Help me identify a fable.
October 7, 2014 12:06 PM
I heard this in an ethics class several years ago. I believe the original fable is Indian in origin, but I'm not sure. Here is the overview according to my memory:
A wise man is walking along and comes across three people arguing over ownership flute. The people are a rich man, the artist who created the flute, and a musician. The musician argues that of the three, only he will be able to use the flute to its purpose. The artist says that he created the flute, and so it is his. The rich man says he can buy the flute for enough money to supply the artist with materials for a hundred flutes, if only he would sell.
I don't remember what the wise man does in the end. I've looked online and in books about fables and morality and can't find anything close at all. Does this ring a bell for anybody?
A wise man is walking along and comes across three people arguing over ownership flute. The people are a rich man, the artist who created the flute, and a musician. The musician argues that of the three, only he will be able to use the flute to its purpose. The artist says that he created the flute, and so it is his. The rich man says he can buy the flute for enough money to supply the artist with materials for a hundred flutes, if only he would sell.
I don't remember what the wise man does in the end. I've looked online and in books about fables and morality and can't find anything close at all. Does this ring a bell for anybody?
I know a fair amount of Indian parables and I've never heard that one. I've tried searching the usual sources ie the Panchatantra, Ramanujan's collected fables, and come up nil. As Alvy Ampersand suggested, I'm pretty sure the story originates with Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, in his work An Idea of Justice
posted by Perko at 1:22 PM on October 7, 2014
posted by Perko at 1:22 PM on October 7, 2014
It is from the economist Amartya Sen's excellent book An Idea of Justice and begins on page 12:
"At the heart of the particular problem of a unique impartial resolution of the perfectly just society is the possible sustainability of plural and competing reasons for justice, all of which have claims to impartiality
and which nevertheless differ from – and rival – each other. Let me illustrate the problem with an example in which you have to decide which of three children – Anne, Bob and Carla – should get a flute about which they are quarrelling. [...] Having heard all three and their different lines of reasoning, there is a difficult decision that you have to make. Theorists of different persuasions, such as utilitarians, or economic egalitarians, or no-nonsense libertarians, may each take the view that there is a straight-forward just resolution staring at us here, and there is no difficulty in spotting it. But almost certainly they would respectively see totally different resolutions as being obviously right."
posted by epanalepsis at 6:59 AM on October 8, 2014
"At the heart of the particular problem of a unique impartial resolution of the perfectly just society is the possible sustainability of plural and competing reasons for justice, all of which have claims to impartiality
and which nevertheless differ from – and rival – each other. Let me illustrate the problem with an example in which you have to decide which of three children – Anne, Bob and Carla – should get a flute about which they are quarrelling. [...] Having heard all three and their different lines of reasoning, there is a difficult decision that you have to make. Theorists of different persuasions, such as utilitarians, or economic egalitarians, or no-nonsense libertarians, may each take the view that there is a straight-forward just resolution staring at us here, and there is no difficulty in spotting it. But almost certainly they would respectively see totally different resolutions as being obviously right."
posted by epanalepsis at 6:59 AM on October 8, 2014
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posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:02 PM on October 7, 2014