There's a concept similar used in doctor Who, "the Zygon inversion", where just before starting to negotiate a peace treaty both negotiators are made to forget whose side they're with.
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." - Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy ;)
!!! ROBOTS / AI - It seems there's some ideas floating around about the possibility of using AI / Robots to do this kind of work effectively, so incase it's helpful: I wanna pin this comment to provide a space for people thinking along those lines to chat ⬇️
In a way, that would seem to be a good idea, but who designs the robots? Wouldn't you need AI/robots designing the AI/robots to remove as much bias as possible? Or would you just run into the problem of the AI/robots creating a society that's only just to AI/robots?
Problem with this: Who makes the AI? Who starts the design? Who decides what to teach and show to it? Can we be sure the people making the AI are unbiased enough for the computer to work properly? And if it is not the AI, but a purely logical AI, who designs its algorythms? If we think it is perfectly impartial, do we fall in the trap of creating a purely utilitarian system? A good way to understand this is checking the Moral Machine (moralmachine.mit.edu/)
Reposting my comment after seeing this pinned: If a committee were filled by self-learning AIs intended to fill an original position (coded by numerous and randomly selected coders from around the world) that could understand all languages, maybe there would be a way to develop a system somewhat neutral and just. The information fed to the AIs would be mainly publications/textbooks/etc. from universities and seasoned by human interactions from social media sites. Then these AIs could construct this new society from city planning to laws to court systems to whatever. Afterwards, either terminate all AIs or randomly distribute them amongst the society using an additional computer program. Statistically, if there were 1,000 different coders each designing their own AI from scratch, a bell curve of normality would arise and eliminate corruption.
You say the committee is incentivised to make society as fair as possible because they could end up being any one of the members, but that opens the door to the committee playing a game of odds. What if they designed a society that was super unjust to a super small minority for some sort of profit to the rest?
A core part of Rawl's idea is that the person is extremely risk adverse and wouldn't leave themselves the chance of being in some small totally screwed minority. Depending on the type of person though this could be a huge problem that undermines the thought experiment or a non-issue.
The maximin rule (maximize your minimum result) that guides parties in the OP to opt for fairness has nothing to do with probabilities. "Since the maximin rule takes no account of probabilities, that is, of how likely it is that the circumstances obtain for their respective worst outcomes to be realized, the first condition is that the parties have no reliable basis for estimating the probabilities of the possible social circumstances that affect the fundamental interests of the persons they represent. This condition fully obtains when the concept of probability does not even apply." - Rawls, J. - Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 98
Abe Dillon I mean how would that even work its not like you can make 1% of people slaves and grow all the food for the other 99% I mean unless you want most people to starve. You would still have to grow most of your own food. making a small minority really less well off wouldn't really help anybody. If you have a large minority or majority that's less well off that could benefit a minority but it doesn't really work the other way around.
Aaron Smith I think there are more subtle ways you could be super unjust to a small minority than simply slave labor for food production. You could, for instance, make it ok to perform super unethical experiments on 0.1% of the population for scientific gain.
Aaron Smith Also, in developed countries, agriculture workers do make up a tiny percentage of the population. It's something like 4% of the work force, which means an even smaller percentage of the overall population. So it's not far from 1% of the population growing food for everyone. That percentage will go down as farms become more automated with self-driving tractors and the like. There are also jobs, like sewage worker, than almost nobody would choose if they had much choice. In our society those jobs tend to be filled by lower class workers. The current distribution of wealth isn't really just though. So how do you fill those necessary, yet undesirable jobs when trying to design a perfectly just society? (The easy answer is to pay really well for those jobs, but that implies all sorts of complications)
Every time I read about an ideal fictional society, whether it's from academic reading or science fiction, stripping things away (stuff, identity, economy, rules) is always a unifying trait. There is always a need for people to be more responsible or "better" than we actually are in real life or game the system in order to force people to behave themselves and make the impossibly perfect society function.
You couldn't be more wrong. We don't need to be better people than we actually are. We need to be allowed to flourish our best traits. That is all. Have 5 kids and then spoil one and give nothing to the other 4. You will have a murder taking place Have 5 kids and educate them well and provide respect and love as well as guidance and you will have 5 amazing human beings in the World and a great family as bonus.
This kind of neutrality proposed in the Original Position isn't very useful. Paulo Freire wrote a lot that neutrality just doesn't exist in his book Pedagogy of the Opressed. His argument could be summarized by something like this: "If one doesn't take a side, a position, they are in practice taking the side of the winner, of the status quo" So, when proposing a "ground zero" or a "neutral" space to design society you actually will tend to keep things the way they already are.
The thing is that the proposal sort of "knows" that it is impossible, a person cannot know absolute nothing about themselves, so it's a target to be aimed. My point here, is that in our society and any other existing* one, to try to aim to neutrality is, by definition, to take the side of the current status of the world. *And therefore, possible to exist.
but what if you see a nonexistant world what if there is no scocity you know about for exaple the person could be told everything but in mixed order so it would be hard to tell the current state of the world and then be given a blank world to work with
I don't think it's entirely necessary for the rulemakers to forget their past. All that's really needed is uncertainty for the future. First, assemble a committee of a evenly distributed assortment of people, pulling from every skin color, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. Then, inform them that at the end of their term in office, everyone will be assigned a completely randomized job, salary, criminal status, citizenship status, etc. Assuming that the committee cooperates with this batshit crazy plan, the even distribution of physiological traits amongst the committee gives the best chance that they will pass laws that benefit all people possessing those physiological traits. Meanwhile, the fact that nobody on the committee knows if they'll be rich or homeless or serving in the military or jailed, ensures that they'll do their damnedest to pass laws that won't screw anybody over (at least, by an undue amount).
Sounds like an extremely powerful supercomputer, not an AI, should design this society. It has no sense of self, identity, no self interest except for optimising and solving problems. This supercomputer will calculate all the best outcomes for every single thing possible and humans then follow the best solutions.
PBS Idea Channel There will be no AI, it will be pure mathematics. For example. the computer will calculate pure economics, manage health from medical records, control infrastructure through traffic data, manage environment though climate data etc. All decisions are made scientifically and objectively. All humans can even be given the same value of '1' and be treated absolutely equally. And where difference are to be observed, such as health, all genders will be scientifically assessed and provided different medical coverages etc.
The thing with that is, who tells the supercomputer what is more important when dealing with usually subjective matters? In zero sum situations (say, a famine that has to be dealt with, keeping your people with less food that has to be regulated, who gets it? The 20 years old former criminal? The very old man that worked all his life for a good pension? The ill teenager?) the computer needs to know what to prioritize, and the person that teaches it what is less important than what will stick their biases into it
I just want to point at that the OP is just a natural extension of the method for sharing a cake; that is, if two people want to split a cake so that each gets an equal size piece, then the person who cuts the cake should not know which slice he is getting. The reasoning is similar to the OP reasoning, since the cutter would like to maximize the size of the smaller slice, which happens when both slices are equal in size.
