But it would be nice to find a way to make the linguistic arguments — whether about changes across time or across space — in a more testable form.

To play the winning linguistic card in a fair game of social science, it seems to me, we need a better way to track usage across time and space in a quantitative way. January 28, 9: Well, there is something to be said for the idea that not every language has a word which corresponds one-to-one with the English word "fairness". As anyone who has studied political philosophy and many others knows, John Rawls, in his extremely influential "A Theory of Justice" presents a theory of "justice as fairness". How do you translate that into other languages? The German version seems to have been "Gerechtigkeit als Fairness".

In Swedish, a child who in English would cry "That's not fair! In the Swedish translation of "A Theory of Justice", translator Annika Persson discusses these problems and notes that Swedish once had a corresponding word for fairness, "billighet", but this meaning of the word is now obsolescent and "billig" means "cheap" in everyday parlance. Of course the idea of "fair play" is well-established in countries like Sweden and Germany, both of whom also tend to do quite well at these game experiments.

But distinguishing the words for justice and fairness may well be quite peculiar to the Anglos. But in his original essay , Wilson has tried to get ahead of you on this:. German speakers might note that they frequently also use the word gerecht in addition to fair; French speakers might say that they have not one but two words for it: However, depending upon context, gerecht is also translatable into English as just or equitable. That's a three-to-one translation, not one-to-one, and probably one reason why the Germans directly import the English word.

These languages may have the sense of fairness, but we have a word for it that they do not. I don't find this line of argument very convincing. In general, that's because it's not clear that polysemy or greater or lesser specificity of a language's words in some conceptual space has the strong relationship to thought and culture that the argument presupposes it should. In this specific case, moreover, English fair is also polysemous meaning "considerable" in phrases like "a fair amount" or "a fair number", and "moderate" in phrases like "fair-sized", and "of slightly below average quality" in contexts like "fair to poor", and so on.

Does this mean that we anglophones are also handicapped in our appreciation of fairness, tending to confuse it with medium-sized portions of questionable quality? But in fairness to Wilson, he's all over gerecht , and he's tried to frame his argument the whole "one to one" deal specifically to allow for it.

I think Wiezbicka's general argument is bogus. Someone who offers one dollar in the Ultimatum Game is being perfectly procedurally fair — his offer is according to the rules of the game as established by the experimenters and as understood by both players.

Substantive fairness is very much not dead even if people still have a lot of difficulty agreeing on some of the corner cases and procedures that disserve it lose legitimacy as a result. But the rules are only agreed on if a sufficient number of people think they produce just, good and wise results. In modern Swedish, however, it means exactly the same thing as "fair", it really is one-to-one.

Aren't we talking about two different issues? One is whether "fair" is English only, and one is whether the presence of such a word has something to do with whether people have a concept of fairness and therefore may not play fair or expect fairness? In the case of the latter, I think there is some research that might be relevant. In it the subjects behaved as if they had a concept of fairness, despite not having a word for "fair.

January 28, Wierzbicka's argument is consistent with the view that all social mammals say have some concept of fairness, but the exact interpretation of this concept, its cultural prominence, and especially its role in the economic aspects of human societies have varied significantly over space and time.

Pretty much one-to-one correspondence here — I can't think of any more appropriate English word to translate the Slovene, or vice versa, with Slovene as my native language and near-native knowledge of English. Funnily enough, fer exists as a recent 'slang', our linguists would say loanword in Slovenian, meaning, well, fair.

I have seen kids, including myself when I was younger, shout To ni fer! It is used in practically any context that one would say 'That's not fair! Make of that what you will. In any case, the concept obviously preceded the borrowing. A tiny quibble about one of the examples although I entirely agree with the general thrust of the argument: John Rawls … presents a theory of "justice as fairness". If Oskar is right, then Persson's translation of "Justice as Fairness" would backtranslate not as "Justice as Reasonableness" but as "Fairness as Reasonableness", which would seem to miss Rawls' point entirely.

All this points to the reasonableness of Wierzbicka's perspective, which is that. Some of the analyses might be wrong in detail, and the strength of the relation to thought and culture is open to argument, but the scholarship is serious and so are the ideas. To claim that fair is one-to-one untranslateable seems a stupid statement, as stupid as the suggestion that the equation of equitability with a light skin in the word fair is a clear example of racist bias and 'white man's justice'. The Spanish is probably heard a couple of times a day and more by those who deal with young children, particularly the parents of siblings.

In Spanish, I guess "Justice as Fairness" comes out as "La justicia como equidad", not "La justicia como justicia", suggesting what the problem is. The fact that "fair play" is "juego limpio" underlines the lack of one-to-one correspondence. In the past, we've discussed and ridiculed claims about "no word for sex" and "no word for when" and "no word for accountability" and so on. These were naive and often ill-informed claims, made as rhetorical gestures by people who had not thought very hard about the facts and ideas involved. Anna Wierzbicka's book is a different matter — she's a linguistically sophisticated polyglot, who has looked carefully into the history and thought carefully about what it means.

