I suppose that the idea of fairness itself is the real naivete. Really, since there are not unlimited resources to divvy out according to certified need - a whole other problem to be addressed, what constitutes real need? - it is not a question of providing resources in any fair manner, but in a less egregious manner. The reality is that some people have greater needs than others. Some of those needs can be met others cannot.
The best distribution is one that regards the core values of the society and distributes per need based on those values. Accepting, for a moment, that we value all life, we have to ask whether we value some life more highly and why. The classic debate is found not with abortion - the life of the unborn child weighed against the life of the mother, or the impact on its quality if this child is born - but with regard to which lives are forfeit in this society. The life of a convicted murderer is reckoned as less valuable than that of the victim. A soldiers life is expendable - though costly and valuable - for the sake of a (hopefully) higher value. What of eugenics, the systematic and intentional elimination of weaker stock from the gene pool in the name of creating a stronger humanity?
Hitler, misreading Nietzsche, wanted to create an ubermensch by the elimination of lesser bloodlines from the alleged purity of the Aryan nation. The nationalization of any program of eugenics seems to me to be an act of oppression based on arbitrarily legislated norms of human excellence. Why is white skin intrinsically superior to my olive skin? This is present also in Mormonism, though in recent years the doctrine that disallows entrance into Celestial Heaven (only Terrestrial and Telesial for me, I fear) for non-whites has fallen into disfavor. If the ultimate norm of what is fair is the wellbeing of the race, then the elimination of that which would dilute the race becomes the fair action. This twisted logic became the justification for the final solution of the Nazis and is still present in white supremacism as much as in any group that pretends that a language, skin color, sexual preference, or other measure makes for weaker humanity.
Is a level playing field fair? If I am in a wheel chair, stuck in the mud, it does not matter how level the field. I will always be at a disadvantage. It is not merely a level field that I would need to compete, I would need adaptations and modifications above and beyond the norm. What constitutes fairness in a land of limited resources?
I am not convinced that the good of the whole is the only measure that can be drawn. That it much too short sighted. If that were the case then all children with disability would be subject to removal from the gene pool (and perhaps the parents compelled not to breed further?). The obvious difficulty is that one cannot predict what gifts and what abilities a person will bring to the whole based merely on cognition or physical ability. I think that the ideal of fairness requires us to transcend what is good for the individual or the whole and look at values that go beyond the transient necessities that are perceived and judge on the basis of what affirms life itself.
Fairness, however a chimera it may be, still stands as a nearly platonic ideal that calls us to reach beyond our own needs and see that we are involved in humanity. That we see that any death diminishes us because, just a clod washed away from the main diminishes the whole, so does the passing of one person diminish me (apologies to John Donne) is the goal of fairness.
We reach beyond ourselves to make ourselves greater by giving all the more and in the act of kindness and generosity we become all the richer and find that resources that we never imagined are created in that act.
Ah, but I am only a fool...
