Chapter 1. The Meaning of Fairness (Sample Paragraphs)

This chapter would provide an in depth analysis of the nature of fairness, including the objective and subjective natures of fairness.

In my first physics class at college about thirty years ago, the teacher told us a story about a starving donkey. There was a hungry donkey standing between two piles of hay. The distance from each pile to the donkey was exactly the same, the size of each pile was exactly the same, and the quality of the hay in each pile was exactly the same. Hungry though the donkey was, it could not make up its mind for which pile to go. It just stood there crying and starving to death.

 

Donkeys might be very stubborn, but in real world no donkey would starve to death while two piles of nice hay are nearby. What the teacher was trying to demonstrate through that story was one of the fundamental natural principles of balance: symmetrical balance. In the physical world, in order to cause a system to change its status we need some unsymmetrical inducing factors. For example, if we put 100 gram salt in the left pan of an old fashion mechanical balance, and put a reference weight of 100 gram in the right pan, then the beam holding those two pans would be in equilibrium horizontal position; but if we add more salt into the left pan without increasing the weight in the right pan, the equilibrium of the system would be broken. While most people are familiar with this principle of symmetrical balance, not too many people realize that the reflection of this principle of symmetric balance in our social life is what we called Fairness.

Reviews

[Grant P.]

Very Brilliant start to your book. The donkey story really made it so that anybody could clearly understand what you are talking about. You also show that you have great knowledge in the science area, specifically physics. I had a pretty hard time finding any mistakes in this. Great job.