That doesn't mean that her facts and interpretations are all correct, but they can't be dismissed so cavalierly. I'm afraid that Wilson presents a sort of stick-figure version of her argument in his essay along with getting some dates and so on wrong ; and Suriowiecki's third-hand version is much worse "the word 'fair' is apparently untranslatable into any other language". The current e-newsletter for Skeptic magazine http: Mostly, they don't, but if they had a word it would vary across species.

I suspect there really are "one-to-one translatable" words, but they may be hard to find. The first idea that popped into my head was hippopotamus , but then I considered the possibility that some West African language could have two different words for the two species I have no idea if this is true. It's well known that such basic words as kinship and color terms merge and divide categories in different ways cross-linguistically.

Proper nouns and registered trademarks probably don't really count. Hmmm…maybe my suspicion is wrong. The whole idea is rather silly, anyway, unless you're desperate to believe in the flawed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. So vague, so indefinite — why, they don't even have a word for the! They can say "a day and a night" or "24 hours", but to them there is no qualitative difference between 23 hours and 24 hours, only a difference in quantity. They don't have a word for a either. Maybe they're just too definite? Or maybe it compounds the vagueness…. Seeing how many people have counterarguments to "no word for fair", I really want to locate a copy of Wierzbicka now.

I'm guessing Wilson stripped something very important from Wierzbicka's argument and unfortunately his butchered version is the one populating the Anglo-American blogosphere. And we wonder why different races don't get along. In the Brockhaus German dictionary the entry for "fair" is "eingedeutscht: I'd want to translate "ritterlich" as "chivalrous" or "gallant".

Not quite what we Anglos mean by "fair". I recently read a paper about dogs showing a sense of fairness, which tells me that the idea lies so deep in the mammalian brain that no word is needed to experience the feeling. I find it very hard to believe that English speakers don't understand the concept "hour period". That is especially interesting given that, not so long ago I argued that "justice" and "fairness" were the same thing there was a discussion about whether Cree had a word for "justice" , except that one had to be made within the trappings of law.

The judge's job is not to be "just", it is to be "fair" with regard to the specific limits put in place by the law. An interesting point is that the exact French complement to the childish "it's not fair! If the usage of the word "fair" to mean "a roughly equal allocation of resources" is somehow related to industrialization as Wilson seems to claim , then surely the language he should be examining first is not English, but Dutch, since the industrial revolution began in The Netherlands.

In any case, his claim of a link between industrialization and a word for the concept of just allocation being found in a language should be eminently testable empirically, since so many non-English-speaking countries have now industrialized. Did Japanese, for example, only have a word for this concept after ?

The Ultimatum Game experiments are very revealing of the methodology of mainstream aka autistic economics, which is as follows:. Articulate a theoretical model of human decision-making.

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Once such idiocies are cleared out of the way, we can discuss whether cultural differences in cognition are elucidated by examining the distribution and history of word senses and common collocations. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. January 28, 8: We translators talk to our computers all day. This thread is focused on the English word fair and the concept that underlies it, but for readers who are interested it's probably worth pointing out that Anna Wierzbicka has written extensively on the general topic of how words don't mean quite the same thing from one culture to another e. Not to mention "etre fair-play".

Conduct experiments with human subjects to confirm model. When experimental results fail to confirm model, accuse human subjects of acting irrationally.

Gerechtigkeit als Fairness

Of course, it may be necessary to define "rationality" in a very specific, even perverse, way for this to succeed. Continue to teach and publish the theoretical model articulated in Step 1. It is natural to expect that word-to-word translation is possible, but experience teaches one that it rarely is.

I tend to believe this lack of equivalence is a result of chance factors rather than some Sapir-Whorfian process or its converse. Of course it's handy to have an everyday word with that specific meaning Hungarian — like other languages — does have hifalutin words that mean "fair" , and several languages have adopted our word. From midnight to midnight? Einstein gifted us a return to the age before steam — time is knowable only locally, any attempt at national or international unification of time is at best an approximation of the unknowable.

The specified hour period makes it seem like a monotonic time is meant, something like the TAI, time seen as a continually ticking clock, the kind of time a wristwatch measures. But on the other hand midnight is a concept closely tied to the Earth's rotation, like a sundial, ever-changing and unpredictable. Surely, the Scandinavians cannot be such vague and non-specific people that they don't care about the difference, which might add up to several seconds per decade, and can only increase over time? More practically, I do not want to be thrown off a train half an hour from my destination just because I took the and it doesn't arrive home until Nor do I wish to buy two tickets.

When it comes to the definition of a day, I'm with Humpty Dumpty. The closest thing is a stoolie or a snitch. January 28, 1: I remember a point about cross-cultural communications that concerned the term for "fair" in Confucian-influenced cultures. The illustrative anecdote went something like this forgive me if I misremember any of the details:. In an American high school class, a Japanese exchange student raises her hand and asks permission to refer to her Japanese-English dictionary during the essay portion of her exam.

