The Search for a Fair Society: Rawls’ Sustainability Principle Is a Call for a Redefinition of Property

October 17. Nice to meet you. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society as only a fair society will eliminate violence and war. But to get there we need to know what we are aiming for.

So far, Rawls told us to go back to the Original Position. As I have shown, Rawls’ Original Position is the moment in which the first group of humans came together to cooperate without any preconceptions of what it means to cooperate. The first task these humans faced – and we still face today – was finding common ground from which they could formulate shared goals.

The problem with this is that our brain is not capable of processing the data necessary to perceive the reality of the physical universe, nor do we pick up all the available data with our senses. We don’t even come close. Our mind, as a tool that turns any human in the best possible search engine to help the material things that make up our body to explore in order to get into their lowest energy state and be in equilibrium with their surroundings, self-generates in quick succession models of the world that are mostly based on hypotheses. These models vastly differ between humans. What we perceive as reality is not the common ground needed to start a cooperation from.

To cooperate, the models of all members must be aligned. But not completely. In fact, since the one motivation to cooperate shared between all members is an increased ability to execute random searches, these models must at the same time remain as randomly diverse as possible. The Original Position asks of us to come up with a dataset – a set of definitions, structures and rules – that all members will apply henceforth to their world generation processes to accomplish this balance that will satisfy the one motivation all members share.

Rawls said that it can be accomplished when we respect two overarching principles, namely the Justice Principle that defines the basic personal, political, and procedural liberties each member should equally enjoy, and the Equality Principle that defines the worth these liberties have. Together they create a balance between the satisfaction of each member’s goal to increase their ability to execute random searches and the offsetting of the high risk of this kind of searches for even the least successful. I talked about all this before.

There’s one other principle that Rawls included, which must be considered while contemplating both overarching principles, and that’s the Principle of Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice. This principle is based on the acknowledgement of the environmental and ecological limits of growth. In Rawls’ words: We have a fundamental duty to make possible the conditions needed to establish and preserve a just basic structure over time. It means that each one of us, when we come up with the dataset that governs our cooperation, has a duty to choose the path that leads to sustainable development i.e. development that increases the ability to execute random searches of even the least advantaged without fear of failure while it doesn’t compromise the ability of future generations to do the same or even meet their own needs.

This, like nothing else in Rawls’ work, puts us on the track to reconsider our definition of property. When we stick with the Roman Law definition of property, in which ius abusos – the right to neglect and destroy – is the defining characteristic, none of our developments will be sustainable. On the contrary, it gives us permission to exhaust and to suck dry whatever we consider our property whenever, wherever, and however we choose to, from a company we bought shares of, to a country we hold citizenship of, to the planet as a whole. The Sustainability Principle calls for a definition of property that connects property with the duty to care for it, if not to improve what we have been entrusted with so at least to preserve it. Without this redefinition fairness of a society will not be achievable. And frankly, the planet will not survive us.

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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