kelley at pulpculture.org said:
>And yo, anyone who teaches might want to use that equity and chocolate cake thingy in class. It's adapted from Deborah Stone's discussion in policy paradox: the art of political decision making (I think, I didn't check) colleagues have successfully used a small and large bag of m&m's -- the peanuts ones since some students are allergic.
>And Shane, the random selection answer is typical, I just left it out for the purposes of my discussion at another list. But, as justin says, it can present problems.
>So, Dougster, I hope you can see that even equal slices of cake (equality) can and is inevitably also about perception since it depends on _what_ is being distributed, _to whom_ it is being distributed, and the boundaries drawn around the good and its relation to other goods.
I think this is a great example. I'm sure your discussion usually brings up the following points:
1) Some of the paradoxes vanish if you distribute *Money* instead of cake. One of the advantages of money is that it is fungible. No one is stuck with something they are allergic to. Give me money and I can buy my own M&Ms or a cheap pen or whatever I want within the budget you give me.
2) Some of the other paradoxes you bring up arise because you have deliberately created an artificial situation in which there are no answers - and thus no limit to the subjective answers that arise. Whatever you say, the cakes are gift from you. No one "deserves" them. Legitamately you can give them to whoever you use.
3) Ignoring 2, some of the other paradoxes arrise because you are dealing with resources disproportionate to the problems you are trying to solve. You bring in two cakes or two bags of M&Ms and try to find a distribution that is some sense *fair* over the lifetime of the students, and over a good part of the population of the campus. It is only a couple of cakes - resources on that scale can't respond to injustices on that scale. You won't be able to much about slavery, the holocaust or the problems of the Palesitians with them either. It is unreasonable to go beyond those who are in that classroom on that day, or to look at a timeline much beyond the present day.
4) The question of the limits of tolerable inequality don't disapear just because an equal division presents paradoxes. I think you could get a pretty broad agreement that giving one person 90% of the cake and then dividing the remaining 10 % would be pretty unfair. In other words, a rough degree of equality is a value most people hold in and of itself.
5) Lastly, if I was in your class - ( would argue for equal distribution of the cake among those present. I would argue that, even when the small cake appeared and the large one was not available. My logic would be as follows.
Even a single taste of tasty goodie provides some pleasure, as we see by the number of people who accept samples when given out in supermarkets. We are not going to achieve a perfectly fair distribution of the cake, especially if we try to find a solution everyone agrees is perfectly fair. But an equal division is as close an approximation as possible. It will be fair to as many people as possible. Granted it offers nothing to those who do not want cake - but since the resource being distributed is cake they could not be satisfied without time travel. As to those who believe they deserve a larger than average share of the cake - well at least they are getting something.
And in the end since the resource being distributed is not very great, there is not that much materially at stake. But it is important to minimize feelings of unfairness. In an equal distribution, the majority end up with more than they would have under any other distribution likely to have been approved. And even those who feel they should have received a more than equal share understand that this is probably the second best distribtuon they were likely to receive. If we were distributing , say a million dollars, some other logic would have been needed. But if Kelley ever has a spare million, I expect she won't distribute it as a gift to this class.
5) A minor point about random distrubtion. Lotteries can be used as a powerful conservative argument. Hobbes for example argued out that if a Lottery is a fair way to distribute goods that cannot be divided equally , then birth is as good a lottery as any, as random a basis for distribution as could be found. Thus he Hobbes justified inherited wealth.