In the series Babylon 5, the assistant to the Mimbari (sp?) Ambassador is asked this question.
He notes that he most certainly hopes that life is NOT fair, because otherwise that would mean all the horrible things that happened to you happen because you deserved them. He took great comfort in believing life WAS unfair.
I thought that line of thought was an interesting twist on this age old question.
Preachers, parents, politicians and police all have some version of the promise that if you work hard and follow the rules and stand by them you will be rewarded, or, at least, badness will be averted. Wittingly or unwittingly, they often promise things that are beyond their scope of control.
I’m amazed at how many people are surprised by this.
No, but if civilization is about anything it is about changing that.
Life isn’t even a thing that could be fair. It is like asking if a dream is moist.
Marcus from Babylon 5:
Yep. People and smarter animals have been operating under their own concepts of fairness as long as there have been people and smarter animals. A sense of fairness, or a sense of unfairness, can be observed when you give a treat to one dog and not another, especially if the one with the treat ranks lower.
Interesting. I’ve heard that line of thought before and it wasn’t on B5. I wonder what it’s origins are?
Off to IMHO.
Um…eew.
Not always but my Lady is. 
(And I really am ashamed to make that observation)
No.
Life isn’t fair and it can’t be made fair. Any attempt to create fairness inevitably results in a another type of unfairness.
I heard it said once that if you’re an adult, the word “fair” shouldn’t even be part of your vocabulary.
I agree.
Conservative.
Life is hard, then you die.
You have a hypothesis, not a theory. Do you honestly think it isn’t obvious as hell what that hypothesis is? No need to be coy, Roy. Conservatives think life is fair and liberals don’t. Amirite?
Wouldn’t that statement be equally valid if unfairness were substituted for fairness?
You could ask, in Life’s Glass of Fairness, is it half empty or half full?
Fair doesn’t necessarily mean equal.
My life’s generally fair to middling.
Valar morghulis. All men must die. Yup, fair. And yet not, since the road to get there is much more pleasant for some than others.
A fair is a place where you take children that has rides and funnel cakes and cotton candy; it is not a condition of life.
Fair as in “everyone has an equal chance to fail” or fair as in “we receive what we earn”?
Except neither of those things appears to be true.
That’s racist.
The central fault with the question is that most folks’ working definition of “fair” is actually “absence of adverse consequences for me”. IOW, me getting an unexpected cookie today is fair, merely my just reward. Me not getting a cookie tomorrow is unfair.
IMO, “fair” properly is a moral judgment. If 100 people are standing out in a field and one is struck by lightning, which person it struck was random and hence fair. If some bad guy is sniping the same crowd and picking off the obese or the Asians or the elderly or guys wearing khaki, that’s unfair.
IOW, what matters is the motivation.
And here’s another vote that the proper measure of merit for a civilization is not how well the most powerful live, but rather how well the least powerful live.