The Search for a Fair Society: John Rawls ft. Self-Generated Models of the World - a Recap

September 28. It’s the weekend. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society.

Since we have reached the end of the basic discussion of Rawls’ principle of justice as it relates to freedom a quick recap before we move on to his second principle of equality:

Rawls said that in order to know what it means to live together on terms that everyone could accept as fair, we must put ourselves into the Original Position. We should ask ourselves how we would choose to organize the society if we didn’t know what our individual circumstances would be in this society; not just our economic circumstances but our gender, sexuality, religion, skin color, land of origin or in short any diversity that could be picked at. Our unawareness should also stretch to the society itself in such a way that we should assume not to know anything about the society’s composition and majorities.

Basically, what he describes is the very first meeting of humans who want to cooperate what requires them to align their self-generated models of the world in their mind to a certain degree. Doing so requires them to agree about a defined set of data they will all use as a base line in their model generation processes because only that will enable them to agree on common goal. Why do they want to cooperate in the first place? Their motivation is not survival. They can survive alone. But the material things that make up a human haven’t come together in the way they have in a human to simply survive. All material things in the universe seek both their lowest energy state and to be in equilibrium with their surroundings. That’s only possible when you lean into the unknown and explore your surroundings. Humans are the best exploration machines material things have found yet on earth. The biggest prospect of success – the highest payoff – in any exploration offer random searches. They also pose the highest risk for the individual as the success is random and thus, per definition, neither plannable nor standardizable. The risk for the individual can be offset by cooperation. Hence, the goal every member of the group coming together in this meeting has, the main thing they want to get out of the negotiations, is the ability to engage in as random searches as possible. This refers to the level of the group as much as to the level of the individual because if any of the participants were happy with exploiting existing knowledge all day long every day they wouldn’t seek cooperation. And it is important that this desire is really the desire of the material things making up each human. These material things can’t be convinced that it’s enough that material things gathered in other members of the group are enabled to get closer to what they seek because the group enables these few to explore.

From behind the veil of ignorance, Rawls discerned, we would settle on two overarching principles: justice and equality, and the principle of intergenerational justice and sustainability. The basic liberties principle is a template for protecting our most important freedoms and designing a democratic political system, while the equality principle tells us how to organize our core social and economic institutions. One defines our liberties, the other defines the worth of our liberties. Together with the just saving principle they describe the ideal of economic justice that is both liberal and egalitarian while we recognize the limits of our finite planet. They constitute a truly systematic alternative to the neoliberalism that continues to dominate economic thinking and which serves to justify the ecological destruction and inequality that blight our society today.

Rawls didn’t know what science tells us today about what each one of us recognize as reality; that it is all a self-generated model of the world that, since it is based on just very few sensory data and a lot of filling up gaps, is unique to each of us and therefore incredible diverse. But his ideas lead us to exactly the point that thinking in terms of creating a basis for cooperation would take us. A fair contract between all members that would lead to an alignment of the individual self-generated worlds must balance a protection of diversity that must remain between the models of the world to ensure that the explorations conducted by the members of the group and the group as a whole remain random with an alignment of the models of the world to the degree necessary to get the level of cooperation pursuit by all. The basic freedoms all work to establish the two ends of the seesaw. But it is the equality principle that helps to define the exact system that is needed to offset the risk attached to random searches for the group and the individual.

Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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