The Search for a Fair Society: What Makes a Liberty Basic?

September 16. Let’s start this week in style. Grab a coffee and let’s talk a realistic utopia of a fair society.

I presented you yesterday the list of liberties Rawls considered basic. While a lot of the freedoms, rights and liberties sounded very familiar there might have been some surprise about what was not on the list. E.g. the only economic liberties mentioned were the right to own personal property (and the definition of personal property Rawls gives is far more limited than you might think) and the freedom to choose one’s occupation. So, the question is what exactly does it mean for Rawls for a liberty to be basic?

The short answer would be, basic liberties are those that are both fundamental and inalienable. But just like basic these are two words that can mean a lot to a lot of people. Hence, Rawls clarified what he meant with either.

According to Rawls a liberty is fundamental when it can only be limited in order to protect another basic liberty. The truth is there will always be a huge amount of data each and every individual will use as hypotheses in the generation of their model of the world to fill the huge gaps left between their perceptions in order to come up with a to them coherent reality that’s unique to them or unique to a subset of a society – a family, a religion, a fandom etc. And others using their unique mix of data will disagree, sometimes disagree vehemently, about the resulting personal morality. The basic liberties principle calls on all of us to respect each person’s freedom to live according to their beliefs. And this comes down to the fact that we must respect that our agreement about what dataset we will all use in our individual world generation process is limited. The parts no agreements have been reached about between all members are free to fill as the member desires. The only limit on this freedom is the freedom of others to do the same. Or in other words, your personal data might not include provisions or permission structures to force others to use more common data than agreed upon by all members freely.

And this is logical when you go back to the reason why we consider cooperation as an option in the first place what requires this alignment of our personal models of the world so that we can agree on common goals. After all the setting of common goals requires us to know what the problems are, what levers we have to pull to solve these problems, and which levers are the best. They require a certain alignment. But the reason why we go through the hustle of aligning our individual generation processes is to enable as random searches as possible for all, to enable all to expose themselves to a constant flow of new experiences and information. It again goes back to the fact that we are part of the physical universe and its laws work on us, on our body, on the material things that have come together to create us. And all material things in this physical universe seek both their lowest energy state and to be in equilibrium with their surroundings. It doesn’t happen if we don’t expose ourselves to truly new energy and information on a constant basis. Random searches offer the highest payoff but also represent the highest risk for the individual; a risk that can be offset by cooperation. Cooperation requires some alignment of our individual world generation process. But random searches require a variety of individual models of the world in the group because only people with various individual models of the world will expose themselves to a vast variety of experiences. Hence, alignment and variety must be kept in a balance while all the models of all the members in the group as they are fed with new information from these searches constantly change.

The common dataset that needs for the same reason constant maintenance and adjustment, leads to alignment and therefore enables cooperation. The basic liberties protect the variety of individual models. That’s also the reason why the protection of basic liberties will always take precedence over the pursuit of economic justice.

Inalienable again means these are liberties that we cannot voluntarily give up, or ‘alienate’ ourselves from them. The best way to explain this is via slavery. Slaves are where the idea of vampires came from because slaves weren’t allowed to generate their own world anymore. All the data going into their world generation process was force onto them from their owner. This meant that they were considered to be dead as a human. But at night some slaves generated their own models of the world again and with it a self. They became dead men walking fueled by life energy that was considered not to be theirs but their owners. This also illustrates all that’s wrong with slavery from a societal perspective – the absolute loss of variety of models of the world prevents all from participating in the high payoff of random searches. It’s what basic liberties for the individual protect all members of the society from – this loss. They are therefore a collective right really and can’t be given up by the individual. That’s what inalienable means.

Does that make sense to you? Can you agree with it? Tell me.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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