“That’s not fair!” We have all said it, and we have all heard it. Everyone is born with a sense of fairness, but somehow everyone doesn’t agree with what is fair.
This feeling fairness has a built in bias that tends to favor our own perspective. If we feel we are better off under a certain set of rules, then we are more likely to consider the rules fair. It takes someone with great empathy to see fairness from another person's perspective.
What is even more troubling for those who are rational is that “rational fairness” can often be perceived as “unfair” by almost everyone. In fact, how we choose to perceive things can change what we think is fair.
What is fairness?
adjective: in accordance with the rules or standards; legitimate.
adverb: without cheating or trying to achieve unjust advantage.
What we learn from these definitions of fairness is that it all depends upon some “rules” or “standards”. If everyone can agree to the rules, then any outcome that adheres to the rules is inherently fair.
An sufficiently complex set of rules needs to be derived from principles.
principle: a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.
If we are to be rational about fairness, then all rules should derive from principles and should never be in contradiction with those principles. A system that is in contradiction with its principles is not in line with the rules or standards and therefore illegitimate and unfair.
What principles guide voting?
Here are some general principles that people may have:
- everyone get’s a say
- everyone is equal
- majority rules
- secrecy
When it comes to joint ownership of a company or currency, the principles are effectively the same except it is every-share instead of every-person.
A voting system is a means of measuring everyone’s equal say for the purposes of making a decision that is binding on the group. Whenever there are a group of individuals there are two or more different opinions on which way a decision can be made.
Unfortunately the range of available opinions is infinite and more often than not contingent upon other people’s opinions. This means that a perfectly expressive voting system would have everyone submit a smart contract that would take everyone else’s opinion as input and generate an output. A computer would then iterate as many times as necessary to compute a stable opinion.
Unfortunately this process is not guaranteed to reach equilibrium and the order of computation can influence the outcome.
It is possible to express opinions that cancel out mathematically yet cannot be calculated iteratively. In the debate between rabbit season and duck season the result of that vote is “unknown” until someone else changes balance of power.
Perception of Fairness in Voting
Everyone (or every share) is entitled to an opinion and deserves equal weight. When two people have opposite opinions (rabbit season vs not rabbit season) both opinions are legitimate. How do we decide who wins? Can a decision be made?
Under this situation we have no outcome that can be rendered. When exactly two people are voting and they disagree the result is “no decision can be made”. In most cases this means status-quo remains unchanged.
The voting rules can be configured to bias the decision. For example if “last vote wins” then the balance of power is shifted… who ever moves for change first loses. If first vote wins then it becomes a race to vote. Alternatively the system could be biased to say that in the event of a tie, “duck season” is chosen.
In other words, the rules of the game can favor certain outcomes over other outcomes. This may be acceptable assuming everyone agrees the bias is “fair”, but I doubt Daffy would think defaulting to “duck season” is fair.
A perfectly fair voting system would bias the outcome in favor of neither Daffy nor Bugs.
Perceived Unfairness is often a Rejection of Reality
Suppose Daffy always disagrees with Bugs. Bugs could claim this is “unfair” because it means that neither Daffy nor Bugs gets to decide. It is always Bieber Season.
Is it legitimate for someone born without legs to claim that it is “unfair” that other people get to walk around? Is it legitimate for someone born in Africa to claim it is “unfair” that someone else was born in USA? If you were alone on an island, is it “unfair” that you have to do everything for yourself? Fairness has nothing to do with it.
Our much of our situation in life is beyond our control. If you happen to be born into a world with an evil twin who always does the opposite of you and opposes you at every stage is that unfair? To whom is it unfair, twin A or twin B? Depending upon whose perspective you adopt the “other guy” is evil.
In effect what someone claiming unfairness is saying is, “their opinion is unfair, they are not entitled to that opinion”. They are upset because both of them are attempting to steer the car in equal and opposite directions and therefore the car continues straight.
Fairness is all in Our Head
Imagine you were the only living person in the world and everyone else was a robot that was pre-programmed with a certain set of behaviors. Could you claim anything is unfair? That is just the way the world works. There are no “people” that are hurting you, the rules are created by nature and beyond the power of you or any of the robots to control.
It is the attitude of entitlement that is the seed of unfairness. The expectation that you deserve something that someone else has. This attitude of entitlement is often rooted in envy, you want what the other person has and you feel they don’t deserve it.
When it comes to negative voting the feeling of unfairness is identical to feeling it is unfair that you were born with an evil twin while everyone else wasn’t.
Principles Against Negative Voting
In an effort to look at things from both sides, I attempted to identify any principles of voting that may contradict with the concept of negative voting. What I came up with is the following:
- The only legitimate opinion is one that is derived independently of everyone else’s opinion
- All votes should be secret
The theory behind this stance is that it takes work to create an opinion, but costs nothing to destroy an opinion. Furthermore, if all votes are secret then it becomes impossible to express a legitimate opinion that is exactly the opposite of someone else.
I feel both of these principles are fundamentally flawed. For starters, every choice and idea we have in life is influenced by the opinion of others. We are more likely to adopt someone else’s opinion than develop one of our own. Tribe mentality, catch phrases, and memes. It is far easier to copy than to create. In fact, more often than not people are not able to defend their own opinions from first principles, but instead appeal to authority.
We can conclude from this that affirmative voting would not be fully legitimate independently derived opinion, but the aggregation of other people’s opinion filtered through personal bias. In other words, it is just as biased and derivative as a negative vote.
Secret voting prevents accountability. Accountability is critical in game theory, especially in prisoners dilemma. If people down’t know who is responsible for bad votes, then they don’t know who to shun in the market. Without recourse people will vote in anti-social manner. In other words, the principle of the secret ballot is in direct contradiction with the principles of transparency and accountability.
Conclusion
I still believe that negative voting is a critical component of an anarchist society and is inherently fair. I also believe that every other system is less expressive and ultimately less able to represent the will of the people (or shares).
That said, perception often matters more than reality and we must design systems that are perceived to be fair even if they are logically and “objectively” less fair from the perspective of mathematics, deductive reasoning, and first principles.
Perception is Reality. Change your perception and you change your reality.