The Search for a Fair Society: What’s Wrong with Rousseau’s View on the Importance of Certain Freedoms

September 18. Nice to meet you here. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society.

I presented you with Rawls’ arguments about what makes a freedom basic, the fundamentality and the inalienability. Are there other arguments leading to different results. You bet.

Let’s consider first J.J. Rousseau’s school of thought which has roots to classical Athens. According to this school of thought political and democratic freedoms are the most important. Personal freedoms are, at best, instrumentally important when they help to promote a healthy democratic culture. So, basically this school of thought believes that your freedom of speech but also your bodily integrity, your freedom of movement and your right to own personal property are only protected when they don’t get in the way of smooth running of the political system.

This points us already to the problem this view has when it comes to the establishment of a fair society. Followed to its conclusion it will lead into the tyranny of the majority. When the will of a democratic majority clashes with the personal freedoms of a minority, the former takes priority. Going back to the Original Position that leaves open the possibility that you could be a member of a minority in the society behind the veil, you couldn’t say in good faith that you would agree to such an arrangement that might strip you of your personal freedom to choose your job or live your family life without interference or love whoever you want etc.

But I always believe it helps us even more to understand what’s going on when we remember that each one of us is generating their own model of the world in our minds, and that when we are left to do it on our own, these models will end up being extremely diverse given that the info going into the model is almost exclusively subjective. The only reason we ever align these models is to cooperate in order to be able to conduct random searches which offer the highest payoff, but also represent the highest risk for the individual. In order to satisfy this goal we need to strike a balance between the level of alignment needed for the amount of cooperation we pursue and the degree the resulting models of the world in the members’ minds remain diverse so that the experiences and new knowledge the members seek out still add up to randomness in the searches. When you translate Rousseau’s school of thought’s argument into this language what they deem the right way to handle liberties is to turn them into a bargaining chip to limit the variety of self-generated models of the world more than all the members have agreed to voluntarily and agreed is necessary to allow the level of cooperation pursued by all members. And they justify it by pointing at the fact that the majority already uses the additional data collectively.

There are two things majorly wrong with this view. For one, limiting the variety of the self-generated models makes the searches conducted by the members of the society in question, the experiences and knowledge sought out, the activities engaged in etc. less random. Thus, it robs the society as a whole of potential and profit in a monetary and non-monetary sense. And that when people aligned their models of the world to a degree and cooperated exactly because they wanted to be able to go after the high payoff random searches promise. Hence, this view undermines the whole reason of the social contract.

And then, people will only really use shared data to generate their model of the world when they can agree with it. The only way to get people to use data they haven’t agreed to is by force, like her by cutting into their liberties that are meant to protect the variety of the existing models of the world in a society. Once you introduce force into the system, violence begets violence. It will proliferate, messing with the world generation processes of all, and not in a good way. More and more of the cooperation agreement will need to be enforced with violence and the threat thereof until the agreement is totally gone but the people are trapped in the system.

This is certainly not a system to base a fair society on.

The second opposite view to Rawls’ ideas of what makes a liberty basic is the school of thought is associated with John Locke and the modern liberal tradition. According to this school of thought personal freedoms are the most important freedoms there are whereas democratic freedoms are only means to secure our personal freedoms and economic prosperity. This can lead to distinctly undemocratic conclusions which I will talk about tomorrow.

Before I go I want to mention that Professor Timothy Snider has a new book out this week called On Freedom. I haven’t read it yet but I’ve heard him talk about it and the discussion therein about negative and positive freedoms – freedom from vs. freedom to. And I heard some echoes of my discussion about basic freedoms always having an individual aspect on the one hand while being collective freedoms by nature. I’m looking forward to read the book, and so should you.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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