Thank you, Idea Channel. After a hard day of school, where you are expected to absorb, not think, it is always a joy to sit back and watch some Idea Channel. Thanks for the thoughts.
I was about to start outlining how I would set up what I see as a fair and just society, but the youtube comment section didn't seem to be the right place for what would have turned into a thesis. Even as I write this comment, it threatens to turn into an essay outlining the thesis that I just said I wasn't going to write.
My Political Science professor thinks that anyone without a Political position would never claim they have no Political position without an ulterior motive. I think this society Rawls envisions is that of extreme liberalism. It isn't democratic or authroritative, it's lazy. Alot of presumptions exist in order for this to work. The way our Political system works is that everyone can voice their opinion on how the goverment should work. Not having an ideology is different from not knowing your ideology. Any basic knowledge of how society works will affect your ideology. Those without that knowledge are no help to our society. How will people transition peacefully to the newly formed society?
Exactly. I think the impossibility to know nothing about the world (or, in other words, to be neutral) is what breaks the proposal to be a methodology in which people would "aim to get the closest possible". Because the closest possible is the world in it's current state: neoliberalism.
I like this channel, but I disagree. If a "just" society is even possible, then it will be though the efforts of the entire society regardless of "policies" that are put in place. So the discussion of this video becomes meaningless at best.... a red herring at worst.
even the best system can be ruined by uncaring humans with lots of time. like that Jerry mandarin thing. the people in charge play the system like a game during a long period of time.
@noah schaefferkoetter: Excellent point. Society "works" because individuals in the society work. Another good argument for spontaneous order instead of intentional design.
In the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special there was a point where they actually adopted this philosophy in order to create a treaty between two warring races. The Zygons were invading the humans, and they have the ability to shapeshift into others and even steal their memories. Eventually the Doctors got a bunch of them in a room with the leaders that they were imitating, but then the Doctors wiped all of their memories of who was on who's side. And he refused to let them back out and give back their memories until they had finished the treaty, effectively returning them to the OP since all people doing the negotiating had no idea what side they'd be on.
Orange Aeronaut I mean they may want to devide up wealth evenly at the start of the new society. But think it wouldn't be universally accepted that everyone should be equal from that time forward i think alot of people would expect to get more if they worked harder.
Orange Aeronaut That's not communism. Communism is about ending labour exploitation. Not everybody has the same, but nobody gets the profit from somebody else's work. Factories are organised by its workers and they get the value of their work instead of letting the owner get most of it. Look up "surplus value".
I have a 3 step plan to bring about a just society. 1. Every gets a puppy. Even the allergic people get puppies. 2. Pizza will be eaten every Monday. 3. Pants will always be optional. I think I'm pretty good at this.
So.... just according to whom? I mean what is just? Is it just to, for example, kill animais to eat them? Probably not according to the animals, but we are okay with it. Is it just to, for example, people in Africa work for a 1 dollar a day in order for us to have cheap electronics products? Probably not to the African poor people, but we are okay with it.
Well what one is "okay with" is not necessarily the same as what they would consider just. I don't think most people find Chinese sweatshops "just," so much as they are unwilling or unable to do anything about it. And the other thing, apart from assuming that animals have a concept of justice, which I find specious, given how many of them eat other animals, I feel like they wouldn't want the practice banned.
I see the problem as being one of perspective, a true and just society boils down to a utopian ideal and after a long discussion with a few friend we all collectively came to the understanding that utopia is only a perspective, it cannot exist if multiple perspectives are to be considered, if just one thing is out of place it will eventually cascade back down to chaos. Even if you set someone or something (AI) to the OP they will, by lack of knowledge have a unique perspective of what utopia would be and this perspective wouldn't be translatable amongst people who actually have background knowledge. My final quote is this "The universe slowly pushes us towards disorder and we are not yet clever enough to push back" ~MaJiCiDe 2017
First of I have theory of justice on my self, great book! Second Ollie of philosophy tube helped with this episode, great dude and great channel! Third, great video!!!!
I actually wrote a philosophy master's thesis on this exact topic!!! However, that was a few years ago, so my Rawls is a little rusty. Still, I think I identified a few places where we aren't being entirely fair to Rawls in this video. First, The Veil of Ignorance: It is important to recognize that Rawls constructs his method to have different degrees of ignorance at different stages of the designing of society. The high level of ignorance that the video describes is only in place while the representatives are deciding on the principles of justice (a fairly general topic). As the representatives descend into more narrow and specific decisions, they are allowed more information about history, social conditions, theory, etc. Still, all the information allowed is always of the public sort. That is, at no point do the representatives have access to information about themselves. The idea is that if they do not have access to information about themselves, they will only agree to things that anybody and everybody would agree to; this allows for a sort of hypothetical unanimous consent. At least, this allows for hypothetical unanimous consent in western countries. In POLITICAL LIBERALISM, Rawls concedes that his method is based upon (seemingly ubiquitous) western values, values that he can give no argument as to why people should hold them, if they don't already, but values that by historical accident every western country seems to hold. (That all said, I disagree with Rawls's supposed need to withhold information about history, theory, and social conditions from representatives in the original position, at all. It always seemed to me that it is necessary to keep the hypothetical representatives ignorant of information about themselves, but that the representatives should have free access to information of the public sort, i.e. information about history, theory, and social conditions.) Second, Rawls DID NOT think that his method led to a political situation basically resembling mid-20th century United States. To think this about the principles of justice that Rawls comes up with is to ignore that Rawls's principles of justice require a robust and actual, not merely formal, respect for civil rights and equal opportunity. That is, and Rawls is clear on this, a person's expected life outcomes should in no way be linked to any social group or class that the person is a member of or associated with. This is clearly not true about mid-20th century USA. Further, Rawls's second principle of justice gives the so-called difference principle: That any inequality should be of the greatest advantage to the least well-off in society. American capitalism clearly does not meet this requirement. And, Rawls says as much in part IV of JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS, when he compares his preferred just society, a "property-owning democracy," against mid-20th century American welfare-state capitalism. Rawls repeatedly states that it seems to him that either "market socialism" or property-owning democracy could fulfill his principles of justice, and he merely prefers property-owing democracy; however, what is clear to him is that neither soviet communism, nor American capitalism, can fulfill his principles of justice. Lastly, The Social Basis of Self Respect: Martha Nussbaum's critique of Rawls is a common one, but it stems from a misunderstanding of Rawls. The criticism assumes that Rawls is primarily discussing distribution of material goods and that Rawls believes that if material goods are distributed fairly that everything else will work itself out. This is simply not the case. Rawls is at no point discussing the distribution of mere material goods. Rawls clearly states that he is always discussing the distribution of what he calls "primary goods." Rawls defines primary goods as those things that any individual would need to be able to pursue any conception of the good life that they might hold. Rawls recognizes that different people have different ideas as to what a good life might be. Thus, Rawls imagines a list of things that any person would need to be able to pursue any possible conception of the good life. Material and financial well-being are on this list of primary goods, but Rawls clearly states that the most important primary good is the social basis of self respect. With a quick glance of the index of A THEORY OF JUSTICE, I already found that he claims the social basis of self respect as the most important primary good in section 29 of the revised edition. So, basically, Rawls agrees with the criticism. He agrees that we shouldn't only focus on material goods. Self respect is important. In fact, Rawls clearly states that he thinks self respect is the most important. Anyway, I apologize for the length. Brevity was never my strong suit. Hopefully these comments forward the conversation.
