The Search for a Fair Society: Rawls’ List of Basic Liberties
September 15. Happy Sunday. Grab a coffee and let’s talk a realistic utopia of a fair society.
From the Original Position, Rawls extracted two overarching principles, things that need to be fulfilled so we can speak about a fair society. They are justice as it related to freedoms and equality. Additional to that there’s also the principle of intergenerational justice and sustainability that needs to be heeded.
When we go deeper into the principle of justice we see that it again contains two principles. I presented them in full in Rawls words in yesterday’s post. Today, I want to discuss what Rawls considered to be truly basic liberties. They are divided into three groups: personal, political, and procedural.
Personal liberties include the freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, the freedom of association, and all rights that are needed to ensure our individual freedom and bodily integrity including the freedom from violence, the freedom of movement, free choice of occupation, the right to a private family life, the freedom of choice in questions of sexuality and reproduction, and the right to own personal property. We will get deeper into some of those – I’m especially giddy to talk about property but also the flip side of liberties, namely responsibilities – but for now I just list Rawls’ ideas as a starting point for any discussion.
Political liberties are, according to Rawls, all the rights and freedoms that underpin the democratic process including the right to vote and to stand for office, the freedom of political speech and association, the right to scrutinize and criticize the government, the right to form political parties and campaign groups, the right to create a political system as long as in which people have substantively equal opportunities to exercise those rights and to influence collective decision-making. Oh how do I itch to compare this list to the three basic freedoms our ancestors had. But for now it’s Rawls speaking and for him the personal and political liberties established the core substantive freedoms protected by the basic liberties principle, what is the first of the two justice principles. Together the personal and political liberties must be seen as the liberal and democratic aspects of a liberal democracy.
Procedural liberties then again are the rights and freedoms associated with the rule of law. To abide by the procedural liberties the state should act in accordance only with laws that have been approved through a legitimate political process. Everyone should be subject to the same laws, which should be administered in a regular and impartial manner. These procedural liberties are a precondition for enjoying all the other personal and political liberties. Without the rule of law, democracy would be meaningless since the state could act with impunity, and none of our personal liberties would be secure.
So far Rawls. I don’t have the space left in this post to get into a detailed discussion of different aspects like what exactly did it mean for Rawls for a liberty to be basic. It has to wait for another day. Let me end therefore with a general observation. Rawls’ list of basic liberties is compiled with the implicit understanding that democracy, as we practice it today, is the fundament of any fair society. It’s a given that it will be an integral part of the dataset that all members of the society will use as a hypothesis to generate their model of the world around. As is the division of the world into states. In principle, I don’t disagree. A certain degree of alignment of the results of the individual world generation processes must happen before any meaningful cooperation is possible. Voluntarily, people will only accept to use the entirety of a certain dataset in their individual world generation process that they agree to. And they only agree to it if they are better off when cooperating, when they are more able to engage in random searches, have truly new experiences, and gain truly new knowledge in the group when without it or maybe in another group that uses another dataset to align their world generation processes. The bigger the group, the less agreement we will be able to reach. A point will come there any alignment reached with what the group can agree on will not be enough to meaningfully cooperate. At that point, you either fall back on violence and the threat thereof to get everyone in line with what some believe should be the dataset used by all. It should be our goal though to cut violence in any shape or form out of our system of organizing, so a general agreement of a smaller group will always be preferable, what leaves us with something we might want to call states in which we practice the will of the people. But neither the state nor the democracy that results are what we have in mind right now. The members of the society must define the terms for themselves.
What is on your mind after reading Rawls’s list and my additions? Is anything missing you considered as basic? Did you notice that the list includes only a very limited set of economic freedoms? Talk to me.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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