Do you get annoyed when someone boards the elevator with you only to ride up one floor? The stairs are right there, could they not just walk up a single flight? Well, consider this.  Someone boards the elevator on the first floor with a 3rd floor destination,  but instead of getting off at floor 2 and walking the last flight of stairs, they ride all the way to 3.

Doesn’t seem as annoying, right?  So what explains the difference? It can’t be that you are just appalled at their laziness. Because riding to floor N rather than getting of at N-1 is just as lazy.  It must be the externality.

Getting on the elevator only to ride up a single floor delays everybody else. The decision to ride to the second floor rather than the third isn’t the same because whichever he chooses the elevator is going to have to stop once.

Ah, but what if he gets on, floor 2 is already pushed but 3 is not. Then the tradeoff is the same.  Because if he were to get off at floor 2 and walk he would spare everyone else the additional stop at 3. So you get annoyed at a single-floor rider you if and only if you get annoyed at this marginal-floor rider.

Well, not quite. Becuase there is one more difference.  After he makes the sunk decision to get on the elevator, but before he makes the marginal decision, the problem changes.  In particular, as he is riding he gains some new information:  he can observe how many other people get on the elevator and are going to be affected by his decision.

This puts the marginal-floor rider in a different position than the single-floor rider in terms of social welfare. Because the single-floor rider’s decision whether to board at all is made without knowing how many other riders will be on the elevator.  The marginal-floor rider can condition his decision on the number of riders.

Indeed, this means that you may even have cause to forgive Mr. Single-Floor and yet be annoyed at Ms. Marginal-Floor.   He may have reasonably expected that few people, if any, were going to be inconvenienced.  But if it turns out that the elevator is nearly full then the sum total of their delay due to Mr. SF’s decision to board is a sunk cost, but it’s an avoidable cost for Ms. MF.  If she doesn’t get off at 2 and walk an extra flight, you all have plenty of reason to be annoyed.

This is all very important.

Also, this explains the otherwise inexplicable glass elevators, and raises the puzzle of why we don’t see them in office buildings.

That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect
by Stefan Collini

AMERICANS TRAVELING ABROADoften hear this country discussed with great passion and intensity. These discussions, it will not surprise even homebodies to learn, are often critical. Nor is it surprising that the criticisms range from the uninformed to the witheringly acute; they fall on the same spectrum as American self-criticism. Foreigners can be imprecise or simply misinformed about this country—I remember being asked at a small bookstore in New Delhi why Americans would never elect a president with a postgraduate degree—but a unique (at least to us) perspective can also yield real insight. Different news sources or cultural reference points will produce distinct analyses. No criticism is invalid simply because of the critic; what matters are the opinions themselves.

I once listened to a large German baker in a café in downtown Frankfurt impugn American voters for voting George W. Bush into the White House. I nodded and occasionally interjected a thought or two while doing my best not to react defensively. Here was a Hessian who understood politics, and was simply outraged by the administration’s policies—policies that the American people had in some measure validated by reelecting the president. He had substantive reasons for his anger. But try commenting, as an American, on Indian or German politics in the same tones and with the same vehemence, and see the result.

After the man’s interrupted monologue, I mentioned that the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, had gone off to work for Vladimir Putin’s cronies at Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth. Upon hearing this, the man looked sternly at me and said that Americans had no right to lecture or criticize Germany, especially after Abu Ghraib and Bush’s foolish comment about Putin’s soul. He was offended that an American would dare call into question the ethical choices of a German leader, and, by implication, of German voters. Germany is hardly a poor or struggling country, but it does not share America’s power and standing, and criticism is too often defined as acceptable when it is made against the “more powerful” and offensive when it is made against the “less powerful.” If this is in part a positive sign that people are sensitive to the less fortunate, it is also a threat to uninhibited intellectual inquiry.  

I now wish I could fly back to Germany and give my interlocutor a copy of Stefan Collini’s book. This volume is only sixty-seven pages long, and small pages too, but Collini, a distinguished historian of ideas, has written a powerfully argued manifesto on the subject of offense and criticism. The book is neither densely philosophical nor as militant as books that have covered some some of the same ground, such as Robert Hughes’s The Culture of Complaint. But Collini’s deft dismantling of various forms of cultural relativism—conveyed in clear and concise prose—are sure to be debated and discussed by anyone who engages with his important essay. His decision to forgo real world examples and instead focus on principles slyly puts the reader in mind of recent controversies (such as the one over Danish cartoons) while contributing to the clarity of his argument.

