Why do businesses capitulate to popular social demands? That’s a very good question, but I don’t think the fellow who tries to address that question in this video quite understands business, and the motivations at work, probably because he’s an academic. As someone who has actually owned and run a business for over a decade and worked with many businesses, I can tell you that one of the main things businesses actually want is to be left alone to do their work. And that’s not that easy to do. 
   What a business does is already terribly complex and overwhelming, so that it takes many people to do what it does, usually. And the world is complex, full of pressures and regulations and demands and all kinds of threats and issues that you’re not always well-equipped as a business to deal with. And so a business is almost always asking itself, what’s the lowest cost way to mitigate those risks and discharge those demands?

    It’s hard to overstate how much people can damage a business, if they decide to go after it. One angry customer or employee can create a mountain of problems. And these days there are so many people who are willing to be angry with you and make it their business to go after you.

     So as a business, you want the cheapest way possible to protect yourself from that so you can get on with the actual work that keeps the lights on. And the present demands on businesses to not only do their work but also fulfill a ton of other needs and social demands is at an absolute historical maximum. You are constantly being challenged, constantly forced to defend your right to exist and to be doing what you’re doing. The need for legitimacy and for approval is enormous in our media and opinion-driven world.
   So I think people who accuse businesses of simply toadying up to the popular ideologies are doing businesses a disservice. Yes, they’re being cowardly and disingenuous, often. But they’re doing it to survive. They’re doing what’s demanded of them. Their real concern is to do their work, so what do you expect them to do, when their very ability to do it is under constant assault and dealing with this kind of issue is not what they’re designed for? Of course they’re looking for the easiest way to deal with it. And they’re probably going to get a lot of flack from those making the demands for not really having their heart in it and not doing enough, because of course it isn’t and of course they aren’t, you’re forcing them. So they’re going to be in trouble with everyone. 

    For a historian, he has a very modernist view of fairness. The modern idea is very similar to how a child views fairness, as whether I got the same as the other kids when mom was handing out the goodies. It’s distributionary fairness; it takes production and wealth for granted, and sees the actors as recipients or beneficiaries. It sees that as the most important, and perhaps only, field that matters for determining fairness. It assumes that everyone is of equal standing and therefore has an equal right to their share of the pot. 
    The older ideal of fairness was more like appropriateness, how fitting something was, karma, just desserts, consequences. It was very consequentialist. This kind of justice or fairness was a very different kind of principle to pursue and to violate, and it came with different assumptions. This paradigm of justice was more like a father handing out rewards for performance among competing children trying to earn rewards for doing assigned chores. The focus was on appropriate rewards for differing investments and accomplishments. You assumed that there would not be uniformity of status or rights to a certain share of distributed goods, but rather variability, with a right to your negotiatied share in the results of whatever you have undertaken to produce.

   Certainly, you could have a bad and unjust father who managed that task very badly. But this system isn’t injustice, and may in fact view uniform distribution and “fairness”, when inputs and performance vary, as a kind of injustice and unfairness. There is a genuine and genuinely different idea of fairness at work from the modern ideal. Fairness was conceived as justice, and justice was diverse and individual, because people and their actions were diverse and individual.

   Justice, in the more ancient sense, was consequence without subversion, action and reaction. Each action leading to its own and proper product. Loyalty to love, valor to honor, oathbreaking to vengeance. People were viewed as agents, not recipients. Their focus was on production, with distribution as an afterthought, or secondary, and on competition between producers, between means of production, and between strategies (personal and societal).

    You wanted what could succeed to succeed and be rewarded, and you wanted what could fail to fail and be rewarded in kind, so you could learn and guide your actions toward what was best and most productive. The proof was in the pudding, and justice was emergent as long as consequence was free to operate without interference. People were not children receiving status, but adventurers producing and securing it.
    Although our culture has gone all-in on the first understanding of fairness and largely forgotten the latter, modern fairness is not a new idea. It’s an innate universal that has always existed alongside the latter conception. Why? Because they must. Because neither is actually universal enough or effective enough to stand alone.

   Generally, these twin conceptions have been maintained primarily by the feminine and masculine sexes, who have broadly specialized in distributive and productive justice. And their practice has historically been restricted in scope, with distributive justice ruling around the hearth, at the intimate scale, and consequential justice ruling beyond the walls, in matters between less closely affiliated groups and in matters of distance.

     Although there is much value in bringing both conceptions into both spaces, proximate and distal, there are also unperceived dangers if we try to oust the existing hegemony. We don’t quite understand, often, how the justice of one domain will work when it is applied in another domain for which it is not optimized. And we are often unwilling to admit the correction of another perspective into our domain, seeking to universalize our own concept of justice in a way that isn’t warranted.
     It isn’t a bad thing that these concepts of justice differ. The only true error is in failing to recognize that there are two concepts, and that they exist, in fact must exist, in tension with one another, and in cooperation. They’re both right, and they’re both wrong. True justice isn’t found in one or the other approach, but in the proper relationship between them. And it’s when that relationship is broken, when you lack knowledge of the other perspective or have contempt for it, that you have gone truly wrong and caused injustice to reign.