This made me think of religious societies who believe in rebirth like the Hindu. As long as the rebirth is somewhat random, politicians in those societies have a similar position as the ones in the OP committee of not knowing what they will become in their next life or the life after the committee. The problem there is, of course, the problem of incomplete knowledge and also that most religions with that believe design the rebirth mechanism so that it mostly gives incentive for submission to the religious and societal rules.
But you forget the shortsightedness of humans, If that form of religion was so useful to make people realize the importance of doing good, why do they still have criminals and people of bad character? It poses the same problem as most other systems do. Maybe instead create a committee where everyone will be given the job of someone else on the committee and have it so every job/position is correctly accounted for. (though even then that would be nearly impossible as one cannot adjust for age or disability or sex in the same way they can job and position) But still that would mean that everyone in the committee would have a reason to support people of every other position as they do not know where they will end up.
This makes me consider the Doctor Who + Religion episode, and I guess using Sociology's definition of Religion; in a guess, how will people's attitudes, values, & beliefs and to extent identity play into designing a just society. And I guess how ought that society 'enforce' attitudes, values, & beliefs- Religion on its citizens and itself. I mean there's explicit, plus there's also systemic bias too which in turn establishes institutions.
yeah, except that how well did you behave in life dictates where will you reincarnate. so if you think you are good, then you have nothing to worry about.
Why I think we can't ever get a utopia is because we could all have a perfect world, but can't together have a perfect society. If I got into a cloning machine and left it on overnight, me and all my copies could get together and produce our vision of a perfect society. But to literally anyone else on the planet, that society would seem positively bonkers... because we rarely have enough in common with others to agree in everything. Like in the real world, elections swing from party to party as their attempts to build a great society with their philosophy is almost always met by people pointing to the mistakes or side effects as being fundamentally flawed.
The main problem with humans is that we're too diverse. One person's utopia is another person's hell. It's literally impossible to create a society in which every member accepts it as just without modifying the individuals in some way; which would be morally questionable at best. Compromises will have to be made, and nobody will be entirely satisfied; and what do people do when they're not satisfied? They blame the system that creates their dissatisfaction.
Should just take the game show approach, "Right decide on some stuff for the local jobs, tomorrow we'll toss some jobs into a hat, by we i mean me not you, and you'll draw to see where you go next week. Have fun!" :D Or don't tell them at all and see how they react for the first week or so XD
Ok, you raise a group of children in isolation. You teach them all the pertinent information (that information will have to be debated on later) You hide their race and gender from each other and themselves. And them let them go out it.
It's not a lot different from what Aristotle wrote on Politics. If I remember correctly, he thinks all children should be separated from parents and raised by "experts" so they would become experts in what they "naturally" were born for.
I am actually for this, but instead hiding the race i think its better to make artificial neutral race (mate everyone with everyone). Hiding gender is silly. I wrote a really long comment on my idea of it, you can read it if you can find it here
Pity Doctor Steel has retired. His propaganda made him look like he had a good grasp of what was needed. Also looking up CGP Grey's Keys to Power video seems interesting. Also what this 'original position' committee sounds like is AI designed for this task. However AI is only as effective and unbiased as it is programmed and if the coder knows the AI's task then the coder could theoretically introduce biases for the AI to follow once past the selection process.
That's undistiguishable from generations of people raising their children with a less biased upbringing than themselves. Sure that's what we're doing right now and it isn't necessarily bad, but what guarantee do you have that they will ever reach that "unbiased" state?
But then again, we come back to the original issue: if how do you design an ai who can detect its own biases? How can you prevent bias from infiltrating your bias detection algorithm? That stuff just goes in circles, man.
This reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. And this is a spoiler for the end of the second book in the "trilogy" in which it is revealed that the person in charge of the Universe is actually one guy who lives in a cabin with his cat. He doesn't believe he rules the universe; he's not even sure about the existence of his cat.
Presidental democratic systems are bad, I prefer a coalition democracy like Germany has, where the chancellor is not voted but the parties are and they have then to find together and choose then the chancellor based on which parties could work out to work together.
maybe justice is one of those things that you can't pursue directly, like happiness. The more you chase it the more you get embroiled in *trying* rather than just *being* happy (or just). In my opinion what would _really_ help if we could agree on aims, and then strive toward that... like hey, let's focus on figuring out space travel. With a unifying aim, everyone might band together and achieve justice as a happy side effect?
The idea of removing a person's personal desires and status is ok but from there I wouldn't limit controversial material but rather include all of it. As well as having Karl Marx you have Ayn Rand and even Mein Kampf and include history of where those ideas have led in the past. One idea if you don't mind the whole process taking a life time is to take very young children and shape their whole lives and education towards the task of designing this society without telling them it's anything but hypothetical.
Well in the Douglas Adams book "The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe" the ruler of the universe is a man who takes everything as hypothetical, even his memories and the existence of a universe outside his front door. Some men ask him questions every few days about the running of the universe and he just answers whatever comes to mind.
A brilliant quote from that book, "It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"I wouldn't limit controversial material but rather include all of it." But that's part of the problem. Even assuming you have people in the "original position" designing society, there are conflicting ideas about how to achieve a just society. Being in the original position doesn't make them more able than anyone else to decide which ideas are right and which are wrong.
In order to design a just society, social approval (the core abstraction of value to humans beyond survival needs) must reward ethics for their own sake as an ethos. You create that social environment by having all dominant authoritative influences act from that premise in their every waking action, reflecting it as their highest priority in a wide enough scale to form a social culture. You become influential by some combination of positive feedback and being the source of survival in terms of resources and respite. Thus those influences raise a generation of kids who tacitly understand that social acceptance and their subsequent survival benefits means being an ethical person for its own sake and thus those qualities are implied and reflected in every interaction and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy which expands on itself. Ergo a just society. I believe minority delinquency can be ameliorated in a single generation using this method. The problem has always been the laws and logistics to getting better influences to those at risk.