Collini begins by defining “offense.”  From a dictionary entry, he writes that the taking of offense is often seen as intensely related to one’s feelings. This may suggest, he writes, “that if someone does not feel offended, they have not been offended. And this may in turn seem to entail the reverse proposition, namely that each individual is the only possible judge of whether or not they have been offended.” For claims of offense to be given respect, however, an objective standard needs to have been violated by the offender. No one, for example, is offended by people who snore in their sleep. We might find them annoying, but they do not offend us. Nor is sympathy always granted to those who claim to have taken offense. To say of someone that they “do not easily take offence” is to compliment them, Collini notes. The bar, in other words, is higher than it could be.

Collini is also aware that in many societies today, free speech is highly valued, even at the cost of offense. “If we confine ourselves to the traditional form of the debate about ‘free speech,’ it is not difficult for those of a liberal disposition that the rights of criticism should be guaranteed in any tolerably open society, even when the activity risks giving offence to some of those being criticized.” And yet Collini sees the outlines of a problem: “Those who think of themselves as committed to ‘progressive’ moral and political causes have come to believe that two of the central requirements of an enlightened global politics are, first, treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.”

Treating people with respect is a fine goal, but Collini notices that respect tends to be shown with special deference to so-called “out groups.” Claims of offense that would otherwise be ignored are instead given credence and even deference. Collini also correctly identifies the people who tend to fall into this trap. Very few “progressive” forces, for example, would have shown any “understanding” of hurt Christian feelings if Jesus had been mocked in a Danish newspaper. The entire force of the argument against the offensiveness of the Danish cartoons was based on the concern that Muslims were somehow less powerful than other religious believers. But this hardly qualifies as an adequate justification for a double standard.

This is Collini’s central passage: “Where arguments are concerned—that is, matters that are pursued by means of reasons and evidence—the most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being an intelligent reflective human being.” And in case this seems too easy or too glib, he adds:

“This does not mean assuming that people are entirely—or even primarily—rational, and it does not mean that people are, in practice, always and only persuaded by reasons and evidence. It means treating other people as we wish to be treated ourselves in this matter—namely, as potentially capable of understanding the grounds for any action or statement that concerns us. But to so treat them means that, where reason and evidence are concerned, they cannot be thought of as primarily defined by being members of the ‘Muslim community or ‘Black community’ or ‘gay community.’”

What is crucial here is the ability of people to evaluate and to criticize, and to not feel as if their doing so is given more or less respect based on the groups to which they belong. Their words do not gain force or lose force—or “credibility,” to deploy a nonsensical and overused term—because of their specific identities. 

The related point, which Collini also touches upon, is that if one decides to criticize a culture or a tradition or a work of art, doing so is not an act of Western arrogance. Criticism is not Western or Eastern or Christian or Jewish, and those facing criticism—and those societies and cultures facing criticism—should respond in a spirit of openness about truth. To withhold criticism from certain communities or religions is, in Collini’s word, a form of condescension towards them. It denies these groups the ability to engage in constructive dialogue, and to fortify their own values. In the final analysis, everyone loses.

Collini does not adequately address the issue of when people should take offense, because his focus is on the inequitable way in which offense is deemed valid. Moreover, his vision of the public square, where ideas find free flow among honest debaters, may strike some as too optimistic. There is no such public square yet in existence. (He acknowledges this criticism). But he ends very strongly: “When engaged in public argument … do not be so afraid of giving offence that you allow bad arguments to pass as though they were good ones, and do not allow your proper concern for the vulnerable to exempt their beliefs and actions from that kind of rational scrutiny to which you realize, in principle, your own beliefs must also be subjected.”

And Collini offhandedly mentions something that is infrequently recognized about cultural relativism: that no one is intellectually consistent in their relativism. Those most fond of relativist arguments, for example, are the first to belittle American politics and culture. The conclusion is obvious, and important: if relativism were widely and consistently embraced, and criticism were increasingly stifled, the results would be both boring and sinister.  

By DICK CAVETT, January 9, 2009

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

There are two kinds of insult. “I was bored by your book” is one kind. “Your book? Once I put it down, I couldn’t pick it up,” is the other.

