FAIRNESS – PRINCIPLE & PARAMETERS, PART II. . .

Gentle reader, as I noted in PART I, today I will use a metaphor/analogy of ‘Cooking’ in order to help us understand ‘Fairness’ as rooted in ‘Principle’ and ‘Parameters.’

Think of ‘Principles’ as cooking recipes.  ‘Parameters’ are the ingredients.  Some ‘Parameters’ are necessary and other ‘Parameters’ are optional.  Once a ‘Parameter’ has been added, it interacts in crucial ways with the other ‘Parameters’.

For example, when my mother made a cake ‘from scratch’ she had a recipe in mind.  The recipe required certain ingredients and these ingredients had to be put together in a certain way – for example, the oven had to be turned on before she was ready to put the batter in; she had to set the temperature to the right level in order to avoid burning the batter.  She had to mix the ingredients thoroughly and she had to put the right amount of batter in the mold or the cake would not be able to expand as needed.

For each recipe there were specific ingredients needed AND for each recipe my mother could, if she chose, add additional ingredients.  The additional ingredients would ‘add to the cake’ – if they did not, then the cake would, more likely than not, be ruined.  When it came to adding additional ingredients, a great cook would have fewer ‘failures’ than a novice would.

Looking at cooking in this way shifts the continuous process of ingredients unfolding and mixing over time to a discrete process whereby particular decisions are made at each step in the recipe.

A good cook can also, in a sense, reverse the process.  For example, a good cook can taste a piece of cake and identify some of the ingredients that went into the recipe (some of the parameters that made up the principle).  A good cook will taste, smell, and touch in order to identify some of the ingredients.

However, even the greatest cook will have difficulty pinpointing the exact proportions of each ingredient (Parameter) and the order in which they were put together.  A good cook could write all of this down and then bake an acceptable cake AND the cake would not turn out as the cake the cook had tasted for all of the ingredients and the process itself would not be the same for each cake (the original and the one the good cook baked).

If ten good cooks followed the same recipe odds are high that each will bake a cake that is different from the others.  One might be lighter, another might be a bit sweeter, and another might be a bit drier.  The ‘influence’ of each cook would be revealed in the cake baked.

Prior to putting anything in the oven, my mother would pause, hold her thumb and index finger over the cake batter and then gently rub her thumb and index finger together.  When I was ten years old I asked her what she was doing.  Her response was: ‘This is a little love that will make all of the difference.’  For my mother this was a key, extra and essential, ingredient.

For our ten good cooks, differences in the output will be influenced by the quality of each cook’s ingredients, by their oven, by the attention they give to the process, by their experience and by their patience.  These make up the ‘performance’ and they are also indicators of what they know consciously and unconsciously.

Next time, we will connect our cooking metaphor/analogy to ‘Fairness, Principle, and Parameters.’