The Search for a Fair Society: Rawls’ Two Principles of Justice (Overview)
September 14. Thanks for stopping by. Grab a coffee and let’s talk a realistic utopia of a fair society.
According to Rawls’ Original Position thought experiment we should ask ourselves how we would choose to reorganize our society if we did not know what our individual circumstances would be, if we want to know what a fair society would look like. In the language of our minds self-generating a model of the world that only exists for the individual who creates it, he asks us to go back to the point of the original negotiations about what dataset to use as hypotheses in the individual world generation protocols of the participants of the negotiations when all they had to judge any agreement on was a life without an alignment of their reality with that of others. The goal of any alignment is to enable cooperation and the establishment of common goals. I added that we must not lose sight of reason why we pursuing cooperation: to offset the high risk of random searches, the kind of searches that offer the highest payoff once conducted. This means any dataset for common use that does not enables all to a large degree of exploring for new experiences and knowledge will not be used by all without pressure put onto all – violence or the threat thereof. You want to eliminate violence while still enabling cooperation and the establishment of common goals, you better come up with a dataset that every member of society will accept to use in their personal world generation process. I.e. you better come up with a dataset that enables all to a as large as possible degree of exploring for new experiences and knowledge and to a as small as possible degree of exploiting of existing knowledge, esp. exploiting of existing knowledge for the benefit of a few. The reason is easy: we only live in the moments we mix truly new information with past experiences and hypotheses about the future. And that goes back to the fact that all materials things, what we are, seek both their lowest energy state and to be in equilibrium with their surroundings. It can only happen when we exchange energy and information with our surroundings.
Now, Rawls established two overarching principles of a fair society that arise from the Original Position: Justice (relating to freedom) and Equality. And then he added the principle of Intergenerational Justice and Sustainability to them. Taken together, these principles can be used to start a debate about concrete measures, concrete data that’s meant to go into the dataset for common use, and what their best design should be so that all can agree. I mean to work my way here through all of those and add things wherever our understanding of how our mind works to create our models of the world leads to additional thoughts. For now let’s take a look at Rawls’ discussion of Justice.
Rawls divides the overarching principle of Justice into two (and these are his own words):
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first they are attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle.
That’s a lot. We’ll go through it step by step starting with the question what Rawls considered to be truly basic liberties. Today I want to conclude though with some basic clarifications. The two principles of Justice concern themselves with social justice i.e. the justice of institutions and not the justice of individual actions. And they concern themselves with domestic justice i.e. they are concerned with how we should organize the basic structure of society/ its core institutions, not with local justice (how should the internal life of various associations that operate within the basic structure e.g. families, church, sports teams be organized, and not with global justice i.e. the justice between rather than within societies. Might the ideas be transferred to a bigger or smaller scale especially once the self-generation of models of the world in humans’ minds is taken into consideration? Maybe. But that’s not what the principles should be judged against.
So, on first glance, what comes to your mind after reading just Rawls’ two principles of justice? Any ideas on truly basic liberties a person in the Original Position would require? Tell me.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
#science #history #reality #society #philosophy #WorldGeneration #fairness #information #Rawls #OriginalPosition #mind #self #brain #thinking #exploring
