The Search for a Fair Society: Rawls’ Difference Principle, Useful Inequalities & What is Beneficial?
October 10. Nice to meet you. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society as only that is the type of society that will eliminate violence and wars from our lives.
Rawls used his idea of the Original Position to extrapolate two overarching principles that define a fair society, Justice and Equality. The principle of Equality again has two parts: the fair equality of opportunity and the Difference Principle. The Difference Principle is the notion that social and economic inequalities can be justified only if they ultimately benefit everyone, and, specifically, that they should be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. In simpler words, some people can have more than others but only when this imparity also benefits those who have less. This begs the question, how can inequality benefit those that have less?
Well, let’s start by defining what we mean by ‘benefit’.
We are programmed to think about money when the word benefit comes up. That’s part of the dataset currently used by all of us in the self-generation of our models of the world. Implied is a reduction of a human life to a means-to-end calculation and of all human motives to the most selfish. That’s a choice, and a harmful one as it goes contrary to the fact that we mirror i.e. we use part of the data we associate with any other person (and living being) we see in the generation of our Self. What we recognize as us is a mosaic of information attributable to our body and that of others, the goals of those others invade ours, and our motivations become layered. Being asked to reduce them to the most selfish one is like cutting parts of us off. All this to say that profit and benefit are not the same. Benefit is not measurable as a monetary value.
What then are we talking about when we say benefit? It, of course, goes back to the social contract that’s concluded to organize the cooperation of the members of society and more specifically to the motivation every member of society had to seek to cooperate with others in the first place. Once more with feeling: We are not motivated by survival, so when all we get some get out of cooperation is survival the contract is not fulfilled. A human being, by conducting searches that exploit existing knowledge, can survive alone; the same as many other animals do. What no individual alone can do because of the high risk posed by them, is conducting random searches; the kind of search that promises not only a higher payoff than searches that exploit existing knowledge but the highest payoff of any kind of search. That’s the kind of payoff the material things that make up our body are after in their quest to reach both their lowest energy state and to be in equilibrium with their surroundings, what requires exploration. The material things came together in the shape of humans to build the most powerful natural search engine ever. That’s everyone’s motivation to cooperate sorted as cooperation offsets the high risk and makes random searches possible for the individual. Benefit therefore must be defined as an increased ability to engage in random searches without fearing the high risk – exploration, trial and error, leaning into the unknown, discovery.
So, our question is how can inequalities lead to an increased ability to engage in random searches without fear of those who have less? Well, there is nothing about how markets work, in theory or in practice, that guarantees that the benefits of economic growth – the increased ability to engage in random searches without fear through cooperation – will be widely shared, let alone that they will be shared with the least well-off. But all members of society, the least advantaged included, seek cooperation to increase their ability to engage in random searches. What’s there to do? We cannot force anyone to do useful work as everyone’s motivation to cooperate is the ability to engage in random searches and everyone has an interest in keeping the searches random as the high payoff that truly random searches promise, ensures that this promise made to all can be kept. So, we must rely on incentives to encourage people to do their random searches in one direction rather than another and possibly, at one point, voluntarily accept to increase the quota of their searches that exploit existing knowledge (menial labor) for the good of society.
I want to compare it to pheromones that are used by ants to make the track between a known food source and the colony. Pheromones don’t force a single ant to help exploit the existing knowledge. In fact, more often than not ants will ignore a pheromone track as Prof. Melanie Moses showed in her research and continue with their own random searches for new knowledge. But when it fits the ant’s current situation, the pheromones will be an incentive to exploit rather than explore for the good not just of the single ant at that moment but the whole hill.
In a human context think of the care economy. Relieving someone from some of the responsibility of raising a child or caring for an elderly or sick relative, increases this person’s ability to engage in random searches without fearing the high risk. Hence, someone developing and applying their skills and abilities in such a way to do just that would be justified to have more than a person using the basic level of support to solely explore. But that person, too, needs to be supplied with what it takes so that they can securely conduct random searches as it is in the nature of random searches that we can never know where and when the highest payoff materializes, and in the end every member was motivated to join society to be able to do just that.
So, what a person is entitled to above the basic level of support all members must get depends on what they contribute to the group. Economic justice is therefore a form of reciprocity that ensures that certain exploiting tasks necessary for the group to work get done, and the Difference Principle is concerned with maximizing the life chances or lifetime expectations of the least advantaged, rather than maximizing the income of whoever happens to be poorest at a given point in time.
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.
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