I’m going to eventually track all the pages I
should be tracking for the philosophy
papers blog, but until then I’ll keep having to do manual updates.

Analysis has posted two new preprints, and
surprisingly enough they’re both of higher quality than the Lowe
McCall effort. Shaun Nichols has a paper
on imagination arguing, among other things, that Lamarque’s solution to
Lewis’s Ugly Dave problem doesn’t work. I want to think about this a bit more
before making a snarky comment.

From the more spectacular department, Hillel
Steiner and Jonathan Wolff have a solution
to all the land conflicts in the world. Here’s how it works. When A and B
both claim something, call it imaginatively C, and the Solomonic solution of
cutting the C in two won’t work, we basically auction it off. We’ll stick to
the example in the text and assume that C is an indivisible parcel of land.

— How could a
parcel of land be indivisible?
— Perhaps God said it was heretoafter joined, and what God has ajoined, let no
man tear sunder.

And with no one better to receive the auction
proceeds, to the loser go the spoils. So if B wins the auction by bidding $10,
then A gets that $10. This is meant to leave everyone better off because, although
A loses the land, she “ends up with something which, in the circumstances, it
prefers to the land: lots of money.”

There’s always a hitch. After we reach the price at
which A might be best off
stopping bidding, because she’d be better off if the auction stopped than if
her next bid were to be accepted, call this her indifference point, she might
be motivated to keep on bidding just to make life harder for her opponent, and
not to mention to line her own pockets. And if her opponent calls the bluff and
cashes out, A could be in a pretty pickle. Steiner and Wolff think this won’t
happen because

For the likely
alternative is that the party with the lower indifference price will lose its
nerve before it starts to appear too greedy, and it will thus cash out for a
sum above its indifference price.

I think that’s right. In most land conflicts around
the world, the parties are (a) very concerned about looking too greedy and (b)
not at all motivated by a desire to make life harder for their rivals in land.

There seem to be a couple of technical objections
to the project. First, there’s a worry about which currency we’ll use for the
auction. I guess in practice US dollars. Which would be fine if greenbacks were
equally available to each party, but when the US is backing one side or the
other it might create some kind of advantage to that party. As a good
Australian I suppose I don’t object to that, but it’s a point.

Secondly, as we’ll see in horrendous detail
presently, it turns out that it is very useful in the bidding process to know
more about the other side’s intentions than they know about yours. And that, I
think, provides a major advantage to parties governed by secrecy obsessed
cliques over parties governed democratically. And I don’t think that’s the kind
of advantage we want to build into the system.

Most importantly, as best I can tell, the proposal
doesn’t yield the result proposed, that the losing party will end up with
something it prefers to the land. Assume that A values C at $8, and B values C
at $12. (If this even makes sense, try and pretend that A and B each value C
equally, but A values dollars more highly than B does, perhaps because A has
fewer of them.) Also assume that A doesn’t know that B values C at $12, and
that B has just bid $4 for C. What should A do?

Note that if A makes a bid, and it is accepted,
then A will be worse off than if she accepts B’s bid. To see this, imagine she
bids $5 and this is accepted. Well, she now gets the land, but she is $9 worse
off, the $5 she paid, and the $4 she didn’t get. And, ex
hypothesi, the land was worth $8. So if she’s scared her bid
will be accepted, and given her uncertainty about B’s attitudes she may well
be, especially if B is run by a secrecy obsessed clique, she should not bid,
but accept B’s bid.

The allegation was that when the auction ended, A
would get ‘lots of money’, which would be more valuable to her than the land.
But she only ended up with $4, and she valued the land at $8. So that seems to
be false. Note also that B got a ‘bargain’, $12 worth of land for $4. Note
particularly that the size of B’s discount, $8, is larger than the amount of
money A receives. In general, this seems to be how these auctions are likely to
go – the party with ‘deeper pockets’ will win the auction, and will end up with
a larger ‘profit’. None of which speaks fondly for the fairness of the
proposal.

But you might think that this isn’t too bad. After
all, A got half the value of the land, and she had half a claim to it to start
with, so that’s only fair. Well, maybe, and maybe not. In most land disputes it’s
not exactly obvious that each claimant has an equal moral claim. To pick a
wholly untendentious example, let’s consider the claims of Protestants and
Catholics to Ulster. Since this is philosophy not history we can stipulate to
some facts, so let’s assume that the only basis of the Protestant claim is that
keeping Ulster under Protestant control preserves the 1800 Act of Union, which
constitutes an inviolate contract between the Irish and British peoples, and
that the reason for having it under Catholic control is that this implements
God’s will about where the boundary between Ireland and Britain should be as He
clearly expressed by drawing the coastlines just where He did.

Now, if we auction off Ulster as suggested, the poorer
party will end up with about half of what they are believed they are entitled to.
And that might be fair if each
party to the auction started with an equal claim. But obviously it’s a
substantive moral claim that the moral claim conferred by the Act of Union is
equal in weight to the moral right conferred by God’s terrestrial design. If
one of these is stronger, then it’s not obvious that giving the poorer party
half of what they think they are entitled to is exactly fair.

The important point is that we have to do some
serious ethical work before we can even start the auction. And in most
cases, doing the serious ethical work will show us that one of the claimants has
a less worthy moral claim than the other. Maybe the proposal here would be
appropriate when it’s decided that the two parties have an equal moral claim,
but note that’s not the same as not being able to tell who has a stronger moral
claim, which is a depressingly common state of affairs.

Of course, even then the worries about currencies
and relative governmental secrecy still apply. Let me close with one other
worry. In many land disputes in the world as we stumble across it, if B gives A
a large sum of money, or vice versa, then A will use that money to procure
weaponry with which to attack B. I haven’t worked out how to factor that into
the utility calculations each party should do at each stage of the auction, but
I don’t think it makes things better. One important thing to work out is how
the auction would be affected if A is likely to use every penny of the money to
buy bombs to bomb B, but B will use the money on butter and foreign aid. I can’t
imagine that it makes the process considered more just, but I shouldn’t be
insistent until I do the calculations.