Here's an idea.
In order to design a just society,
the people designing that society
should know nothing about themselves.
Bear with me.
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Imagine that instead of running for President,
someone actually ran for leader of the world, literally.
And after their election, they'd oversee
the construction of a just and fair society
from the ground up.
And let's imagine that person is you.
You, 2020.
I am so excited.
This is going to be great.
You're going to do awesome.
You're going to need some campaign ads.
You should probably go on tour, practice your debate skills.
Oh!
And you're going to need some policies.
Don't forget about that.
Very important.
Policies.
How does the world government function?
What are the specific rules and distributions
of power and resources that your policies-- your p-- p--
policies-- aw geez, who needs a coffee break?
How do you design a whole society?
There are lots of possible answers, of course.
But today we're going to talk about the one suggested
by philosopher John Rawls, a thought
experiment-slash-methodology that he
calls the "Original Position," found in his book,
"A Theory of Justice."
Ideally, a just society, he says,
has rules of conduct, Which are mutually agreed upon
and understood by all who are subject to them.
Makes sense to me.
I would love it if that were the case.
I hope you're taking notes, by the way.
Furthermore, he says the benefits and burdens
of social cooperation are clearly and appropriately
distributed.
Which is, I mean, that's a little bit more difficult.
Like, who decides what clear and appropriate mean?
Having one person decide doesn't seem fair.
I know you just ran for supreme leader.
And you got elected.
Congratulations, by the way.
But maybe it's better to manage things instead of, you know,
decreeing them.
Totalitarianism is not rad.
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So Rawls says, imagine you have a committee of people.
It's not just you.
It's lots of folks.
They will design the hypothetical and ideally
just society together.
But oh, there's a big problem.
They're going to act in their own self-interest, aren't they?
They're going to develop rules which benefit them
and not others.
They'll screw the people or types
of people they don't like, and improve their position
or positions they hope to achieve.
The solution here, Rawls says, is
a committee of people that don't know their own position.
In fact, they don't know anything about themselves
or history, like, of the world.
They can have some basic facts about human biology
and psychology, what kinds of things people enjoy and value
and need.
They can know the different kinds of people
that there are, and general information about science,
evolution, economics, philosophy, and so on.
You can even give them some various theories of justice
to get them started.
But while designing society they don't know once it "begins"
if they'll be the president or the postman.
They don't know whether they'll be
black, white, gay, straight, cis, trans, abled, disabled,
rich, poor.
They don't know their hobbies, geographic location,
or aspirations.
While they're trying to design a just society,
all of that information is hidden behind what Rawls
termed a "veil of ignorance."
Rawls calls being in this state of non knowledge
about the self the "Original Position."
Rawls thought that people in the Original Position
would design a just society because if they don't know
whether they'll be a CEO, C programmer, or street sweeper,
they'll make sure the street sweepers get a good deal.
They'd design a society that doesn't screw anyone
over because they might get screwed over.
But OK, here's you behind your big desk.
Nice suit, but you're flummoxed.
You can't-- I mean, you're the leader of the world.
But you're not a sorcerer.
How do you get your committee to know literally nothing
about themselves or history?
The short answer is you can't.
But you can encourage them to try.
The Original Position, as a methodology,
is for helping to make decisions about how a just society may
operate, one where justice is rooted
in fairness and not interest.
Why would you want that?
Well, for Rawls, the purpose of the veil of ignorance
is to isolate the "moral point of view."
the committee can't decide on the basis of self-interest
or class interest or any interest,
because they should ignore those things.
In the OP, they don't know what their self or class will be.
So whatever they come up with must
be a reflection of their moral principles
about people and society.
If your cabinet doesn't know, or attempts
to not know whether tomorrow they'll be rich or poor,
how would they design health care or the prison system
or taxation?
Arguably their policies would transcend politics
and egocentrism, reflecting instead deeply-held ideas about
how "the benefits and burdens of social cooperation--
should be "--appropriately distributed.
Whatever OP committee members believe
should be the case while free of self and history
should be reflected in the society they design.
And whether they like it or not, once society begins,
it doesn't matter.
This is about convictions, not convenience.
Of course, there are criticisms of the Original Position too.
Like, how do you decide what information the committee
will have access to?
Rawls says they should get some general knowledge
about economics to help them design just economic systems.
But do you include Karl Marx, who
says capitalist systems are exploitative and, therefore,
completely off the table?
Do you include Lenin or Mao, who thought
it was OK to bring about societal change
through violence?
Rawls says that the participants can't know their own race
or gender.
But do you include the writings of people who genuinely believe
that certain races or genders are inferior or don't even
exist?
So here's you you're standing in front of the society-building
shelf at your leader-of-the-world library,
trying to figure out what knowledge is going to help
without suggesting.
Rawls says you should only include uncontroversial ideas
and facts.
But whoa!
That's pretty subjective.
Are you the lone arbiter of controversy?
And even if you could find - "uncontroversial" ideas, when
it comes to justice, it's precisely
the controversial ideas that make the discussion
useful and important.
The ignorance of history bit might also be a problem
for obvious doomed-to-repeat-it reasons.
Perhaps Rawls expects the society
which results from the OP committee
would be so just that things like slavery, imperialism,
genocide, or systematized oppression
would never come about in the first place.
So there's no need to know about and therefore,
plan for them in advance.
I am no leader of the free world.
So I'm going to leave it to you to decide.
But frankly, that seems rather optimistic to me.
We've talked before an Idea Channel
about how systems inherit the values of their designers.