I've hated this idea since the first time I came across it. The problems with the veil of ignorance are numerous, but let's just focus on a couple. The video already went over the impossibility of creating a biases-free committee, through the leader, the general knowledge allowed to the committee, or simply willing the committee from not having biases, so the idea of attaining the original position is impossible from a strictly practical standpoint. The lack of practical applicability, even as a thought experiment, is the first problem, but that isn't it's worse sin. There's no denying that material wealth and justice have some value to individuals and society as a whole, but this value is negotiable. The real problem with the original position/veil of ignorance is it's denial of human perspective as having value. This idea starts off by assuming that human experience is fundamentally a poison, despite that experience is fundamentally what defines our identities. If no one's perspective has value, then how do those without perspective in the original position assume greater value? Either perspective and experience matters and only a respective body made of a plurality of human identities could create a just society, or nobody's perspective and experience matters, in which case attaining the original position is useless endeavor. It's an obsolete ouroboros. And frankly, this is such a white man answer to ills of society. Obviously, we can't go back in time to restart society, so this experiment must be under the operating position of society exists in a current conditions and that the just society would be built upon these conditions for a hypothetically better world. This means all previous sins and inequalities go unaddressed, because one would not be able to act in a just matter to remedy these existing issues- only prevent future occurrences. Even if the focus on material wealth and justice, there's no getting around how interlocked material wealth and justice are with our socio-political identities. Read Ta-Nashei Coates' "The Case for Reparations" to see evidence and personally understand just how interlocked black identity and black wealth are together. Look at the history of the Native Americans; there is no getting around that their modern extreme poverty rates and social ills accompanying such poor living conditions are the direct result not of their capability to produce and work, but of who they are as a people. The white man came in at a low point in Native American history after disease had decimated many tribes, and then proceeded to slowly and violently exploit their land, resources, and living conditions to the point where living as their ancestors did is a practical impossibility for the majority of living Native Americans. I'd be happy if the veil of ignorance made a hypothetically better future for my descendants, but I don't them and I do know people now who suffer and would not see justice now if such an endeavor through the original position were pursued. Justice at the expense of the innocent is not justice. Much in the same way that an earlier Idea Channel proposed that media= political, so too is this true of the existence of a human being, even if that person is in a vegetative state. And should it not be a big red flag that there is something wrong with his argument if it turns out that the results of his thought experiment are the society he is living in? Doesn't that seem like a lazy way to morally justify one's life- 'no significant change is required of me, because through my philosophical pondering, I've come to the conclusion that I'm already living in a just society,' says the white man in the ivory tower. (I don't mean that to be a snide remark at all of academia, as I wish to pursue my own doctorate work one day, but academics like this piss me off.) The idea of creating a just society is a dream, and like dreams we should understand both how we will never quite be able to achieve it's beauty and that we should strive to make the world more like it's beauty. Racism, sexism, ableism, gender performance bias, and the many other ways we have found to deny humans of basic respect and dignity will not disappear anytime soon or likely ever. Our goals in building a government that acts in a just manner on behalf of the people is minimize the conditions that produce such psychic and physically violent biases by building better and more plentiful housing, create more effective transportation systems, find better ways to open and regulate labor markets, and encourage an education system beyond compulsory elementary and high schools. We need to create systems that allow people to find what they do in their day to day lives as satisfying and/or meaningful, and this doesn't necessarily have to be through work or education- it could be in a monastery of pop culture, since Nietzsche did envision culture as a future substitute for religion. Dreams are worth striving for, but they are the horizon of human thought as they are always the guiding light just beyond our reach. Links: The Case for Reparations: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ What if Jobs are not the Solution but the Problem: aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem "Buried Treasure," Existential Comics: existentialcomics.com/comic/37
*slow clap* "And frankly, this is such a white man answer to ills of society." I was itching to say that earlier, can't remeber now why I didn't do it.
I think the entire idea of trying to build a society from the ground up is flawed. No matter how careful your planning, you can't predict every little problem that'll arise, every loopholes in your plans. A society needs to be built by iterations, you try things, you see what works and what doesn't and then you try other things. It's also required for the imperative of the rules of conducts that are understood and agreed upon by all who are subject to them. How can you expect people to understand or agree with rules that they aren't accustomed with. If you want to build a society from scratch you are going to have to carefully plan the transition that is going to take at least a century. Also when building a society from scratch, how do you plan for possible innovations that'll change things? Do you plan for a mostly agrarian society to find out that two century later farm work is almost entirely automated and only requires a small fraction of the work force? Do you destroy your society every once in a while a redo the all commity thing, rebuilding it from scratch?
the definiton of a god is debatable but regarless if you had a strong enough computer you could predict every possible path of the future and if pre determinizm has any truth behind it you could predict the path of the future im starting to feal an entity that can predict the path of atoms is paradoxical as it could then probably move agenst that path although it might not be able to
why not with complete knoledge of physics in a determinsitic world you could predict the future with a good enough computer a human from what we can tell is basicaly a fleshy computer why cant a computer chose to act
The idea of making a perfect society is addressed in Plato Republic where the letter of the nation would have to be prune to become the leader while not knowing he will be leader
I think the inability to anticipate potential inequalities is the biggest death-knell to the Original Position. I can imagine some sort of injustice developing in the society--say racism or sexism--but any complaints would be immediately silenced by, "Don't be silly; we carefully planned a society free from bias and inequality. You are living in the best possible of worlds."
Imagining one is possible,realizing it is not,it's called utopia,in fact every time in history someone has tried doing just that,they ended up kickstarting a war or country-wide rebellions. The reason behind it is that you have to be obsessed with the design,eventually as you see that pieces do not fall where you expect them to,you turn into a dictator and attempt to force it - also the main reason how/why power corrupts.
Everybody wants to think the society were they thrive is "just". Because if not, it means you became successful because the world was nicer to you than to others, cheater.
It's true that no one can have all possible perspectives, but everyone could. The process would just be a lot more chaotic and it would take much longer.
I feel that the core idea behind the original position is essentially the same as the "many perspectives" idea. Since the intended motivation is that no one knows their own rank so would they would be motivated to consider all the possible positions found within a society. So essentially the ideal original position would come to the same answers as "many perspectives"
Whoa, I think I've got it, and this is where the anonymity of the internet can really come into play. You randomly select people for your committee, from all walks of life, and get them to work together without ever meeting, and instruct them that they should make decisions without regard to their own station, and that everyone else should too, or the rest will call them out, remove them from the committee, and choose someone else. They never meet, never talk, and are selected based on relative intelligence, all higher than average, but not too high. And all have unique perspectives due to their class, station, position, and social standing, but are not allowed to talk about their personal experiences, nor allowed to let it influence their decisions, lest they are expelled from the committee. Hard to know though... Maybe they have handlers who know whether they're staying too close to personal subjects? Wow this is hard. Maybe the secret is that you need two societies, and each governs the other, and they never interact with each other outside of that.