Although both are insults, only one is witty. Or, at least, funny. I suppose we should reserve the accolade “wit” for the very highest practitioners of the art — Parker, Wilde, Shaw, Twain, Kaufman, Levant, Marx et al. Some would include Rickles. (As when Sinatra entered a club while Don was onstage. Rickles: “Make yourself comfortable, Frank, hit somebody.”)

While on the subject, I believe it was writer/critic Clive James who is said to have remarked, when a man punched Sinatra in the face one night outside the stage door, “That’s the first time the fan hit the . . . .”

If there is a Top Ten list of insults, Churchill’s most famous one would be at least number three. It is, of course, the well-known exchange between Sir Winston and an irate lady MP.

Often botched in the re-telling, the correct version, according to an MP who claimed to have witnessed the notorious exchange, was:

Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

Madame, you are ugly.

Mr. Churchill, you are extremely drunk!

And you, Madame, are extremely ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober.

Somewhere the witless got hold of it and added “..and you’ll still be ugly,” shamelessly spelling it out for the slow to catch on. The underlining of and the verbal stress on “I” needs no further help. The boobish add-on sinks it.

*****

Great humorists are great insulters.

Someone should do a book, or thick booklet at least, of the collected cracks by Mark Twain, sprung from his lifelong lack of admiration — to put it mildly — for the French.

I cannot find this sentence again but shall do my damnedest to get it as right as possible for you. The sentence includes a reference to “that mixture in his voice of awe and reverence and lust which burns in a Frenchman’s eye when it falls on another man’s centime.”

A lesser writer might have had it, “another man’s coin” or “another man’s money”: but the rhythm would be off. And the finesse would be gone.

*****

Comedians are sometimes resentful of their writers. Probably because it’s hard for giant egos to admit you need anyone but yourself to be what you are. Some of the funniest insults I’ve heard were whispered from one comedy writer to another while in a meeting with an unpleasant star comic, shortsighted enough to be nasty to his writers.

Here come two gems from my small but cherished collection of well-deserved toxic bombs dropped on giant comic egos by fed-up writers.

The comic who received the following poisoned arrow was known on both TV and radio, nationwide. Let’s leave his largely forgotten name aside, should he have surviving relatives who may not have heard this. (Note: It was not Arthur Godfrey. I liked him.)

Let’s call this fellow “Don.”

I met him but twice. He was unpleasant. He was known as a good ad-libber, cordial and amiable on air. Additionally, he was known as a horror. Think of one you know. Don was worse — snide, insulting and contemptuous of those vital employees whose talents nourished and enhanced his reputation as a funny man.

At a meeting with his staff of four writers, his contempt for them and their art became too much for one guy. Don was a marked man, about to inspire an insult of the deadliest variety.

First, a required fact. The comic had an unfortunate disfigurement of the face and was self-conscious about it. Make-up made him look o.k. on the air, but in person, the small craters in the facial flesh were the worst I’ve ever seen. They were virtually holes.

On the fateful day, he said something so infuriating that one of the writers resigned on the spot. Uttering a decidedly unwitty expletive, he jumped to his feet with a loud, “That’s it!” And stomped out, slamming the door.

Then the door re-opened. He reappeared, momentarily.

“Hey, Don, I’ve always wanted to ask you something. What’s par for your right cheek?” (Exit.)

*****

You’d think that insecure comics — and this category includes some huge stars — would know better than to open themselves up as targets to the very people who can both make them appear witty but can, at the same time, most memorably wound them.

I was a huge Jackie Gleason fan, despite friends who wondered how I could admire both Groucho Marx and Gleason, whom they considered crude. Watch him in “The Honeymooners” or, if you prefer, in “The Hustler” and see the definition of the phrase “never makes a false move.”

Contributing to his collection of neuroses was the fact that, when he was quite young, his father went away one day and never came back. It’s said that Jackie went to great lengths to find his lost father, even trying psychics and trance mediums.

One of Jackie’s writers had been summoned to the penthouse offices of the Gleason show in the Park Sheraton in Manhattan. (In my youth I used to hang around there, in hopes of glimpsing The Great One.) From experience, the guy knew he could expect a chewing out.

The writer was on time but the star was not. An hour passed. And then, another.

The writer, presumably with an already ample list of grievances over this sort of treatment, apparently decided that employment in a salt mine would be no less pleasant than the current gig. He’d had it. It was time to quit.

