The Paradoxes of Cheese Pizza
Imagine a world in which we only ate cheese. Mozzarella. Swiss. Cheddar. Vegan. What a wonderful world that’d be…almost. We’d need two more things to make it perfect: pizza dough and pizza sauce. For cheese pizza is fantastic, and we celebrate it today on National Cheese Pizza Day.
Cheese pizza is beautiful for sure. But I actually prefer mushrooms on my pizza. Does this mean that mushroom pizza is more beautiful than cheese pizza?
Maybe not.
We could argue that they’re equally beautiful because an idealized pizza consumer would have an equal desire for either. That is, given that our pizza consumer is an unbiased consumer insofar as they’re idealized, they’d prefer either one.
But if the idealized pizza consumer were to exist, we’d be confronted with two prima facie conundrums.
First, would the idealized pizza consumer’s equal preference imply that all pizzas are equally good and equally bad to our consumer? It seems that it does and that, therefore, our idealized pizza consumer in fact has no preference.
Our perfect pizza consumer prefers no pizza at all.
As a consequence, we’re confronted with a second issue: Burdian’s ass. Although Burdian wasn’t the first to propose the problem, it’s his name that got attached to it. And here’s the problem: all things being equal, an equally hungry and equally thirsty donkey has no rational reason to move toward either a barrel of water or a stack of hay and therefore will eventually die of hunger.
Our idealized pizza consumer is just like that donkey. Insofar as our pizza person is unbiased because they're idealized, our consumer has no rational grounds for choosing one type of pizza over the other—and therefore never eats pizza.
Our idealized pizza consumer is no pizza consumer at all.
Well, if our idealized pizza consumer has these issues, then perhaps we should suppose that they do have preferences. But if this is the case, then what makes our consumer idealized? They just sound like a normal, run of the mill pizza lover.
I have no idea how to solve these conundrums, so, in lieu, here’s a hefty cheese pizza fact: the world’s cheesiest pizza had a total of 1,001 varieties of cheese on it. Of all those cheeses, 940 were of French origin.
Now just add some mushrooms to that pizza and it’d be perfect.
Happy National Cheese Pizza Day!