Followup to: The Bedrock of Fairness

Every time I wonder if I really need to do so much prep work to explain an idea, I manage to forget some minor thing and a dozen people promptly post objections.

In this case, I seem to have forgotten to cover the topic of how morality applies to more than one person at a time.

Stop laughing, it's not quite as dumb an oversight as it sounds. Sort of like how some people argue that macroeconomics should be constructed from microeconomics, I tend to see interpersonal morality as constructed from personal morality. (And definitely not the other way around!)

In "The Bedrock of Fairness" I offered a situation where three people discover a pie, and one of them insists that they want half. This is actually toned down from an older dialogue where five people discover a pie, and one of them—regardless of any argument offered—insists that they want the whole pie.

Let's consider the latter situation: Dennis wants the whole pie. Not only that, Dennis says that it is "fair" for him to get the whole pie, and that the "right" way to resolve this group disagreement is for him to get the whole pie; and he goes on saying this no matter what arguments are offered him.

This group is not going to agree, no matter what. But I would, nonetheless, say that the right thing to do, the fair thing to do, is to give Dennis one-fifth of the pie—the other four combining to hold him off by force, if necessary, if he tries to take more.

A terminological note:
In this series of posts I have been using "morality" to mean something more like "the sum of all values and valuation rules", not just "values that apply to interactions between people".
The ordinary usage would have that jumping on a trampoline is not "morality", it is just some selfish fun. On the other hand, giving someone else a turn to jump on the trampoline, is more akin to "morality" in common usage; and if you say "Everyone should take turns!" that's definitely "morality".
But the thing-I-want-to-talk-about includes the Fun Theory of a single person jumping on a trampoline.
Think of what a disaster it would be if all fun were removed from human civilization! So I consider it quite right to jump on a trampoline. Even if one would not say, in ordinary conversation, "I am jumping on that trampoline because I have a moral oblig

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