Rawls' Original Position reminded me a lot of the Ruler of the Universe in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". The Ruler was determined to be the person most fit for the job because he is the least ambitious person ever born and has a philosophy of pure solipsism. He only believed what his senses could perceive at the time, and even then, he had his doubts. The point didn't seem to be that this was the best choice to rule the Universe-- as The Ruler cannot understand the consequences of his decisions, and therefore has no moral or ethical ground on which to stand-- but it more highlights how a man like Zarniwoop (who is arrogant and manipulative) should *not* have this kind of power.
Is the OP committee made up of only humans? The decisions they make about building a just society would be very different if a member might enter "society" as a cow, deer, tree, etc.
My dad was a student of Rawls so I asked him some questions about this. He says the idea of capitalism being the best way forward and inequality being necessary to motivate competition is a common misscharacterization of rawls. Rawls said that the two rules of a just society that people would agree upon would be equality, and helping and giving resources to the person in the worst position. This would result in things like the disabled being given what they need to live a comfortable, good life, medical assistance would be provided to those in need, and it would promote science and research in medicine to help those in need and make things readily available to all. It is not inherently capitalist, or anything else, and promotes equality, not inequality.
Science Fiction example of this, in the special episode of Doctor Who "The Day of the Doctor" he manage to made a deal with the Zygons by making the Zygon leader and the human leader forget what each was, this is not knowing if they were human or Zygon during the negotiations of a peace treaty to avoid a full on invasion.
"Pirates are evil? The Marines are righteous? These terms have always changed throughout the course of history! Kids who have never seen peace and kids who have never seen war have different values! Those who stand at the top determine what's wrong and what's right! This very place is neutral ground! Justice will prevail, you say? But of course it will! Whoever wins this war becomes justice!" Donquixote Doflamingo One Piece
I see people talking about an AI but as a game designer the first thing that popped in my head to solve this problem was iteration, essentially AB testing.I think the original position could be a great tool but as you pointed out it's limited in that it has no hindsight.however, if we could create a society simulator and give each player input as to how the society should be run along with a knowledge base about the people, resources, technology, etc. They could have no knowledge of their avatar in anyway, only be able to shape the rules of the game. Then after a period of time the results of the game test are factored into the knowledge base and any factors that can be interchanged such as skin color and geography are randomized and it begins again. I think this could be a good starting point, but my gut instinct is telling me players would try to make things really really unequal in the hopes of being one of the lucky 1%.
So in brief, what about running this as a crowd sourced simulation and let it tweak itself until it gets things 99% right or completely destroys itself?
Our society has a deep problem with judging people by who they are, rather than what they do. All forms of discrimination have at their roots this notion that who a person *is* defines them more than what they *do*. If Rawles's Original Position tries to eliminate unfair treatment of identities by eliminating knowledge of identities, then it's not exactly the same idea, but at least in the family tree of the pernicious idea that racism is caused by people being aware of racism. "Just don't talk about it, and it will go away," becomes "Just don't know about it, and it will go away." Let's take the idea of police policy. I grew up in an ethnic group that is not typically afraid of police. My relationship with police as an adult is entirely informed by that experience. I never understood why people who grew up with a different identity from me had a different attitude toward police until I started learning about their experiences. However, even now my understanding of their experiences is imperfect. Even if I magically forget what my identity is, if I'm to make meaningful policy I'm still going to be influenced by my own experience, which may be an imperfect and incomplete picture of how police policy works. Identity isn't what we do, but because other people may do to us based on our identity, it ends up shaping how we see the world and *why* we do what we do. It doesn't go away if we pretend we forget about it.
Hot Take (I literally paused the video 10s in): Considering a bunch of recent papers on ethical algorithms it may actually be of vital importance to know society incredibly well: If you know too little about correlations of preferences and identities of groups in a society you may all too often accidentally act unjustly towards particular groups. - Of course, knowing all this means you could exploit it to very intentionally discriminate maliciously. But if you want to be serious about it, mathematically speaking, you also need to exploit this info for good. See this for a couple papers which more or less independently have come to roughly that conclusion: www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is-mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say K, now let's see where this episode actually goes. Ok if you _truly_ could make the constructors of society not at all know what role they'll then play in while giving them all the information they could possibly have for it, that seems like it should work. (Of course the premise is impossible) I think you shouldn't exclude any works though, but rather include them with, and that's important, both theoretical critique and practical scrutiny. If you ONLY put in Marx without information about how communist regimes _tend_ to develop (how ever close or far to genuine Marxism they started off), that would be problematic. But if you can reference empirical effects of various basic ideas I think it should be fine. Ideally, if we stick to this ridiculous premise, the entire concept would be iterated. Say, every ten or twenty years everybody would lose their position again but get an opportunity to shape the future. Even less reasonable but over time this ought to converge against something great. It's kind of a mix of a (modernized) platonic ideal of Society with Kantian ethics "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." I highly doubt that could work in real life though...
Just a note on the graphics, I found the turquoise text over the similar background to be very hard to read. A possible solution is either to change the colour or just to use a black out line around the text to make each individual word pop more.
I believe that the criticism's of Rawls' original position are problematic due to the assumption that the creation of a committee of wise men who know noting about the societies history, demographics, and past oppression is an all or nothing idea. The main point Rawls' tries to make in "A Theory of Justice" is that in order to create a better society you need to have a more inclusive in it. I believe this is a classic case of "the perfect is the enemy of the good", instead of designing the "perfect utopia" that is theoretically possible (But not likely) we should try to apply the "veil of ignorance" when examining feasible political proposals. In other words the original position and veil of ignorance are extremely useful as guidelines for us to think within when examining policies rather than a specific institutional proposal by Rawls.
If I were "leader of the world", I would implement this rule in every constitution, and see what happens: "The right to participate in rule-making. Every member of a social structure (City, country, region, municipality, living area) must have the right to vote on the rules and laws concerning that organization. Votes are decided by simple majority. Every citizen has the right to initiate a vote, if they reach a number of signatures decided on by that structure." I would also experiment with adding this right to other organizations: government agencies, bureaus, companies, etc., because I'm not sure of the result. If it turns bad, the society can always vote to change it back, because it's guaranteed by the rule itself.
My first thought was to have the committee design multiple societies so that we may let them run and see which one(s) are best, but with the explicit knowledge that after they design the societies, they will personally be picked to live in whichever one benefits them LEAST. Then select a diverse committee. After some given amount of time, meet and see what worked and what didn't.
