THE DIRECTOR of an executive recruitment agency said on the Today programme last week that anybody over the age of seven who believes in fairness is a fool.
She was taking part in a discussion about executive pay and whether it's right that the highest-paid people in society have seen their salaries go through the roof while the rest of us have experienced declining living standards.
Her attitude was that life is cruel and unfair, that there are winners and losers, and that it's inevitable and right that some should have more money than they will ever need while others go hungry.
It was Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher, who famously said that the life of man was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Hobbes argued that, with each individual fighting to fulfil his personal desires, a state of war is the natural condition of mankind.
However, he then went on to show that this is not the way in which humans are obliged to behave.
As we are capable of thinking rationally, we can see that a "war of everyone against everyone" is not in the interests of anyone.
Philosophy is sometimes accused of being too abstract, too far removed from daily life: but Hobbes' clear-eyed view of the world shows that while life can be cruel and unkind, it doesn't have to be that way.
He takes it as a given that we are selfish, that we are driven to gain the maximum possible benefit for ourselves: but he also realises that we make our lives better by working together.Crucially, as a complete realist, he saw that this co- operation between ultimately selfish individuals requires some structure that will ensure people stand by their obligations to others.
This is the role that the state fulfils in modern society: to ensure that we act with fairness towards one another.
So, according to the law, if you buy something from a shop and it doesn't work then you can take it back and get a refund; that's fair.
As the novel Lord Of The Flies shows, it may be that fairness does not exist naturally – that, left to our own devices, it would be abandoned – but we have created a concept of fairness that the majority of people live by which improves all of our lives.
Collective decisions on what constitutes that fairness will never be easy, but the question of whether it's right that some chief executives earn up to 200 times more than their employees is something we should all consider – even after our seventh birthday.