And the Original Position, as a system, is no different.
Rawls' Original Position designs what,
for him, is a perfect person object
as much as it designs a situation where one will
ideally reach a just society.
The OP being informed by money dolls
takes for granted that a lack of history or identity
will be a more powerful state-crafting situation
than experience and a plurality of identities.
Maybe that case can be made, but not easily
or non-controversially, I don't think.
So but all right, you're curious.
We're going to do all this work picking all the right books,
training all of the right people to completely forget
themselves.
But does it-- does it work?
What kind of society do you get at the other end of this thing?
Well, Rawls had some expectations.
Oddly enough, he assumes that you'd
arrive at one remarkably like his own late 20th century
American society.
Rawls speaks of rights of "equality of opportunity,"
and says that a committee would choose
some amount of inequality.
Because inequality provides an incentive to production.
And he assumes the American nuclear family
is a kind of natural unit which informs base social structures.
The "perfect society" just happens to be the liberal,
but not radical, democratic family-and-work-based
capitalist society that Rawls personally lived in.
Maybe it's kind of like how so many aliens in science fiction
stories end up looking vaguely human,
given the possibility for anything.
It's easiest to just to just pull from what you know.
So what do you do, then?
Is the problem the Original Position?
Is it Rawls himself?
Is it both?
Maybe you could consult some other experts.
In "The Enduring Significance of John Rawls,"
philosopher Martha Nussbaum says that much like our own society,
Rawls' results end up focusing on wealth and access
to resources as the marker of who is doing well.
He's concerned mainly with "material justice."
But there are other markers of justice.
Writing in 2006, she says that "Gays and lesbians
in our own society, while not the least well off with regard
to income and wealth, are very badly off with regards
to the social bases of self-respect."
Nussbaum points out that Rawls understands
the importance of self-respect, but doesn't end up
factoring it into the just operation of a society.
Because hey, those people, they're
able to produce and provide for themselves and others.
For Rawls, the benefits and burdens of social cooperation
have mostly to do with stuff.
Nussbaum writes that "He conceives
of citizens as rough equals, benefiting from co-operation
because each needs things that the others supply."
I mean, there's no rule that says your OP committee will
end up at that conclusion.
But it does seem that stripped of history and identity,
the focus of the original position
will shift from who citizens are to what citizens can do.
But because you're a kind, thoughtful,
and benevolent leader, you'll also probably realize
that your society will have all kinds of people, including
those who can't do, can't produce, people who need care.
Surely in your just society, their needs
would be met without their caregivers being exploited.
Rawls admits that this is a consideration,
but says it's a secondary one.
Get things running, then figure out
what to do with those who can't do
and the people who have to help them.
Nussbaum says, nuh-uh.
Because "the issue of care profoundly affects the entire
structure of working and family life--"
and that "--no modern society has fully solved that problem,
and the equality of women is frequently at stake since women
do a very large portion of the caregiving."
Maybe your OP committee would decide
to split caregiving equally among genders.
But they'd have to arrive at the realization it could end up
lopsided first.
So whoa, maybe this isn't the way to go.
With all OP committee members being equal,
it seems impossible to account for all possible inequalities,
dooming your nascent society to potential injustice
from the getgo.
A blank committee member may not intend injustice,
but neither may they perceive accidentally designing it.
So the solution may not be no perspective, an impossible
ideal that we've discussed many times.
It could be as many perspectives as possible,
and a mutual respect of their histories.
Perhaps another impossible ideal.
But at least one grounded in humanity.
Ugh, good luck, prez.
You're going to need it.
What do y'all think?
Is the Original Position an ideal methodology
for designing a just society?
Let us know in the comments.
And I'll respond to some of them in next week's Comment Response
video.
There is no Comment Response video this week.
But if you keep an eye on BrainCraft,
you will see me and Joe Hanson and Diana from Physics Girl,
talking to Vanessa about some psychology experiments
that she did.
You can see me kind of like, medium make a fool of myself.
It was a lot of fun.
It's either there right now or will be there very soon,
depending upon when we upload this video.
And in case you missed it, Idea Channel now also has a Patreon.
So we'll put a link to that in the description
and also probably somewhere else around,
if you want to support the show, it
would be greatly appreciated.
And hey, before we get too far, I
just-- I also want to wish everybody a Happy New Year,
and to say that I hope that your holiday season was rad,
and that you got to spend it with all of the people
and doing exactly the things that you wanted to do.
And that I hope 2017 is going to be an awesome year for you.
I'm really excited about the stuff
that we have in the works for Idea Channel.
We have some really cool, I think,
new, fun things that we're kind of trying to try out.
We'll see what happens.
But yeah, I'm excited.
I hope that's worth something.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
And the Tweet of the Week comes from Tom Noland,
who points us towards a piece about John Carpenter's tweet
explaining that "They Live" is, in fact, about yuppies
and the overreaches of capitalism, and not--
as some white supremacists seem to claim or understand--
about the Jewish control of media or culture.
And Tom points out that this maybe
has some relationship to our older episode about Evangelion.
And I would say that it actually also
has a relationship to our episode about encoding
and decoding.
And that this is a great example of kind
of like, asymmetrical encoding and decoding,
that John Carpenter put-- to some people--
very clear comments about capitalism in this.
But that white supremacists, of course,
are going to decode those messages
as being about the Jewish community, unfortunately.
So yeah, it's an interesting read and a very, very-- let's
call it 2017-situation to be in.
And last, but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these kind, benevolent,
and understanding khaleesis.
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