An Observation from the Behavioral Health Field

“What a stupid question.”

That’s usually the reaction. Not always out loud, but you can see it on clients’ faces the first time I ask it.

Why should things be fair?

What kind of question is that? On the surface, it sounds almost childish. We don’t normally ask why things should be fair because we simply assume they should be. We have heard “life isn’t fair” since we were old enough to complain that another kid got something we wanted. Everyone knows life is not fair. That is obvious. The more interesting question is why we seem so convinced that it should be.

For several years, I have facilitated Coping with Anger groups for adolescents in substance use treatment. One exercise begins by having a client identify a situation in which he became extremely angry. We spend some time breaking down what happened, what he thought about it, what he believed the other person had done wrong, and why it produced such a strong reaction. Then, somewhere in the middle of that processing, comes the question: “Why should things be fair?”

The question is supposed to catch them a little off guard. In some ways, that is the point. The exercise puts the client under a small amount of pressure and gives him an opportunity to notice what happens when one of the assumptions underneath his anger is challenged. He is not supposed to argue his way out of the exercise. He is supposed to regulate himself, think through the question, and eventually recognize some of the folly in the presuppositions that helped produce the anger in the first place.

Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at conducting these lines of questioning. I know where the predictable answers lead and which questions tend to expose the contradictions. What I did not expect was how much more could come out of them. What began as an anger-management exercise repeatedly became a conversation about justice, responsibility, character, and human nature. Near the end of my time doing this work, one young man (our protagonist) made it glaringly obvious just how far these conversations could go and his responses have shaped my understanding of the counseling relationship.

Clients generally evolve in their responses as the weeks progress, and they all come in at different levels of experience and maturity. Some have been through many treatment programs and bring various tips and tricks gathered along the way. But not the newcomer.

The newcomer almost always says, “I don’t think things should be fair.” It is often offered with a little swagger, as though he has escaped some childish illusion everyone else still believes. Our protagonist in this case was no different. So, I ask him to name something that should not be fair. Should teachers grade students unfairly? Should judges treat two identical cases differently? Should an employer intentionally pay equally qualified people differently for doing the same work? I implore them to find any domain of life that should not be fair. The examples change, but the results do not. One by one, the confidence disappears until he finally admits, “Well, I guess things should be fair.”

Exactly.

To call something fair or unfair is already to make a statement about what should have happened. What these kids usually mean, of course, is not that things should be unfair. They mean that life is unfair. Those are two completely different claims. “Life is not fair” is an observation about the world as we experience it. “Life should not be fair” is a moral claim about the way the world ought to operate. The first recognizes reality. The second is much harder to defend, because it requires us to abandon the very idea of justice.

Eventually, after several rounds of this, they tend to arrive at the same conclusion: life should be fair, but it isn’t. That is actually a sign of growth and an important step in understanding their anger. If I believe something should have happened differently, then anger makes sense as a response to the distance between the world as I think it ought to be and the world as it actually is.

Usually, that is about as far as the conversation goes. When I press further and ask why things should be fair in the first place, I am usually met with silence. It is an abstraction, a stretch just beyond where many of them are prepared to go in the moment. They know things should be fair. They can certainly give endless examples of unfairness. But explaining why fairness itself is good is another matter entirely.

They knew that things should be fair. What they couldn’t tell me was why they knew it.

That distinction has become fascinating to me because the conversation is remarkably consistent across adolescents with very different personalities, beliefs, and experiences. They may disagree passionately about what is fair, but very few can bring themselves to argue that fairness itself does not matter. We recognize that the world routinely fails to meet our expectations of justice, but we rarely stop to ask where those expectations came from or why we feel justified in placing them on the world in the first place. From that painfully simple question, we can begin making surprisingly serious claims about anger, morality, human nature, and even what makes a life meaningful.

This particular young man answered.

And that is where the conversation became something else.

A Higher Standard

His father was in prison. When he entered treatment, that fact did not seem to disturb him much. In some ways, he had built his identity around the same culture that had put his father there. The street lifestyle represented authenticity. Prison was not necessarily failure. Refusing to “snitch” was honorable. Violence, reputation, intimidation, and loyalty to the street all fit rather neatly into his idea of what it meant to become a man. The possibility that he might eventually end up in prison himself did not seem particularly frightening to him. It was almost part of the deal. Even being killed as a consequence of that lifestyle carried a certain status in his mind. Listening to him early in treatment, it was difficult not to imagine that he had already accepted a future that looked remarkably similar to his father’s.