The teacher refuses to allow it. Her classmates protest, saying "That's not fair! In a Japanese secondary school class, an American exchange student raises his hand and asks permission to refer to his English-Japanese dictionary during the essay portion of his exam.

His classmates protest, saying, "But he's so 'kawaiso'! This implies that the Japanese students bargained with the teacher from a position of subservience, appealing to the authority figure's generosity to take pity on an underling. In contrast, by using the term 'fair' the American students bargained with the teacher from a position of equality, appealing to the teacher's conscience and making her feel guilty for putting the foreign student at a disadvantage compared to her classmates.

In practical terms, 'fair' and 'kawaiso' serve the same purpose in their respective languages and situations. Culturally, however, they are worlds apart. So when non-English speakers say "of course we have a word for fair! In French, loyal is a pretty good translation of 'fair' in the context of competition sports or business ; in fact, the Petit Larousse defines fair-play as comportement loyal. This use has carried over to other Romance languages, so that 'unfair competition' is competencia desleal in Spanish, concorrenza sleale in Italian, and so on. But because in Spanish leal also has the English meaning of 'loyal', Mexicans use parejo as a more exact equivalent of the English 'fair'.

All this has to do with this particular meaning of the very polysemous 'fair'. Fair weather beau temps , fair hair cheveux blonds , a fair price prix correct etc. Bush, but that attribution has been discredited, here. I think the Skeptic interpretation is consistent with my interpretation, which is that even monkeys want to be treated "fairly.

January 28, 2: January 28, 3: Believing in the "no word for X" meme does not imply believing in Sapir-Whorf. That is, you may think that it tells us a lot about Venusians to know that they have no word for "lie", without thinking that the absence of the word prevents them for lying. At least as likely, the absence of exposure to lying prevented them from having a word for it, but either way it would say something about the culture. The literary source of my example, however, did buy into the Sapir-Whorf interpretation. On the news yesterday, I heard a report about an exceptional snowfall in some desert country Dubai?

January 28, 4: Following up my own comment — Or maybe it wouldn't say something about the culture. I'm not willing to stand by that, although I do think it would raise interesting questions for further investigation. The point I wanted to make is that you could think it said something about the culture using a different line of reasoning than Sapir-Whorf.

January 28, 5: He would have seen differences between English and French or German and Spanish as fairly insignificant. The problem of the translator is to negotiate the differences in the ways in which the semantic pie is to be divided "fairly" among different words and concepts. The problem maybe is not Whorfianism but nominalism: This thread is focused on the English word fair and the concept that underlies it, but for readers who are interested it's probably worth pointing out that Anna Wierzbicka has written extensively on the general topic of how words don't mean quite the same thing from one culture to another e.

Her basic starting point and recurring theme is a general skepticism about the idea of universal concepts. Like Mark, I'm a little uncomfortable defending a bunch of neo-Whorfians, but like Mark, I agree that Wierzbicka's work is serious scholarship, and it's written in a fairly approachable style.

If you want to read more on this you might also try Umberto Eco's book Mouse or Rat? January 28, 6: It's an interesting semantic question what the difference between justice and fairness even is. After some thought, I've concluded the best illustration I can think of is the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. It's interesting that human instinct seems to prefer fairness over justice.

I'd bet sure that instinct plays a large part in the results of your average Ultimatum game. From the standpoint of justice, neither player deserves any money, so it's best to take what you're offered, but it hardly ever seems to play out that way. Incidentally, this is why "Deal or No Deal" is so frustrating to watch or interesting. Your mileage may vary. I read recently of experiments in which dogs demonstrated an awareness of, and insistence on, fairness.

If dogs understand fairness, it must be a pretty basic social concept. I gather that many languages perhaps by design, more or less? I would expect such a language to have problems expressing fairness as we and dogs understand it. When business people say as they seem to do about every five minutes, lately "It is what it is", I always respond, "Fair is fair! This gets quizzical looks, but I hear the former expression less frequently, a development I put down to operant conditioning. Let a Russian speaker enter the fray. In terms of social context, contemporary as well as historical, is probably as far as you can get from England and still remain in Europe.

Russian does not really have two different words meaning "law" and "justice", but in the context of discussion, that is "by the book" let's take "law" zakon or "rules" pravila. But Russian has a perfect translation for "fair" — spravedlivyj. Hey, we have even another word for that — chestnyj like in fair play, another meaning "honest". The difference is approximately "spravedlivyj" — fair by outcome, "chestnyj" — fair by rules e.

Are we even better than Anglo? More interesting, there is a famous Russian saying "Would you be liked to be judged by law or by "fairness"? Used normally to emphasize that the two are not the same. I originally thought it might have come from games like football, where a referee blows a whistle to indicate action not allowed in the game. A couple of online sources attribute it to the whistle blowing of English policemen when they saw a crime.

I have no idea where it came from, but either origin would seem to be foreign to Russian. I'm not sure that that's the point. It's a question of whether they have a term meaning "someone who is privy to an injustice and exposes it".

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