The Search for a Fair Society: Rawls’ Original Position + Individual World Generation

September 13. Fancy meeting you here. Actually, I’m delighted. Grab a coffee and let’s talk a realistic utopia of a fair society.

Okay, so far I’ve established that society is a dataset which all members willingly use in their individual world generation protocol so that the resulting models in the minds of the members align to a degree that allows common goals and cooperation. I also explained why in order to create a realistic utopia that describes a set of institutions that are the best we can hope for, given what we know about human nature and the constraints of the natural world, no part of this dataset shall be prescribed, because whatever is prescribed and not agreed to by all needs to be enforced with violence. We don’t want to start from a point where violence or the threat thereof is already written into the result. Our goal from the outset should be a dataset that every member can accept as fair.

How? With today’s technical means it might even be possible to bring the population of a country together for a convention and have a debate. But as we can see right now very vividly in the US presidential election people with money and power will try to throw their weight around to influence the outcome. Not all voices thus would have the same value what would lead to results that are not acceptable to all.

A better solution was proposed by the political philosopher John Rawls. It’s a thought experiment called the Original Position. According to Rawls, if we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should ask ourselves how we would choose to organize it, if we did not know what our individual circumstances would be in the society we create. Basically, this is what physicists would call a spherical cow. We eliminate the need to protect what we got by allowing for the possibility that we could be a white, straight, Christian billionaire imagining the best possible society just as well as a Latino seasonal farm worker or a black trans kid in Tennessee just to give some examples. This veil of ignorance also means that we have no idea what either of these statuses means in the best possible society we design.

When Rawls came up with the Original Position it hadn’t yet been established that what we all live in is a model of the universe of our own creation that, with almost no resemblance to the universe, widely varies between people. So, he couldn’t phrase is Original Position in the language of individual world generation. But the Original Position can easily translate into this language. What Rawls wants us to do is go back to a mind unincumbered by any datasets that we are fed from the moment we are born. He asks us to base our hypotheses with which we fill the gaps between the few perceptions we take in from the position of the first humans consciously negotiating an alignment of their self-generated models of the world. What dataset would this person be ready to agree to use from then on out to offset the high risk of random searches that they would love to engage because these searches also promise the highest payout by cooperating?

And I think this is exactly the question we need to ask because it reminds us not just of the goal – cooperation – but also the reason why we seek it out – enabling all of us to explore, to lean into our curiosity and the unknown to combine new information with existing knowledge. There are many ways to organize that will lead to cooperation but only few will lead to cooperation that allows the largest measure of exploration for all. When we lose sight of the reason why we seek out cooperation, it will lead to resentment in those who are forced to in the majority exploit existing knowledge. As a result, they are open to use other datasets – there own or those that are implied to them. The alignment of the self-generated models decreases and the easy way out will seem to be to use violence and the threat thereof to force people to use one particular dataset for their world generation from there on out that has been chosen by a few.

What do you think?

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