The Search for a Fair Society: Why Rawls’ Fair Society Needs a Positive Definition of Freedom

October 21. Happy Monday. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society. When you want peace, even call for it, that’s what you need to figure out – how to organize a fair society.

Starting from Rawls’ Original Position behind the veil of ignorance - the position of the first human beings coming together to negotiate their cooperation without having any preconceptions about what cooperation means - he concludes that one component of a fair society is that each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties; a scheme that is compatible with the same scheme for all. He is talking about freedom. And while he’s right, there’s a problem with that.

As much as we intellectually might understand the need to start from the Original Position, we will never be able to do it. The reason is that we are born into societies. The datasets members of the society are expected to apply in the self-generation of their individual models of the world exist already. They have been finetuned for millennia by a small group of wealthy men with the might behind them to force this dataset on everyone else. And today this dataset is still constantly reinforced by repetition so that it percolates our unconsciousness where 98% of our thinking and world generation happens. How we define freedom is one of those datapoints. And for the purpose of creating a fair society this definition is as wrong as the definition of property is.

When you search for the best definition of freedom on Google you will be pointed to the Meriam-Webster definition that says that freedom is the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. Meaning, we define freedom negatively as freedom from something. Reduced to its very basic, freedom means the freedom from death. And thus, a good societal model is any model that will provide its members just that: freedom from death or survival – under the condition the members adhere to the rules of the society, apply the required dataset in their individual world generation processes and thus live in the reality dictated to them with the inbuilt hierarchies and power distribution etc. That’s all a society must do to be a good society because the required minimum of freedom is achieved.

There’s the obvious problem with this, that death is a fact of life, and no society can deliver the freedom from death. So, the goal is already reduced to premature death what allows lots of wiggle-room. E.g. the question can be raised whether it’s really a premature death when a person dies of illness? Or, in other words, is a society required to provide healthcare to deliver on its promise?

The body, with the problems it can throw up, can be seen as just one more restraint. It will be seen as a barrier when freedom is defined as the absence of barriers. It will be - and is today in our society as the Corona Crisis has shown - defined as an obstacle that needs to be overcome. A thing. Something we hold property of. What we hold property of is a source of profit, something we can exploit to the point of destruction. So, death of exploitation of the body is by this definition not a premature death and thus healthcare is not something that a society needs to provide to deliver on its promise to deliver freedom from death.

The other problem that sits even deeper is that humans don’t need to cooperate to simply survive. By running searches that are based on the exploitation of existing knowledge we can do that alone. So, a society that promises to deliver simply what can be achieved alone is an unnecessary complication of things. A waste of energy.

Now, add to this that by remaining alone the single human can generate the models of the world that helps them personally best to survive by choosing freely what information goes into the model and subsequently will be included in the self. Agreeing to use even a small percentage of data other humans favor in the individual world generation processes renders the resulting models less helpful for survival, and thus creates a dependency that wouldn’t exist without the steps taken to enable cooperation.

No human would create a dependency simply to regain what they have given up in the first place. Freedom thus is the more every member can expect to get out of society. And that, by definition, means we must define it in a positive way, as freedom to do things we couldn’t do alone, to create a fair society. And the most basic ‘more’ a cooperation must deliver is the one motivation that nature dictates, why all humans seek cooperation: an increased ability to execute random searches that are impossible to engage in as an individual because of their high risk. But cooperation in large groups offsets that risk.

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.

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