Gowder, I'm talking to the people who say unto me, "Friendly to who?" and "Oh, so you get to say what 'Friendly' means." I find that the existing literature rarely serves my purposes. In this case I'm driving at a distinction between the object level and the meta level, and the notion of bedrock (the Buck Stops Immediately). Does the political philosophy go there? - for I am not wholly naive, but of course I have only read a tiny fraction of what's out there. I fear that much political philosophy is written for humans by humans.

Roland, I confess that I'd intended the original reading of the dialogue as simple greed on Zaire's part, but your reading is also interesting... I would still tend to say that 1/3 apiece is the fair division, but that either of the other two are welcome to donate portions of pie to Zaire; the resulting division might perhaps be termed utilitarian. The morally interesting situation is when Xannon thinks Zaire deserves more pie but Yancy disagrees.