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Jenny Diski asks what constitutes fairness and whether or not we’d be better off ensuring that the vicious pay for their actions:

I’m not sure if this is exactly a sense of fairness. If so, it is a limited, unidirectional sense. Perhaps a sense of unfairness precedes the more general idea. I imagine a full sense of fairness would be demonstrated by a capuchin throwing her grapes down when she sees her fellow worker receiving cucumber. All for one and one for all. I couldn’t find any experiment that showed this.

A sense of personal unfairness may be all that is experienced by small children, too. It is always easy enough to come up with the idea that we have been morally mistreated. We manage to do it from a very young age and, like my mother-in-law, continue to the end of our lives. That others might deserve something is a more sophisticated thought. Usually, before any egalitarian fervour has a chance to emerge on its own, we have introduced the children, if not the monkeys, to the concept of desert. You get the grape for good behaviour, or helping with the washing-up, or not hitting your baby brother when he hits you, and you don’t get a grape if you throw a tantrum, or refuse to put on your socks. In this way, you and your brother get different amounts of goodness according to some very general rule that you are not much in a position to question, and the inherent problems of universal fairness are put into abeyance, except in the deepest dungeon of our consciousness.