In All Fairness

As of January 2006 the RMS program has changed to the Risk and Vulnerability program.

Fairness matters, always has mattered, and always will matter, because it is at the centre of what it means to be human. We cry “Unfair!” – out loud if we live in a democracy – and withdraw our consent whenever others threaten to undermine our way of living with one another and with nature. That is why British pensioners in Plymouth recently took to the streets and withheld their taxes, why Mexican farmers had to be repelled by riot police and razor wire at the World Trade Organisation’s meeting in Cancun, why many people insist that hazardous waste should stay in the territory of those producing it, and why some parties to the negotiations in the Kyoto Round reject agreements, such as tradable permits, that appear to be the least costly way of achieving greenhouse gas reductions.

Upsets such as these are so ubiquitous because no single set of moral principles – the economic efficiency that results from Pareto improvements, for instance, to mention a current favourite – can ever inspire effective personal and institutional commitment to a fair distribution of rewards and burdens. Nevertheless, and without the imposition of a single set of moral principles, people often do reach a workable consensus. How that is possible is, in itself, an intriguing question: a question, moreover, that has tremendous practical implications, especially in a world in which many benefit- and burden-conferring systems – the Internet, anthropologically-enhanced carbon cycles, insurance systems, capital flows and migrant streams, to mention but a few – have now gone global. Answering this intriguing question, and teasing out some of its practical implications, is the purpose of a book project jointly undertaken by RMS with the Stein Rokkan Centre, University of Bergen, Norway, and the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, Oxford, UK.

The title of the book is IN ALL FAIRNESS
[Working sub-title]: From Economic Efficiency To The Essential Contestation Of Ideas Of Fairness In The Shaping Of Policy For An Increasingly Connected World

For more information on this project, contact Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer or Michael Thompson

Responsible for this page: Karolina Werner
Last updated: 02 Jan 2006