Then, slowly, his values began to change. Values—not behavior. That is an important distinction. His behavior changed too, of course, but his behavior changed because the things underneath it were changing. Early on, he understood courage as the absence of fear. Being afraid meant being weak, so strength required acting as though nothing frightened you. Over time, he began to see courage as the strength to admit that you were afraid and do the difficult thing anyway. It meant acknowledging insecurity instead of covering it with anger. It meant accepting correction, telling the truth when a lie would better protect your reputation, and taking responsibility for something without immediately blaming another person.

His idea of manhood changed with it. He became less interested in appearing strong and more interested in becoming someone he could actually respect. The things he admired were changing, and once that happened, his behavior began following along.

Near the end of his treatment, we came back around to the fairness discussion one final time. I asked the same question I had asked before: “Why should things be fair?”

“People should have to work for things and earn them,” he said.

I told him I agreed but he still had not answered the question. What he had given me was another description of fairness. I wanted to know why. Why should anyone have to earn anything?

He thought quietly before saying, “It holds people to a higher standard.”

Stricken, I looked at him for a second. There was a flash in my mind. The gravity of what I had just witnessed began to sink in. It struck me that this teenager—who only months earlier admired a life that almost guaranteed prison—was now arguing that people should be held to a higher standard. He had not intended to make a philosophical claim, but he had.

He knew something he could not yet explain.

In a serious tone, I urged, “Why?”

He looked at me with genuine surprise at my insistence. “Why what?”

“Why should people be held to a higher standard?”

He had to think again. Finally, he said, “Because it makes you a better person.”

“Why?”

Another pause.

“Because when you earn things, it gives life meaning.”

I was speechless. There it was. The shift in his worldview, away from victimhood and toward responsibility, was suddenly unmistakable.

That answer has stayed with me ever since. Not because I think a teenager accidentally solved moral philosophy in a substance use treatment group, and not because what he offered was some airtight philosophical argument. What struck me was that he had never attempted to make one. He had not read Aristotle. He had not studied virtue ethics or natural law. He had not read C.S. Lewis. He was not trying to defend Christianity or objective morality. He was simply trying to answer a question honestly, and somewhere in the process he had made several enormous claims without realizing he was making them.

Here they are: A person can become better or worse. There must therefore be some standard by which “better” and “worse” can be judged. That standard should make demands of us rather than simply affirm whatever we already want. Meeting those demands can form character. Effort and responsibility can make something meaningful in a way that merely possessing it cannot. And a good human life must consist of something more than pleasure, status, survival, or getting whatever we happen to want.

He knew something he could not yet explain.

That phrase has increasingly become the way I think about these conversations, because that is how much of our moral knowledge works. We encounter it before we develop the vocabulary to explain it. A child understands that betrayal is wrong before he can give an account of loyalty. We recognize courage before we have studied virtue. We experience guilt before we have developed a theory of conscience. We protest injustice long before we have read a philosopher’s theory of rights. Human beings seem capable of apprehending something about how people ought to behave before we are capable of explaining what an “ought” even is.

Higher Than What?

This is essentially where C.S. Lewis begins Mere Christianity. He does not begin with a complicated theological argument. He begins with people arguing. Listen to almost any argument long enough and someone will eventually appeal to a standard that he expects the other person to recognize: that is not fair; you promised; you would not like it if someone treated you that way.

Lewis was interested not simply in the fact that human beings argue, but in the peculiar way we do it. We argue as though there is some standard outside our immediate preferences that both people ought to recognize, even when we disagree about whether one of us has violated it. If I prefer chocolate ice cream and you prefer vanilla, I can disagree with you, but I cannot seriously accuse you of wrongdoing. Preference does not work that way. Fairness does. When I say you treated me unfairly, I am not merely saying that I disliked what you did. I am saying you ought not to have done it, and I expect that word “ought” to mean something to you too.

Our excuses may reveal this even more clearly than our accusations. When confronted with wrongdoing, most of us do not suddenly deny the existence of right and wrong. We say, “I had to.” “He started it.” Even a bad excuse is revealing. We are not rejecting the standard. We are explaining why we should be considered an exception to it. We are trying to get ourselves back onto the right side of a rule we are hardly even consciously aware of.