He announced this to Gleason’s secretary and headed for the door.

“What shall I tell Mr. Gleason when he finds no one here?”

The writer vented his accumulated bile with but a few words:

“Tell him his dad dropped by.”

*****

The comedy writer, and my friend, David Lloyd and I worked on the staff of a popular TV show. There were four writers, one a particularly loathsome specimen. The modesty of his talent may have nourished his other traits: jealousy, gossip, rumor-mongering and an inclination to knife his colleagues whenever he was alone with the star.

I’ve forgotten exactly how he went over the line with David, but I came around a corner just in time to hear, “Al, your parents owe the world a retraction.”

*****

As a sort of sweetener from the brutality of the above blow-gun darts aimed at fellow human beings, let us close this subject — but only for now — with something a bit milder. It’s from the man who once complained to me, “I can’t insult anyone anymore.”

Mistakenly, I thought Groucho was being contrite. But no. It was that things he said when seriously angry, and meaning to wound and leave a scar, failed to injure. Instead, he got the reaction, “Oh, thank you, Groucho! Wait till I tell my friends what Groucho Marx said to me.”

“It’s almost ruined my life,” Mr. Marx only partially jested.

Upon leaving a stuffy Beverly Hills party thrown by a socialite, Groucho said to her, “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”

Does it get any better?

No fair! No fair!

“No fair” must rank among the loudest and most readily evoked complaints. Nor is the din of inequity limited to children. Consider the widespread anger generated by the Wall Street and AIG bailouts: Regardless of whether they were justified as national policy, those and other departures from perceived evenhandedness have a long history of rousing departures from citizen complacency, and even from civility. Ditto for outrage over executives getting outsized bonuses and golden parachutes while the rest of us are left to soldier on as best we can.

In evolutionary terms, what’s going on here?

Another way of asking that question is to turn it around. Why do we feel so violated? Lixing Sun, a professor of biology at Central Washington University, thinks we have a “fairness instinct.” And he may be right. He maintains that high on the roster of human propensities is a “Robin Hood mentality” that characterizes our species and qualifies as one of those “mental modules” that evolutionary psychologists consider part of our likely biological inheritance. If so, our fairness instinct goes far beyond the pleasure we take in romantic tales of medieval Merry Men adventuring in Sherwood Forest. Sun believes that despite the fact of our specieswide social and economic disparities—perhaps in part because of them—human beings are endowed (or burdened) with an acute sensitivity to “who is getting how much,” in particular a deft attunement to whether anyone else is getting more or less than one’s self.

In a much-noted laboratory experiment several years ago, described in the report “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” the primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal trained capuchin monkeys to perform a certain task for which they received cucumber slices. The monkeys performed just fine, until they were permitted to see others being rewarded with grapes, a higher-value payment. Previously acquiescent, many of the cucumber-receivers promptly stopped participating, sometimes even throwing those measly, unfair cucumber payments out of their cage. Aversion of that sort is well established among Homo sapiens as well—even though, at first blush, it appears irrational and, thus, paradigm-busting for economists trained in the Homo economicus model whereby people are considered to be “rational and utility-maximizing” creatures. Behavioral economists call it “inequity aversion”—the tendency to turn down a perfectly good offer if others are getting a better deal.

Inequity aversion makes sense for a social species like capuchin monkeys, which sometimes engage in cooperative hunting, with food rewards to be distributed when the hunt is successful; if a participant’s payoff is not commensurate with his or her effort—and if others receive a disproportionately generous return—then further participation may well be personally counterproductive. What looks superficially like spiteful grudge-keeping could thus be adaptive equity-insistence.

In the “Ultimatum Game,” a laboratory setup favored by social psychologists and behavioral economists, human beings insist upon fairness, even at the apparent cost of their immediate best interest. In this simple game, one individual is given some money—say $10—and then is instructed to propose a take-it-or-leave-it division with another individual. Thus, Player 1 may propose an equal split ($5 for each), or $9.99 for herself and one cent for Player 2, and so forth, whereupon the other player accepts or rejects the ultimatum; no second chances.

Logically, Player 2 should accept any offer, regardless of its seeming equity, since even a penny is better than nothing. There is considerable cross-cultural variation in the actual responses of individuals on the receiving end of such ultimatums, and yet to the surprise of many scientists, there is a widespread tendency to reject offers in which the recipient gets less than about 30 percent of the total. Most people would prefer to abandon the whole deal, so that no one gets anything, rather than be on the receiving end of an unfair distribution.

