Raising Up Those Worst-Off: Justice as Fairness (John Rawls) // UTOPIAN DREAMS #2

Imagine yourself a spirit, about to be born as a human on Earth. It could be anywhere, and it could be any kind of body. Your birth will be completely random.

So many places. So many situations!

(1.)

You could be born into a rich family in Moscow with 3 summer homes. Or an indigenous group in the Amazon. Or a refugee family fleeing their war-torn homelands. Or a trailer park in Mississippi, U.S.A.

Maybe you'll be born into a plentiful, stable situation, with at least enough to eat and be healthy. Maybe you'll be born into the kind of body and kind of mind that others value, and that maximize your chances for a life with options.

Maybe not. Right now, globally speaking, the odds are not in your favor.

(2.)

More likely than not, you'll be born into poverty, and, more likely than not, you won't have much ability to change your circumstances.(3.) But maybe you'll get lucky and be born into an OK situation. Or maybe, just maybe, you'll win the lottery and be born into a crazy rich family.

You don't know!

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Now imagine that you are having a conference with all of the other about-to-be-people, all looking at earth and all about to be born into bodies of random gender, ethnicity, healthiness, sexuality, and - critically - future conception of what makes a good life.

Not only that, but you'll get to choose the basic structures of society that will shape the positions you might be born into. You have as much information as you can get about human nature, and what has and hasn't worked so far for earth people.

(4.)

So, if you knew you were going to be born randomly, what kind of world would you want to be born into?

This thought experiment, called "the original position," was designed by John Rawls, an American political philosopher, to give a theoretical basis for the fairest possible way for choosing a society's values. Whatever this committee of spirits would agree on unanimously, according to Rawls, would be the most just society possible.

In Justice as Fairness, Rawls elaborates arguments for what this committee of spirits would agree to. It ends up boiling down to two principles:

1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are:
   a. To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged
   b. Attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

The first principle guarantees basic political freedoms that we pretty much take for granted as foundational to democracy in the westernized world: the right to vote, right to free speech, etc.

The second principle is the radical one. It says that the the fairest social and economic structures are those that raise up the starting position of those worst-off. What's more, this group is the most important group of people to look at to maximize their situation. More important than the wealthy, and more important than the middle class. If we are to build a just society, it is quality of life for those with the most unfortunate births that we most need to maximize.

(5.)

The reasoning? The spirit committee is collectively risk averse because they must reach an agreement as a group. Not knowing what they'll each be born into, they will want the worst possible outcome to be as good as it possibly can be, and to reduce the potential gamble as much as possible.

So, once equal rights and liberties are guaranteed, all of the details about structuring society will be prioritized around what is best for those worst-off. In other words, inequality of wealth and social positions are only useful to this society to the extent to which they raise up those least advantaged as much as possible.

If, given what we know about human nature, a lot of inequality of wealth and social status are necessary to create enough collective prosperity to offer the best possible standards of living to those worst-off, so be it.

But if not, we ought to have only the amount of inequalities that raises up those least advantaged.

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To my mind, it seems obvious that the current experiment is failing miserably at providing the best standard of living to those worst off. Not only that, but collectively we have more than enough knowledges, technologies, and material prosperities that nobody need be born into poverty or hunger or danger.

Why is it that, despite our net affluence, some are still born into hunger, poverty, and varying forms of slavery? And how might we otherwise reorder our socioeconomic arrangements to change this?

Do you agree that the most fair society - and the one you would most want to be born into - would be the one with the least-bad worst place to be born into?

What examples of societies so far have best lived up to this criteria for fairness?

And what if, in the committee of spirits in the original position, you did not know if you would be born a human or not? How might that impact our human choices.

I'll be looking more deeply at these kinds of questions, and the practical ways we can re-arrange our lives right now to try to achieve fairness and prosperity in my series on UTOPIAN DREAMS. Here's part 1, Another World is Possible.

I'd love to hear your dreams, thoughts, critiques, examples, comparisons, too.

Keep those dreams dreamin'.

Sources

1. Image from http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-detected-a-crack-in-earth-s-magnetic-shield

2. From the "Outlook on the Global Agenda 2015" report by World Economic Forum, which you can find here

3. This report, studying economic mobility in families in the USA, concluded, "It appears that families are less likely to change wealth quintiles over time, while those that do move are less likely to move very far. The reasons for these trends are not fully known, but increasing wealth inequality has contributed to the decline."

4. Image from https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/01/the-worlds-best-science-fiction-chosen-by-scientists/

5. Image from http://forum.gethopscotch.com/t/post-your-woah-moments/6516