So I suppose you think that "fairness" is also just an abstract notion with no basis in anything, a mere social construct?
No, it doesn't "adapt." It refers to a concept that doesn't change. If three people bake a cake, all doing equally much, in no human society will it be considered fair to give Billy two thirds of the cake. Now, in the past, or in the future.
The notion that morals are just a social construct is absurd. Does a blank slate human have a preference for other people suffering or for other people not suffering? Does he prefer for babies to die or for babies to live? Would Gandhi take a pill that makes him want to murder?
The social construction of reality is an ongoing, dynamic process that is (and must be) reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. Because social constructs as facets of reality and objects of knowledge are not "given" by nature, they must be constantly maintained and re-affirmed in order to persist. This process also introduces the possibility of change: i.e. what "justice" is and what it means shifts from one generation to the next.
Society's idea of "fairness" is not inevitable, but historically contingent. (Thus the idea or category "fairness" can be said to be "socially constructed".)
For example, take a look at slavery. For thousands of years many different groups of people practiced slavery. Back then it wasn't thought of as unfair or immoral, it was just reality, and nobody batted an eye because generally slaves were looked at as subhuman. Millions of complacent slaves grew up knowing that was their life and their role in life and didn't spend their waking moments believing their treatment was unfair because they got less than 1/3rd of the hypothetical cake.
It wasn't until key people came a long to seed society with the idea that slavery was wrong that it finally started to become perceived as unfair or unjust among mainstream thought, and it wasn't until this moment that people started thinking that slavery should be abolished from the planet and not be practiced.
So when billy bakes a cake with two other people and then takes 2/3rds... is that fair? Well being modern day humans with our understanding of the definition of fairness it's easy to say no that is not fair. (especially when you are taking a mathematical approach to fairness (aka: what is equal))
But if you go into different time periods there are many hypothetical situations where we can surmise that Billy taking 2/3rds of the cake is completely fair and justified to the people of that specific time period and or region, because they do not share our same understanding or current concept of fairness.
I mean this is exactly why the United States created things such as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They weren't inherently there, these concepts had to be socially constructed in one way or another and adopted by mainstream society.
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