In fact, in most cases, the individual who gets to determine the division actually proposes something not too far removed from 50/50, almost never demanding a strongly asymmetric distribution. A generous interpretation is that, in addition to a fairness instinct that generates aversion to being presented with an unfair situation, people are also predisposed to be fair. Alternatively, maybe they are simply being selfish realists who intuit the fairness instinct of others and realize that a blatantly unfair ultimatum is liable to result in getting nothing. It is always possible that people are less predisposed toward genuine fairness than they are to the appearance of fairness, all the while secretly hoping to obtain an unfair share for themselves. Those yelling at political meetings may be angry at large banks receiving millions while small businesses go begging; or they may want the government to bail them out, too. Those incensed at the prospect of federal relief for people upside-down on their mortgages often yell “No fair, No fair!” since they have been paying their debts without comparable assistance. Similarly, anger over proposed immigration reform often revolves around a perceived asymmetry: Why should “they” get leniency when “my people” played by the rules?

For a fairness instinct to have evolved by natural selection, those who possessed it must have been disproportionately successful in projecting their genes for it into the future. How might that have happened? Wouldn’t each individual be more fit taking whatever he or she could get, rather than turning down opportunities simply because they were unfair and thereby sometimes getting nothing at all? Why bother yourself with what others are getting—i.e., with fairness—instead of just trying to maximize your own payoff?

There are several possible answers. For one, consider that in some circumstances, one’s payoff is very much a function of what others are getting … and giving. That is particularly true of so-called reciprocal altruism, misnamed because it isn’t based on altruism at all, but rather on a selfish exchange whereby the donor is subsequently repaid (and then some) by the recipient.

As emphasized by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who first brought reciprocity to the attention of biologists, such systems are vulnerable to exploitation by cheaters who accept the beneficence of others but fail to reciprocate. Systems of would-be reciprocation can therefore evolve only when the participants do their part, which is to say, when they behave fairly. One intriguing, albeit unsavory, example occurs among vampire bats. Successful nocturnal foragers regurgitate blood to those whose efforts have been less well compensated; in exchange, when the recipients strike it bloody rich, they are likely to repay their benefactors. But bona fide examples of reciprocity—aside from vampire bats and human beings—have been very difficult to identify.

Perhaps one reason for the evident rarity of nonhuman reciprocity is that the ability and inclination to police interactions for fairness (vampire bats and capuchin monkeys aside) may itself be rare outside the human context. But once most of the necessary conditions for reciprocity have been met—sociality to set the stage, brainpower to permit memory of who has been initially helpful as well as who has met his or her reciprocal obligation, opportunities to render aid as well as a high probability of the tables being turned in the future—then selection could well favor a keen eye for fairness, if only to discriminate between who plays by the rules and who does not. Reciprocity requires fair play; thus, adaptations for reciprocity may well involve adaptations to detect fairness.

Another biological basis for fairness probably derives from the fact that natural selection doesn’t operate by absolute reproductive success but by relative measures. Fitness is most meaningfully described as a fraction, with the numerator being the abundance of any gene(s) in question and the denominator being that of all alternative forms of the same gene. Thus it isn’t simply a matter of how successful you are, but how you stack up relative to others. As in the joke, “How’s your husband?” Answer: “Compared to what?” The key evolutionary question isn’t “How am I doing?” Rather it’s “How am I doing compared to everyone else?”

The pursuit of fairness is widely perceived to be admirable. And yet there is something unappealing about monitoring the payoffs of others and seeking to restrict what they get simply because the self-appointed whistle-blowers aren’t getting a comparable return. Isn’t it more laudable to go about feathering your own nest, or at least, minding your own business, rather than complaining that the nests of others are getting unfairly overstuffed?

But since evolution favors whatever maximizes relative fitness, it smiles not only upon those who do well, but also upon those who frown on competitors poised to do better. One way to achieve the approval of natural selection, therefore, is not only to strive to maximize one’s own payoff but also to monitor that of others, and to complain loudly if it seems too high, especially if such a complaint is at all likely to better the situation of those who act as Robin Hood or who cheer him on in the name of fairness.