Lewis called this the Law of Human Nature. His claim was not that every person or civilization agrees on every moral question, and certainly not that human beings consistently obey this law. His point was almost the opposite: we seem to know there is a way we ought to behave while also knowing that we regularly fail to behave that way. We can identify hypocrisy, cowardice, selfishness, dishonesty, and unfairness with astonishing precision when someone else is guilty of them. Yet, we provide endless complexity and nuance when the same accusations are directed toward us. We cry for justice when we have been harmed and become passionate advocates of mercy when the judgment turns toward us.

The question my client had accidentally raised was more serious than it first appeared. He said people should be held to a higher standard. Higher than what? Higher than whatever he happened to want in the moment, apparently. Higher than what his friends considered impressive. Higher than the particular street culture he had once admired. Higher even than the earlier version of himself.

That word higher quietly assumes that some ways of living can actually be above others.

Better According to What?

His next answer made the problem even greater: “Because it makes you a better person.”

Better according to what?

That question is ancient. Aristotle approached ethics largely through the idea of character. For him, the good life was not simply a matter of obeying a list of rules or maximizing pleasure. It involved becoming a certain kind of person. Courage, justice, self-control, honesty, and wisdom were virtues because they helped a human being flourish.

That idea translates surprisingly well into substance use treatment. Recovery cannot ultimately mean only the absence of a drug. If it does, treatment is simply an exercise in deprivation. Lasting recovery requires learning a host of how to’s: how to tolerate discomfort, tell the truth, delay gratification, repair harm, accept correction, ask for help, exercise restraint, and choose according to values when emotions and impulses are pulling in another direction. In other words, recovery involves character.

Eventually the question changes from “How do I avoid using?” to “What kind of person am I becoming?”

That was the transition I had watched in this young man. At the beginning, fairness was mostly about what happened to him. Who had disrespected him, what he had been denied, what someone else had done wrong. By the end, his understanding of fairness had turned inward. The question was no longer only, “What am I owed?” It had become, “What can reasonably be demanded of me?”

That is a much more mature question.

Fairness without that inward turn easily becomes entitlement. Indeed, entitlement oozes from the beliefs and attitudes of large portions of our fellow American citizens and if we look hard we find it in ourselves. We become experts on everyone else’s obligations while quietly negotiating exemptions from our own. We demand honesty but explain our lies, demand patience while defending our anger, and demand grace while insisting that others receive exactly what they deserve.

The higher standard becomes meaningful only when I allow it to judge me too.

Better for What?

Then he made the third claim.

“Because when you earn things, it gives life meaning.”

Now the question was no longer merely moral. It was existential.

Why should becoming better make life more meaningful? Why should responsibility, sacrifice, or discipline contribute to meaning at all?

There is something deeply human in his intuition. Things often matter to us in part because something was required of us to obtain them. A relationship means something because vulnerability was involved. Trust matters because it can be lost and must often be rebuilt. An accomplishment matters differently when it required years of effort than when it was simply handed to us.

This does not mean that human worth is earned. That distinction matters, especially in recovery, for those that toil in low self-worth. A person’s dignity cannot depend on money, achievement, or moral performance. Worth and accomplishment are not the same thing. Love can be freely given while trust must be built. Forgiveness can be offered while reconciliation requires work. Human dignity may be inherent, but character is developed.

A life in which nothing was ever demanded of us might be comfortable, but it is difficult to imagine that it would be especially meaningful. If every accomplishment were granted without effort, and every failure stripped of consequence, we might eliminate a great deal of discomfort. We might also eliminate much of what makes courage, sacrifice, and growth possible.

My client had arrived, in his own language, at the idea that a good life may require more than feeling good. It may require becoming something.

The Theological Question

And eventually that raises the question Lewis was heading toward all along.

If there really is a higher standard by which people can become better or worse, what grounds it?

Culture alone does not seem sufficient. Cultures obviously shape our ideas of fairness, but we also believe cultures themselves can be unjust. We believe laws can be wrong even when they are legally enacted. We believe majorities can mistreat minorities. We believe a reformer can be morally right while standing against nearly everyone around him. The moment we make those claims, we are appealing to some standard capable of judging a culture rather than merely being created by it.

