I was going to write something fairly audacious and start dragging in the history of Western philosophy, but instead I'll just focus on what I see as the flawed foundation of your argument: fairness.
I'll argue that fairness is not really an intrinsic understanding we all share but instead is a concensus. You could argue that it's not fair that some people are blind, but that you'd find few sighted people willing to put out their eyes. Fairness is a relatively fluid concept and it doesn't make sense to try and anticipate how "fair" your actions are.
The way out of this dilemma is avoiding following this line of thought all the way to first-world guilt.
So in your case, you have skills and talents you know you are applying and skills an talents you know are idle. You also likely have talents yet untapped. It is a waste of your energy to worry about this.
Do the best thing you can that intersects with the things you are most interested in. Group concensus in the forms of laws, ethics, an morals should be consulted but not necessarily blindly followed.
If such an innate (genetic) tendency towards fairness existed in humans, it would likely have quite a spectrum of phenotypic expressions. I.e., even if everyone had a sense of fairness, odds are that such a sense would not be exactly the same for each individual.
yes, but I believe we are using different interpretations fairness. as someone already pointed out, for fairness to be innate to humans it would need to be a better genetic trait compared to unfairness. so we are not arguing about how and if it is a good behavioural strategy, as it needs to be a better gene to have vs 'the-unfairness-gene'. so you might be genetically unfair and act fair as long as it is a valid behavioural strategy and revert to your genetic inclination when the situation requires you to (in case of serious danger for example). based on that it would be also possible to say that people are genetically fair and act unfair when in need, but that would not be fairness in my opinion.
But we do live in societies that are fair (compared to other animals). In fact the most fair (liberal, democratic, law abiding, accountable) societies fare the best the past 500 years at least.
as I said to dasil003, it's not really about behaviour, it's about genes. to reply to your post: we have a better understanding of the world compared to the other animals so maybe it simply happened that at a given time we understood that cooperation allows you to gain an unfair advantage vs single individuals and so on (in some way you need to keep that cooperation going).
my point is that it seems to me that exploitation of weaknesses is the central theme of evolution and it doesn't mix well with fairness. then again, I don't study biology so take my words with a grain of salt.
I'll argue that fairness is not really an intrinsic understanding we all share but instead is a concensus. You could argue that it's not fair that some people are blind, but that you'd find few sighted people willing to put out their eyes. Fairness is a relatively fluid concept and it doesn't make sense to try and anticipate how "fair" your actions are.
The way out of this dilemma is avoiding following this line of thought all the way to first-world guilt. So in your case, you have skills and talents you know you are applying and skills an talents you know are idle. You also likely have talents yet untapped. It is a waste of your energy to worry about this.
Do the best thing you can that intersects with the things you are most interested in. Group concensus in the forms of laws, ethics, an morals should be consulted but not necessarily blindly followed.
Do good, and do it well.