Something about the discussion just makes me think about that one Discworld line about grinding the universe down to a powder and finding a molecule of justice.
This idea is illustrated fairly well in the Doctor Who episode "The Zygon Invasion": *The Doctor(s):* Any second now, you're going to stop that countdown. Both of you. Together. And then you're going to negotiate the most perfect treaty of all time. Safeguards all round, completely fair on both sides. And the key to perfect negotiation? Not knowing what side you're on. So, for the next few hours, until we decide to let you out, no one in this room will be able to remember if they're human or Zygon. I'm not sure that this would work on a larger scale, though, designing an entire society rather than a single treaty. Something that Mike didn't touch on at all is the issue that to even set up this situation requires solving several ethical questions first, chief among them being how to define "society". Can the theoretical committee members know that they're human, for example? Is it possible for them to leave the committee room and then discover that, surprise, they entered this new society as, say, livestock? When will the committee members be entering the society? Will it be immediately? If so, how would you avoid them creating a society that lives extravagantly for a single human lifetime, and then leaves future generations to deal with the consequences? If the entry is randomized, how do we determine the range of dates at which they can enter? That leads to the question of *how* they enter as well. Will children be included in this hypothetical committee? When the members enter society, do they simply walk into it at their current age, or do they have to be born into it? Further than that, do they have to be *conceived* into it? These issues are very important, because they mean that any society designed according to the original position will inevitably be in at least some respects a reflection of the one that set up the committee, because these kinds of decisions will need to be made. I could certainly imagine that if the committee were formed in antebellum Dixieland, the architect very well may have made sure that the committee members would know that they would not be entering society as slaves, reasoning that slaves are chattel and not true persons or members of society. Obviously, the line has to be drawn somewhere; we're not going to have cabbages or gemstones sitting in our committee, but how the current society deals with edge cases will determine where we draw that line, which will have a profound effect on the implementation and results of the hypothetical process in this thought experiment, shaping how the resultant society deals with issues such as animal welfare, sustainability, the treatment of children, abortion, slavery, and so forth.
The original position doesn't work. To meet all needs representation is required, and with no point of view there is no possible representation. The cabinet should be a way for the leader to here the opinions of all classes of people through knowledgable and intelligent characters.
"And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God." 4 Nephi 1:16 this is a passage of Scripture that is describing a society that has completely accepted and followed the teachings of Jesus Christ the son of God. I could not be more certain that his teachings bring true happiness and bring about justice. I have seen first hand in my life how those things have brought increased joy and peace to my life and the lives of all those who have followed them.
As a thought experiment, it was designed to argue the impossible. Pure objectivity is impossible: even our objectivity is subjective. The real question is whether we should stop trying to be objective about what constitutes a just society, and accept that this debate is and will be ongoing in every society. Societies are human artifacts, and like humans they must evolve to survive. So change and uncertainty will always be present. Each generation can only hope that they are not judged too harshly by history.
Something very similar was done in an episode of Doctor Who. A leader of a human shadow military organization and a shape shifting alien had their memories altered so that neither of them could remember which of them was which. I don't remember the results being shown. I think The Doctor left or the show cut ahead before negotiations really got started.
Here's an idea: we know about what a society would be like with an Original Position, at least in microcosm. It's called The Sims. *rewarp sound* So first, let's take the rather large assumption that the player is playing the game "properly" - attempting to improve the lot of all simulants in their household. I'd argue that the player meets the conditions required to maintain the original position, have the information needed to make informed decisions, and the power to implement that household, which itself forms a kind of society. The player has no position within the household and as a result can act without prejudice and self-interest. (An aside: Sims household as microcosm for society. As with society at large, there are a number of jobs that need to be handled (both income and household chores), and a diverse set of workers with different skillsets and goals. Some workers require additional care, and change in how they provide for the household over time. The arrangement of the house even mirrors the arrangement of our cities and resources, providing a model for the physical space our society occupies.) For our player to not to know their own position, they need to know nothing about how the world around is arranged nor how society has been historically constructed, save for what their people need and desire. Sim society starts at the moment the player hits play; there is no historical precedent on which member of the family performs which role. Likewise, the player remains ignorant to the actions of Sims in the world at large, which means that the household they construct, the society they construct, will be the first that they see. Race and gender are non-issues to the player: the virtual denizens aren't really either. They can know what the house's inhabitants require, using perfect information about how each Sim functions, what they physically need and emotionally seek, but can have no prejudice about what that is because of the second aspect: the player does not join their Sims in this world, and yet remain motivated to improve it. In the opening the player is encouraged not to create a player avatar but a family, vesting their interests not in an individuals lot but how the family performs as a whole. They feel all suffering, since any Sim that falls behind starts whining away on the player's HUD. In essence, this is equivalent to "not knowing your position in society". Instead, the player has every position in society, at once. It may even give us a clue as to how an Original Position society would function. Often all chores are divided equally among all members of the household, in a kind of "need it, do it" attitude. One Sim is hungry: then they cook, if they're complaining about the dirty plates, then they're doing it. In other words, less family, more flatmates. Essentially we could say that The Sims' Society maximizes autonomy to stay just. In Rawls' original thought experiment, this makes sense for a risk averse committee that don't know their own attributes: they don't know what they want to do, so all members of their society occupy all roles, to guarantee that they meet their own interests. Or maybe such a committee would inevitably create an underclass of painting goblins or some such similar idea.
Was douglas adams influenced by John Rawl's ideas when he wrote the president of the universe into the hitchhiker's guide or did he reach the same conclusion on his own?
On Nussbaum: Rawls thought of justice in material terms EXACTLY because a super committee could never have nor SHOULD have effect on how people "respect" or "are nice" to each other. THAT, my friend, would be fascism.
I, as Supreme leader, would just tell my committee members that I randomly wrote down their future occupations on a piece of paper. They will only be able to know their job/place in the world after they discuss the policies. This way, they have the Original position without needing to invent any shenanigans to make them lose knowledge. The trick is the fact that one remembers the past, but not the future.
I think ideally you would avoid these problems (theoretically) by ensuring OP committee members genuinely had *no perspective*, i.e. No idea what their gender, race, sexual orientation, class, education, wealth, geographical location etc are. In one version of the thought experiment, OP committee members wake up in hospital covered in bandages with severe amnesia, with none of this information.
A Just society must be completely free from the initiation of force. Which means no government, no laws, and no taxation as those are examples of the initiation of force. Many assume this will lead to chaos, but that is not true. Most people do not want to aggress against others. To protect ourselves from the few who do we will form private protection agencies, funded voluntarily. Voluntary funding is key to all good services. As soon as we are force to pay for anything injustice and corruption creep in.
