The method that does not care who wins

Eight friends meet on a beach in Doha on Friday evenings to play volleyball. For months the two tallest picked the teams, and every week the side that lost said the picking had been unfair.

They were not entirely wrong, and not entirely right. Whether a split looks fair depends on which half of it you land in. Winners rarely complain about the process that made them winners. The losing side has its grievance ready before the last point is played.

So one week they changed the method. Everyone wrote a name on a scrap of paper, the scraps went into a cap, and the first four drawn made one team. Nobody loved it at first. The two strongest players landed together twice in a row.

But nobody argued about it afterwards. The losers could say the draw had been rough on them. They could not say it had been rigged, because the cap does not know who anyone is.

That is the useful distinction. Fair is a feeling, and it moves with the score. A sound method is something both sides can inspect before the game and accept, whichever side they turn out to be on. The test is whether you would build it the same way if you had no idea where you would end up.

Prices, promotions, the rules of a competition, who gets served first: a great many arguments about fairness are really arguments about outcomes. They go quiet when the method is agreed first and is blind to the result.

People still win and lose after that. They just stop fighting about how.