**SOPHISTRY INTENSIFIES**
Okay, two can play this game:
Let's say that we're stranded together on a tiny desert island in shark-infested waters, and we've got nothing to eat except a single can of tuna. We're both armed with similar handguns, so neither of us can claim the tuna by force. And no, we can't eat the sharks because they are bulletproof and/or inedible.
Now, from an utilitarian perspective, the preferred course of action for either of us would be to sacrifice himself for the other person, because maximizing the chances of survival for one person is better than minimizing them for two. I give you the tuna and shoot myself in the head, and you get to feast on my flesh until – hopefully – a search helicopter or whatever comes to the rescue.
This is a great plan on paper, but what if I don't want to go along with it? Do we shoot each other like desperados and throw away the last dregs of utility that could be salvaged from the situation? Or do we "amiably" share the tuna and "hope for the best" (or, more cynically, "agree to wait it out until the other guy drops dead from hunger")? If our initial conditions (armament, marksmanship, distance from the tuna can, amount of body fat...) are absolutely identical, there's no question that we'll go with the latter option – not because we decided on it, but because that's how "self-interested rational agents" act.
If this were a real-life situation, though, then of course our starting conditions would be different, as a simple matter of probability. For example, we might have a hundred cans of tuna on the island – in a locked crate to which only
I have the key. And I might also have a fully-loaded .45 revolver, while you're empty-handed, butt-naked, and also much hungrier than I am. Whether or not it's rational to share my tuna with you is entirely up to debate: On one hand, two live people is more than one, and the utility of leftover tuna cans at the time of salvation is negligible...
but on the other hand, I have no idea
how long I'll have to sit around on this rock, so there's always the possibility that giving even
one of these cans to you may result in my own starvation, which means zero people saved, which means minimum utility from an objective point of view. And of course, I really shouldn't waste time on this nonsense if I want to get the maximum nutritional utility out of your corpse...
What I'm saying, LB, is that everything is situational, and you would be very much in favour of equality in the latter scenario.
And so would I, because I'm a
person, not a bloody self-interested rational agent. We would share that fucking tuna 50/50 like good brothers, and I would shoot you and eat you only when driven mad by hunger.