I tend to agree with Martha Nussbaum & the idea that we need a plurality of perspectives to form a truly Just Society. Imho, no blank slate of a person/A.I./sentient being will be able to perceive & meet the needs of many different beings, as that being cannot perceive needs outside of their own needs without encountering and understanding the controversial topics that John Rawls would rather not allow them to have awareness for.
Here's my two cents on this: From where i see it, assuming we go with the Rawl's premise there are two ways to achieve a comitee that resembles rawl's. First is to design a computer with that exact purpose in mind. This solution is obviously flawed with the obvious pitfalls of deciding what information we should let the computer have etc. And there is a second solution, that is to make a comitee from members of society from every class, every gender, and every interest group, in which these groups should be given the task of deciding policies for another group that has no, or the least amount of connections to each other and let every pair decide each other's policies that way they would have an incentive to not screw the other group over because the other group would be able to do the same to them. Now there are quite some flaws with this solution too because a member of one group might as well be a member of another group that has conflicting interests with the groups whose policies they decide, but imo this would be the most optimal way to create a "just" society seeing as notions of morality and equality is not something that can be taught to a being that knows only precious little of themselves and the world. Policies such as healthcare and social justice and equality should also be decided this way, while taxes and fiscal policies should be calculated by measuring the amount of money needed to achieve the policies and factoring in the average incomes and spending of every group with a logarithm that should be designed to be as cold as it can be to reduce the amount of bias for any group to generate the optimal amount of revenue. Who knows, it might work, or it won't i'm just a random dude on the internet.
I think there's an episode of Doctor Who which (unintentionally) deals with some of this. The Doctor's Daughter was about an army of clones who were at war with another group, and all they knew was what they had been told (other side is bad). The episode ended when the doctor stopped them from fighting, but if it had continued, they would have had to create a society with the new knowledge that what they knew about the other side was not necessarily true, and they said they would work to create a new society together. In that situation, I think that it might be successful, but only because they are literally only working with two types or groups of people. I would also imagine it to be a very rigidly structured society, since all they know is military structure. I think we naturally see rigid hierarchies as being injust/unequal, but if you knew nothing else, and had no reason to question it (cruel treatment) I don't think you would see it that way. Then you can ask the question, if nobody, anywhere in the society knew of anything different, and they never thought to see themselves as unequal to somebody else, even if by our standards they might be, would it still be an unequal society?
A Theocracy could possibly qualify as a society designed from the Original Position. Gods advising the priesthood or appearing before the people would need to not know they are gods, though. They wouldn't ask for worship or sacrifice. They probably wouldn't overly favour the priesthood either.
...bias would be a major interference with the whole "make it as good as possible because you don't know what you'll be" so even if it's something's considered "lowly" you'll still be living goodish...but you will never be unable to separate yourself from your own bias as to what makes living "goodish" as it will always be the goodish in relation to you, your own personal idea of goodish, and even with a consensus on the goodish, so your not basing it on the things that make life goodish for just you, the consensus is still making it so it will be goodish for them no matter where they end up... you're always operating for your own goodish... In this way the idea is flawed as it relies on a specific outline of human nature and doesn't confer onto that outline the possibility of actually considering the value in making life goodish for others, the goodish for others is assumed in the making it goodish for oneself, which will always be based on what that individual considers a goodish life.
I cannot believe I have only just discovered this channel! And it's indescribable how happy I am! I watched every single Crash Course Mythology episode. It was a family event; we'd all gather around the screen and watch your lessons. So glad this channel exists, so sad I found it a bit late. But better late than never!
We did a mock version of the original position in my ethics class last semester. We came up with various policies, voted on them, and then were given a randomized identity, which was usually something that would be considered a minority or other "less than ideal" position in society. We then repeated the process with the understanding of what the possible identities were. Unfortunately, it devolved into a more and more socialist society. The only society that is truly "just" or "fair" would be a minarchy. A society where you are free to do whatever you choose, so long as it doesn't cause physical harm to another or their property. It has a minimal government that basically only functions to protect its citizens from said harm. Anything else is unjust. To try and force the "moral" or "just" action on another (literally or figuratively by making the opposite action illegal) is the worst kind of immorality. Anything beyond what I described in the paragraph above does that. For example, in the United States, the welfare system is funded by taxes. While it is the moral obligation of those who have the means to give to the poor and needy, forcing them to by requiring them to pay taxes is a much worse offence. 99% of the services provided by the federal government are less efficient than those of the private sector anyway (look at UPS vs USPS, for example).
This concept is somewhat explored in the book The Traitor, where the society is apparently ruled by an intelligent citizen who is given a potion that causes them to forget their former life, allowing them to be in the Original Position. Said society is expansionist, deeply homophobic and has other issues. Worth a read if you enjoy fantasy novels.
Is it possible to *design* a just society in practice? Do any societies exist or has a society ever existed that "played out" according to design? Your point about perspective is golden. Societies are not designed; they evolve naturally. Rather than attempting to conjure up an entirely new Just Society out of whole cloth, it seems that we would be better served by endeavoring to maximize the justice of our existing society, a process that must surely come about as a result of employing and embracing a multitude of perspectives in a broadly popular movement that is concerned with justice and intent on realizing justice.
I could imagine the Original Position theory working however only under a single specific circumstance. Infants randomly picked would be placed in a pseudo-society and only be taught about the importance of society and its current values. For about 4 years they would live separated in this model society and discuss how they feel about the "rules" and how best to change them. An anime, Psycho Pass, created a slightly different society where those who could not fit in were removed and set to govern society. It seems to suggest that only those who could see society but were never truly part of it could possibly make fair decisions on how to govern it.
There's a concept similar used in doctor Who, "the Zygon inversion", where just before starting to negotiate a peace treaty both negotiators are made to forget whose side they're with.
and later they did have a war. :(
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No, that's how the war was resolved.
no they did have another war but only after one died sorry about spoilers +Djorgal
Actually that's from "The Day of the Doctor".
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." - Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy ;)
!!! ROBOTS / AI - It seems there's some ideas floating around about the possibility of using AI / Robots to do this kind of work effectively, so incase it's helpful: I wanna pin this comment to provide a space for people thinking along those lines to chat ⬇️
In a way, that would seem to be a good idea, but who designs the robots? Wouldn't you need AI/robots designing the AI/robots to remove as much bias as possible? Or would you just run into the problem of the AI/robots creating a society that's only just to AI/robots?
Problem with this: Who makes the AI? Who starts the design? Who decides what to teach and show to it? Can we be sure the people making the AI are unbiased enough for the computer to work properly?
