«In the
animals farm (where each animal speaks and reasons as an Homo economicus)
there was a flock of rational chickens (rational in the sense of Lucas) that
were happy to run to the farmer every morning to be fed
Only one
eccentric chicken noticed that older chickens had periodically disappeared and
expressed the fear that the benevolent farmer was fatting them to bring them to the
slaughterhouse
The
other chickens didn’t take him seriously: they claimed that he was a lugubrious
troublemaker and that if some chickens had disappeared this depended on the
fox; however the farmer had already promised to raise and strengthen the fence
That
night the eccentric chicken escaped from the farm before a stronger fence would
prevent it and saved himself: the following morning all the other chickens were
put on a lorry and brought to the slaughterhouse»
Moral:
the rational chickens behaved according to a “science” based on empirical
regularities (the farmer fed them all the mornings):
their science was apparently
wrong only in a particular morning but that moment was the most important one
Bertrand
Russel: ”The man
who has fed the chicken every day at last wrings its neck instead, showing that
more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the
chicken”
(The Problems of Philosophy,
1912, chap IV, On induction)
The
eccentric chicken saved himself because he had a more general point of view than
the “rational” chickens: the trouble is that in a globalized world we cannot
escape beyond the fence
→ we
need a more general vision but we have also to change the world
