I would like, if I may, to relate a thought experiment that I observed over the summer. It was given by an ethics professor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Buzz Lightyear, and it went as follows.

You are participating in an experiment. You are seated at a table in a room with another person of the same age, race, gender, social class, whatever, as yourself. For all intents and purposes, they might as well be you. You have no feelings or prejudices towards them whatsoever, and you have never met the person before.
The experiment goes like this. You are given a hundred dollars. It is your job to split that hundred dollars between yourself and the other person in any way you choose. The catch is that if the other person is not satisfied with the way you split the money, they can call the whole deal off and you both walk away empty-handed. How do you split the money?

Second question. If you were the other person in this experiment, how much of the hundred dollars would you settle for?

Now what if it was a thousand dollars instead of a hundred? Same two questions.

Your response to the question of how you would split the money only tells us a little about your generosity and how much you think you can get away with. The question of how much money you would settle for before you were willing to walk away from it all is quite revealing. Some people say they’d settle for a dollar, cause hey, it’s a dollar more than they had before, and if they were the one splitting the money, they’d try to take all of it, too. But some people think, “Why should I have only a dollar when the other person gets 99? That’s not fair at all, and I’m going to let them know just what I think of that be seeing to it that they don’t get any money. Serves them right.”

Say the person tries to split the money sixty-forty with you getting forty. Well, maybe you still don’t think that’s fair, but still, it’s forty dollars. Tough call. If you give up those forty dollars just so that the other person gets screwed out of their sixty, what do you gain by it? Will they change their outlook on life and become kinder people? Not likely. Are you doing it for the pleasure of seeing their unhappiness? Not really. So what you have the opportunity to purchase with those forty dollars or however many dollars is fairness – knowing that what happened was right. Forty dollars was an acceptable price for you to pay for justice.


The point of this is putting a price tag on something intangible. I don’t think at the time I experienced this lecture I had any idea how valuable it would be. Buzz Lightyear to the rescue.