This article is really important. Its by an experimental economist yet its thesis is that the English word fair is untranslatable. This insight is, for me, revolutionary. As speakers of the imperial language, English, we often laugh about untranslatable words and idioms from other languages and cultures. These words evidence what is most provincial, piquant, local, silly, somehow most typically Swedish, French, German, etc. By implication, this article proposes that the word fair, something supposedly at the center of Anglo-American notions of justice and equality, might be comparably provincial, local, piquant, even silly. Yet its more sinister than that, because the notion of fair is chimerical-- we pretend its a matter of morality, but its actually a measure of what we can get away with, and comes into play only in certain situations: Wierzbickas research indicated that there are two key contextual elements that make fair precisely the right word for the situation. First, the circumstances entail a tradeoff in welfare between individuals: some action benefits one person at the expense of another. The second element is that other people in the community think that there are limits to how much people are allowed to cost others in order to benefit themselves. This and the fact that fair actually comes into the language at the same time as the Industrial Revolution says a lot about our currently patently unfair justice system, economic system, income inequality, etc., and the cover given to these inequalities by the word fair theatlantic/business/archive/2009/01/fairs-fair/112/
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 14:56:50 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015