Ryan Kendall (Regent's Park College): 'The more the merrier: On how more competitors entails more solidarity'
Imagine Ann and Barb take a standardised test for admittance into a university. The university can adopt one of the following schemes to determine who is admitted. In “Threshold”, the university accepts whoever scores above a pre-determined threshold (i.e., Ann is admitted if she scores above the threshold. Barb is admitted if she scores above the threshold). In “Compete”, the university accepts whoever scores higher on the test (i.e., Ann is admitted if she scores above Barb’s score. Barb is admitted if she scores above Ann’s score). Hussain (2020) discusses a distinctive moral deficit with schemes like Compete: it fails to allow for Ann and Barb to be in “solidarity”. This paper adopts Hussain’s conception of solidarity and extends Hussain’s analysis to argue for the following results. First, when schemes like Compete are adopted in contexts with more than two participants, solidarity comes in a degree. Second, the degree of solidarity that any participant has with another participant increases with the total number of participants involved in the competition. Third, with only a hundred or so participants, schemes like Compete offer virtually full solidarity to all participants.
