Everyone believes that taxation should be fair. It is a near-universal belief.
No political party has ever launched an election campaign on the back of a promise of unfair taxes. It is the one principle on which we all agree.
However…
For some, fairness can only be achieved if the wealthy pay more tax; whereas, for others, it's less. For some, fairness involves fewer 'hand outs' to the less fortunate; whereas, for others, it's more. "On the left, fairness often implies equality," says Jonathan Haidt, "but on the right it means proportionality", meaning that rewards should be proportionate to effort/success/impact etc.
But this distinction does not tell the whole story.
In a well-known experiment, participants were allowed to 'invest' tokens into a communal fund and then share in the communal profits. If everyone invested equally, they all profited equally. However, even if a person invested nothing, they still benefited from a share of the communal profits. As such, the rational approach was to invest nothing. Unsurprisingly, with each new round of investment, people invested less - as the 'generous' individuals realised that their goodwill was being abused by the 'less generous' individuals. At that point, a new rule was introduced: you could choose to punish someone you felt was not investing enough, someone who was not pulling their weight, someone who was taking advantage of the others. This rule had an immediate impact. The punishment of 'bad' behaviour promoted 'virtue' and communal benefits.
This experiment teaches us at least two things.
First, most of us actually subscribe to the proportionality view of fairness. We object to 'freeloaders' being rewarded. For some, the 'freeloaders' are overpaid corporate executives; for others, it's those who abuse the welfare system, but either way we object.
Second, for each of the participants in the experiment, the outcome was something approaching equality. But the mechanism or motivation behind this outcome was not egalitarianism. Far from it. The mechanism was a resentment of the person who played the system to their own benefit and to the detriment of others.
As Jonathan Haidt puts it: "People do not crave equality for its own sake; they fight for equality when they perceive that they are being bullied or dominated." He then cites the American and French Revolutions. In both, 'equality' was the slogan, but the motivation was to bring down the tyrant.
The aim of fairness is not to achieve equality. After all, we are not all equal. Emma Raducanu is better at tennis than I am. The aim of fairness is to recalibrate society when it has become arbitrarily and unfairly imbalanced in favour of one group over another. The outcome of this recalibration may be something approaching equality, but that is not the aim.
Which brings us onto feminism.
In the first and second waves of feminism, feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan focused on structural equality: equal votes, equal pay, equal rights, equal opportunities. Progress on this score has been made, although at a painfully slow rate. In France, it was not until 1946 that women got the vote and, in Switzerland, it was 1971. And, let's face it, equal voting rights is the easy bit.
But these structural equalities are merely the outward trappings of fairness. They are the beginning rather than the end. Whilst they may enforce a form of equality on a misogynistic society, the society itself remains misogynistic. That is not fairness.
In recent years, therefore, feminism has seen a third and a fourth wave, in which feminist thinkers have focused more on societal issues and the removal of systems and processes that have enabled, and continue to enable, the bullying and belittling of women. According to Kira Cochrane and Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, the focus of fourth-wave feminism is on challenging the attitudes that lead to sexual harassment, violence against women, body shaming, sexist imagery in the media, online misogyny and rape culture.
The aim is to recalibrate the attitudes and prejudices of society and it gets to the heart of fairness. As Laura Bates, author of Everyday Sexism, says: "This is not a men vs women issue. It is about people vs prejudice."
In other words, it is about fairness.
Written by Pete Mansfield