Evolution can explain a great deal about why social creatures might develop strong instincts around reciprocity, loyalty, cheating, and punishment. That matters and should not simply be waved away. But explaining how a moral capacity developed is not necessarily the same as explaining away what that capacity perceives. Human vision has an evolutionary history, but that does not mean the external world is imaginary. Hunger has an evolutionary history, but food is still real. The origin of an intuition and the truth of what it points toward are not necessarily the same question. For the majority of my time in learning institutions, professors and other idealogues have presented evolutionary claims as explanations for the origins of all human nature, claiming it as morally indifferent.

Lewis believed this moral law was one clue that reality itself is not morally indifferent. The universe seems to contain not only facts about what is, but demands concerning what ought to be. Christian theology goes further and grounds those demands not in an abstract rulebook but in the character of God. Justice matters because God is just. Truth matters because God is truthful. Love matters because God is love. Human beings possess dignity because they bear the image of God, not because they are successful, impressive, or productive.

That makes the idea of a “higher standard” more interesting than simple rule-following. The standard is not merely an arbitrary hurdle placed in front of human beings to make life difficult. It says something about what human beings are for.

And that is where Lewis’ argument becomes uncomfortable, because if the standard is real, it does not exist merely for me to use against everyone who has wronged me. It judges me too. The same moral law that allows me to say another person has treated me unjustly can also expose my own dishonesty, selfishness, cowardice, cruelty, and hypocrisy.

We want justice when we are the victim and mercy when we are guilty.

Christianity does not solve that problem by lowering the standard. Its claim is that none of us fully meets it, which is precisely why grace matters. Grace does not mean the standard was meaningless all along. It means failure does not have to be the final word.

That idea bears a particularly heavy weight in treatment. Shame tends to push people toward one of two conclusions: either the standard does not matter, so I should stop caring, or the standard does matter and I have failed it so completely that there is no point trying anymore. Grace rejects both. What we do matters, and change remains possible.

What He Knew

I do not know how much of any of this the teenager sitting across from me could have articulated at the time. Probably very little in formal terms. He could not have explained moral realism, virtue ethics, natural law, evolutionary accounts of morality, or Lewis’ Law of Human Nature.

But he knew something.

Only months earlier, his picture of manhood had been built around image, intimidation, fearlessness, violence, and indifference to consequences. Now he was telling me that people should be held to a higher standard because becoming better matters, and that effort can give meaning to life.

His vocabulary had not caught up with his transformation, but his worldview had changed.

I had the privilege of asking him “why” until he ran out of rehearsed answers. The exercise was designed to put him under a little pressure, challenge the assumptions underneath his anger, and see whether he could regulate himself instead of arguing. I had conducted it countless times and had become quite good at knowing where the line of questions would go.

What I had not fully appreciated was where it might take someone.

Counseling gave him a place to think. Treatment gave him structure, consequences, relationships, and opportunities to live differently. But questions and structure alone do not entirely explain why someone begins to admire what he once mocked or reject what he once considered honorable. Something had begun to reorder what he loved.

As a Christian, I believe God was at work in that process. The young man did not need to understand Aristotle, Lewis, natural law, or theology in order to begin recognizing the truths underneath them. In his own way, he had arrived at questions that philosophers, psychologists, and theologians have spent centuries trying to understand.

He knew something he could not explain.

And maybe that is not unique to him.

A Question Worth Asking

“Why should things be fair?”

It still sounds like a stupid question. Maybe it sounds stupid because fairness is so deeply embedded in the way we think that asking why it matters feels almost nonsensical. We use words like should, ought, better, wrong, just, and good every day as though they point toward something real. We do not merely dislike betrayal; we believe people ought to be loyal. We do not merely prefer courage; we believe courage is better than cowardice. We do not simply find injustice unpleasant; we believe it gives us a legitimate reason to object.

And even when we deny that these standards have any objective existence, it usually takes only one person treating us badly before we start appealing to them again.

The adolescents in my groups do not arrive with carefully developed systems of moral philosophy. Neither do most adults. Yet the standard seems to be there already. It shows up in our anger and our excuses, in what we condemn and what we admire, in our guilt and our resentment, and perhaps most importantly, in our ideas about the people we ought to become.

Maybe Lewis was right that this is one of the great clues to understanding human nature and the kind of universe we inhabit.

At the very least, I learned not to underestimate what might happen after asking a teenager one apparently stupid question.

The next time somebody tells you life is not fair, agree with them.

Then ask them why it should be.