The Search for a Fair Society: The One Problem Any Ideology Must Deliver a Solution For

October 23. I hope your day treats you well. In any case it’s time for coffee and a chat about a realistic utopia of a fair society because this must be our goal if we want to stop war and violence invading and destroying our lives.

I said yesterday that I believe Rawls’ approach to liberalism should be preferred to all other ideologies because its starting point is fairness.

For that purpose, I define ideology as a complete dataset meant to replace some data members would otherwise choose themselves for their individual generation of a model of the world. They replace it to align their otherwise diverse models, create some common ground to start from, and thus to enable cooperation. An ideology must offer a solution to the problem that the replacement of data makes the resulting model of the world in the member’s mind less ideal for their personal survival. Thus, the act creates a dependency on the group for something that could be achieved by the member alone – survival – if it were not for the desire to cooperate and the alignment of the models of the world of the member necessary for it. And every member desires to cooperate (while there will be more motives that’s the one motivation all humans share) because only cooperation offsets the high risk of conducting searches in a random fashion. Searching in a random fashion instead of exploiting existing knowledge what an individual can do alone promises a much higher payoff. The rules, structures, and definitions entailed in the replacement dataset therefore must explain how either every member of the cooperation down to the least advantaged experiences a sustained increase in their ability to execute random searches because they use this dataset or how some members intend to coerce and force other, unwilling members to align their models of the world with the dataset despite the fact that doing so puts these other members in a worse position than they could be in when not cooperating at all.

Rawls’ hypothetical – the Original Position – proposes a way how to compile, maintain and adjust a dataset that leads us to the former. Physicists would probably call it a spherical cow, the spherical cow of human existence. What gets stripped away are all the preconceptions we have about cooperation. We are to step back into the shoes of the first humans ever contemplating cooperation – what part of their models of the world they are willing to give up to allow alignment, and what parts of their models of the world must remain diverse so that an increased ability to execute random searches can still be useful to them personally but also the group as a whole.

In the Original Position, the fact that we don’t know our own skills or social position, or even our religious and moral beliefs, means that we cannot tailor our choice of principles simply to benefit ourselves. It also gives us a glimpse of how much there is to explore that we might assume to be already decided.

Of course, we are not really in the Original Position and will never be able to put ourselves into it, because we are products of the society we were born and raised in. So, even when we agree that we should approach these kinds of issues impartially, all our ideas are shaped already by all the rules, structures and definitions that simply living in our society provides us with. But here again the Original Position and peer reviews of our unconscious in the necessary debates and conversations can keep the spherical cow spherical. The peeling off of preconceptions about cooperation restricts the reasons we are able to offer for and against different principles. It prevents us from arguing for certain principles in terms of our own individual interests, and it forces us to justify them from an impartial perspective and with the main goal in mind: a sustained increase in every member’s ability to execute random searches.

And that’s why this approach to compile, maintain, and adjust a shared replacement dataset – an ideology acceptable to all – and its results stand out from all the others.

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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