The Search for a Fair Society: Why Rawl's’ Egalitarian Liberalism and Not Any Other Ideology?

October 22. Fancy meeting you here. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society. When your call for peace is for real, this is what you must set out to create.

There exist many ideas how to organize society best: socialism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism and more. Ideologies. To engage in a pet peeve of mine: dealing only with the economy and not with the whole of society, capitalism is not one of them and is therefore not the opposite of socialism. The dataset representing capitalism can become part of the dataset of any ideology because the dataset of the ideology determines any and all cooperation of the members of society in the market and beyond.

Remember: cooperation is only possible when all members of society align their individually generated models of the world to create common ground from which they can formulate common goals. Alignment happens when all members replace part of the information that they would usually use in the self-generation of a model of the world that best secures their survival, with a dataset that is shared by all members. This creates a dependency on the group’s cooperation for survival – something the individual could achieve alone before. The shared dataset – the ideology governing the cooperation, must address exactly this situation.

Why should we prefer Rawls’ Egalitarian Liberalism? Because his starting point to solve this situation is fairness. He insists that society should be organized according to principles that all citizens can accept. And that’s the only way to think about it, because all members initially must put themselves into what look like worse circumstances than they could be in to enable the cooperation, circumstances that aren’t what they could be to ensure their survival. It’s either creating acceptance in every member by the way you develop the dataset everyone shares by finding a compromise or you must resort to coercion and force to enforce the use of the same dataset by all members.

Whenever people insist that cooperation – society – necessarily needs hierarchies and enforcement structure, they admit that the dataset this society runs on is unacceptable to at least some, that it forces them to put themselves into worse circumstances than they could create for themselves by not cooperating without giving them at least as a result what motivated every member of the group to seek cooperation in the first place.

Without force, the only way to identify fair terms for living together and cooperating is to look for principles that we can agree to among ourselves willingly. These principles must result at the minimum in every member of the group being provided with an increased ability to execute random searches, something an individual is unable to do alone. The ability to discover, develop and apply one’s natural skills and abilities throughout life. The ability to try themselves out even if it leads to failure. The ability to explore one’s surroundings without a specific goal in mind. The ability to lean into the unknown for the sole purpose that it becomes known.

Rawls doesn’t deliver the concrete answer to every bit of the dataset. He came up with a structure – a hypothetical – to determine an ideally fair situation in which we can imagine citizens coming to a fair social contract: the original position. The work is ours to do in every moment because with any new information gathered – what’s the goal of the cooperation – our models of the world change and we must thus adjust the shared dataset to fit it to the new circumstances. So when you have any thoughts, tell me, tell all but when making demands, keep the original position in mind, what everyone sacrifices to make cooperation possible and what motivates us all to do so.

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