The jockeying of genes has direct parallels in the arena of human behavior, especially with regard to conflict. Forty years ago, the political scientist Ted Robert Gurr wrote an important book titledWhy Men Rebel, which he explained in terms of “relative deprivation.” Gurr (whose work was in no way predicated upon biology) pointed out that at the time of the French Revolution, for example, the absolute level of citizen poverty was less than at any previous time in French history. What drove the sans-culottes was the perceived relative level of deprivation—in our terms, the extent to which things weren’t so much bad as unfair.

What relative deprivation implies for society, relative fitness does for biology. Fairness is the perception that relative deprivation is relatively under control, leading to the prospect that relative fitness, too, will not be grossly unbalanced. It may well be that when things are fair, most participants aren’t doing terribly well, but at least they can have some confidence that relative to others, their circumstances aren’t terrible, and are better than might otherwise be expected.

In the arcane mathematics of game theory, people occupy a “Pareto equilibrium,” whereby all parties are capable of improving their situations, but any improvement necessarily comes at the expense of others. As a result, such an equilibrium is bound to be a nervous one, whereby everyone is selected to be finely attuned to any departures from fairness; hence, the widespread concern for a “fair coin,” “fair match,” “fair play,” “fair exchange,” a level—which is to say a “fair”—playing field. Fairness rules (in the sense of being all-powerful), and therefore it is no coincidence that most rules (in the sense of guidelines for legitimate behavior) are developed with the goal of maintaining fairness.

A focus on fairness points, interestingly, to a contradiction in free-market systems: On the one hand, it is only fair that people be given a chance to better themselves, and patently unfair if they are prevented from doing so. But on the other, given the inherent differences among individuals, as well as their socioeconomic discrepancies, the outcome of freedom is certain to be unequal, and thus unfair.

Although most people agree that fairness is a good thing, they disagree as to how it is to be achieved. Hence most of the controversy—and anger—over domestic politics. For the political right wing, it isn’t fair for society to impose taxes, to use one person’s hard-earned money for the betterment of others, to restrict personal freedom (including the freedom to pursue unfettered private enterprise and even, in some cases, the freedom to pollute and destroy the environment). Yet it is fair for government to restrain malefactors. For those on the political left, it goes without saying that equal opportunity is fair. Moreover, for many it is necessary but not sufficient: Equal outcome is the holy grail of social fairness, to which the political right responds that it is unfair to insist on equality of outcome when individuals are not identical, whether in their biology, their effort, or their luck.

Consider next the slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” made famous by Karl Marx. Its practicality has long been debated, especially given the presumed human penchant for both greed and laziness. Less discussed is whether this communist shibboleth is fair, or desirable. Interestingly, however, the two descriptors “fair” and “desirable” are really just one: Whatever is adjudged fair is likely, ipso facto, to be seen as desirable. How many cases are there when a proposition, after being identified as fair, is then rejected as not worthwhile? Inhabitants in George Orwell’s Animal Farm chanted “Four legs good, two legs bad.” We insist, “Fair good, unfair bad.”

The fairness maven Lixing Sun—who is writing a book about the possible biological underpinnings of fairness—points out that merit bears a complex relationship to fairness. It is widely acknowledged that differences in merit can legitimize differences in payoffs, both material and social. Yet the outcome may appear—and to some extent, actually be—unfair. Differences in merit are indeed often exaggerated by those seeking to justify departures from fairness; after all, many mammals have evolved systems of social hierarchy, within which it may be adaptive for participants to accept their positions and thereby avoid wasteful struggles, but also to be alert for any departures from fairness, which is to say, aware of circumstances that offer them at least some prospect of self-advancement.

Many things elicit anger, which, after all, is simply a biological mechanism that induces people to respond vigorously—sometimes violently—to circumstances in which such a response is generally adaptive. (Or at least, has been adaptive in the past.) We get angry when frustrated, when we experience pain, when defending ourselves or others, and not merely because our genetic sense of fairness has been violated. Like many, for example, I am currently very angry at BP, not so much because that corporation has been unfair as for what it has done to the Gulf of Mexico. Anger, like Walt Whitman’s sense of himself, is large. It contains multitudes.

Although not all anger derives from unfairness, we might want to look further into whether people have a fairness instinct. It could help us understand why certain policies are embraced and others resisted, why self-righteous anger is sometimes so easily elicited, and whether that anger is itself fair.