The Search for a Fair Society: No Basic Liberty is Absolut

September 27. I hope your day is treating you well. Right now it’s time for a coffee and to talk about the realistic utopia of a fair society.

Okay, let’s face it. The complete dataset for a fair society will never fall into our laps so that all we need to do is install it in our minds and run it as one of the sources with which we generate our personal model of the world. In fact, whenever someone offers you information in our current societies, presses it upon you even repeatedly, they do so because they want you to generate a model of the world in your mind that might or might not be advantageous to you but that will be definitely advantageous to them. You are the person in these never ending negotiations who needs to be actively exploring what’s out there and play a part in the debate or you become someone’s pawn and the world in your mind is generated for you. It doesn’t take an implanted chip. All it takes is curating what information you hear, read, see, experience.

Bringing this back to Rawls, he insisted that citizens need two essential moral powers or capacities:

1.   Citizens need a capacity for the conception of the good – the ability to reflect on and pursue our own idea of how we want to live.

2.   Citizens need a capacity for a sense of justice – the ability to form our own view about how we should organize society and how we can cooperate with others on fair terms.

According to Rawls these two capabilities are what make us free and equal. They are the preconditions for the existence of a democratic society. And the basic liberties, these personal, political, and procedural freedoms formulated by Rawls from the point of view of the Original Position, are the freedoms we must have to develop and exercise these capabilities.

How? The political liberties guarantee our freedom to discuss moral and political questions, to criticize the government and to take part in public life, without which it would be impossible to cultivate or act according to a sense of what’s fair – our ‘capacity for justice’.

At the same time, we need the personal freedoms of thought, speech, conscience and association in order to define and pursue the kind of life that we want to lead – our ‘capacity for the conception of good’.

When we are this clear about the underlying purpose of our basic freedoms helps us to think about their limits. Meaning, a basic liberty is only protected where it is essential for us – the individual and the society, since basic liberties are always liberties given to the individual but belonging to the group – in developing and exercising our moral capacities. So, when faced with a conflict between two basic liberties, we should seek to prioritize them according to their importance to living freely and for cultivating our two moral capacities. This means that not a single one basic liberty is absolute. We can and must limit any of them if doing so is necessary to maintain a ‘fully adequate’ set of basic liberties for everyone. Resolving clashes inevitably involves thus a degree of judgement about the relative importance of different freedoms. There may be a range of reasonable solutions. This flexibility in not a bug or a flaw. It’s a valuable and intentional feature of Rawls’ approach.

And this takes us back to the beginning of this post. Democracy – the never ending negotiations about the dataset we all use in our individual world generation processes in out minds in order to align our models of the world to such a degree that the desired cooperation is possible – is discourse and debate. It’s the only way we can let others know about the current model of the world we self-generate in our mind and the only way we will ever know what world the others live in. Rawls’ approach merely aims to deliver the framework for the debate.

Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. We need the debate.

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