Chapter 3. Fair Choice and Social Selection (Sample Paragraphs)

This chapter examines the effect of fairness from a more fundamental point of view of personal choice.

Every single movement we make in our everyday life is a result of choice. Some choice is easy to make and some is hard depends on whether available options are equally attractive or not. As we have seen in the starving donkey example, fairness in fact always plays a very fundamental psychological role during any process of choice making. This low level influence of fairness on all the movements we are making daily would inevitably have impact on every single higher level social activity.

 

About one and half centuries ago, Darwin published his theory on Natural Selection. Since then many people including Darwin himself have attempted to apply similar idea to human society. However, unlike its prototype in natural science, the so called Social Darwinism has not been successful in explaining the social evolution process, no matter locally or globally. An important reason behind this failure is because so far none of the existing versions of the Social Darwinism has paid attention to the reverse selection of those being selected. In this Chapter we would reexamine the social selection issue from a different angle, a fair choice based non-Darwinist angle.