Notions of obvious breadth and importance should, when possible, be examined
under a number of different disciplinary lenses. This is the spirit in which the
present offering by Julius Barbanel (a mathematician) joins recent books by
Herv´e Moulin (an economist) and Nicholas Rescher (a philosopher).
But fairness – or, more explicitly, fair division – comes in a number of different
flavors, and we should begin by setting forth something of a general framework
in which we can place the present book.
One of the more important dichotomies in the treatment of fairness is the extent to which the treatment is normative. Is the author trying to argue that certain
methods of allocation are superior to others? The treatment of fair division by
economists, philosophers, and political scientists tends to lie in the normative
camp. Mathematicians, on the other hand, focus on what is possible and what
is not, and often leave subjective judgments to others, as Barbanel does here