And if it is not the AI, but a purely logical AI, who designs its algorythms? If we think it is perfectly impartial, do we fall in the trap of creating a purely utilitarian system? A good way to understand this is checking the Moral Machine (moralmachine.mit.edu/)
I've read enough science fiction to know where this is heading
Reposting my comment after seeing this pinned:
If a committee were filled by self-learning AIs intended to fill an original position (coded by numerous and randomly selected coders from around the world) that could understand all languages, maybe there would be a way to develop a system somewhat neutral and just. The information fed to the AIs would be mainly publications/textbooks/etc. from universities and seasoned by human interactions from social media sites. Then these AIs could construct this new society from city planning to laws to court systems to whatever. Afterwards, either terminate all AIs or randomly distribute them amongst the society using an additional computer program.
Statistically, if there were 1,000 different coders each designing their own AI from scratch, a bell curve of normality would arise and eliminate corruption.
@sighko05
I like the sound of this. I want it to work but I can see it not working being the basis for a sci-fi novel.
Can I get "Totalitarianism Isn't Rad" on a t-shirt? It might come in handy over the next few years.
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Ian Derk +
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Ian Derk +
Ian Derk +++++
Ok but can we get a "totalitarianism isn't rad" gif?
Here's a small one, good for texting friends and family members: twitter.com/pbsideachannel/status/817122337782956034
Thanks!
It's beautiful. I'll treasure it.
how about someone who is capable of unconditional love:
a dog
There would be injustice against cats though.
XD
You say the committee is incentivised to make society as fair as possible because they could end up being any one of the members, but that opens the door to the committee playing a game of odds.
What if they designed a society that was super unjust to a super small minority for some sort of profit to the rest?
A core part of Rawl's idea is that the person is extremely risk adverse and wouldn't leave themselves the chance of being in some small totally screwed minority. Depending on the type of person though this could be a huge problem that undermines the thought experiment or a non-issue.
The maximin rule (maximize your minimum result) that guides parties in the OP to opt for fairness has nothing to do with probabilities.
"Since the maximin rule takes no account of probabilities, that is, of how likely it is that the circumstances obtain for their respective worst outcomes to be realized, the first condition is that the parties have no reliable basis for estimating the probabilities of the possible social circumstances that affect the fundamental interests of the persons they represent. This condition fully obtains when the concept of probability does not even apply." - Rawls, J. - Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 98
Abe Dillon I mean how would that even work its not like you can make 1% of people slaves and grow all the food for the other 99% I mean unless you want most people to starve. You would still have to grow most of your own food. making a small minority really less well off wouldn't really help anybody. If you have a large minority or majority that's less well off that could benefit a minority but it doesn't really work the other way around.
Aaron Smith I think there are more subtle ways you could be super unjust to a small minority than simply slave labor for food production.
You could, for instance, make it ok to perform super unethical experiments on 0.1% of the population for scientific gain.
Aaron Smith Also, in developed countries, agriculture workers do make up a tiny percentage of the population. It's something like 4% of the work force, which means an even smaller percentage of the overall population. So it's not far from 1% of the population growing food for everyone. That percentage will go down as farms become more automated with self-driving tractors and the like.
There are also jobs, like sewage worker, than almost nobody would choose if they had much choice. In our society those jobs tend to be filled by lower class workers. The current distribution of wealth isn't really just though. So how do you fill those necessary, yet undesirable jobs when trying to design a perfectly just society? (The easy answer is to pay really well for those jobs, but that implies all sorts of complications)
Every time I read about an ideal fictional society, whether it's from academic reading or science fiction, stripping things away (stuff, identity, economy, rules) is always a unifying trait. There is always a need for people to be more responsible or "better" than we actually are in real life or game the system in order to force people to behave themselves and make the impossibly perfect society function.
You couldn't be more wrong. We don't need to be better people than we actually are. We need to be allowed to flourish our best traits. That is all.
Have 5 kids and then spoil one and give nothing to the other 4. You will have a murder taking place
Have 5 kids and educate them well and provide respect and love as well as guidance and you will have 5 amazing human beings in the World and a great family as bonus.
"Society is a spook that needs busting." - Max Stirner, the Spookbuster.
LMAO It made me laugh so hard when Mike said "I hope you are taking notes" because i was taking notes for my homework
This kind of neutrality proposed in the Original Position isn't very useful. Paulo Freire wrote a lot that neutrality just doesn't exist in his book Pedagogy of the Opressed. His argument could be summarized by something like this:
"If one doesn't take a side, a position, they are in practice taking the side of the winner, of the status quo"
So, when proposing a "ground zero" or a "neutral" space to design society you actually will tend to keep things the way they already are.
yes but i would assume the neutrality would include neutrality of the status quo
There always were a dominant class. In Freire's thinking, this alone already causes an impossibility of your assumption.
yes but inorder to have complete nutrality you must not inform them there is a leader
The thing is that the proposal sort of "knows" that it is impossible, a person cannot know absolute nothing about themselves, so it's a target to be aimed. My point here, is that in our society and any other existing* one, to try to aim to neutrality is, by definition, to take the side of the current status of the world.
*And therefore, possible to exist.
but what if you see a nonexistant world what if there is no scocity you know about for exaple the person could be told everything but in mixed order so it would be hard to tell the current state of the world and then be given a blank world to work with
I don't think it's entirely necessary for the rulemakers to forget their past. All that's really needed is uncertainty for the future.
First, assemble a committee of a evenly distributed assortment of people, pulling from every skin color, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. Then, inform them that at the end of their term in office, everyone will be assigned a completely randomized job, salary, criminal status, citizenship status, etc.
Assuming that the committee cooperates with this batshit crazy plan, the even distribution of physiological traits amongst the committee gives the best chance that they will pass laws that benefit all people possessing those physiological traits. Meanwhile, the fact that nobody on the committee knows if they'll be rich or homeless or serving in the military or jailed, ensures that they'll do their damnedest to pass laws that won't screw anybody over (at least, by an undue amount).
Sounds like an extremely powerful supercomputer, not an AI, should design this society. It has no sense of self, identity, no self interest except for optimising and solving problems. This supercomputer will calculate all the best outcomes for every single thing possible and humans then follow the best solutions.
GuyWithAnAmazingHat I mean wouldn't it be easier to just build a super computer instead of get people who know nothing about themselves?
Still though, the AI would have to be designed by a person, wouldn't it? This doesn't avoid identity, only puts an intermediary step.
PBS Idea Channel There will be no AI, it will be pure mathematics.
For example. the computer will calculate pure economics, manage health from medical records, control infrastructure through traffic data, manage environment though climate data etc.
All decisions are made scientifically and objectively. All humans can even be given the same value of '1' and be treated absolutely equally. And where difference are to be observed, such as health, all genders will be scientifically assessed and provided different medical coverages etc.
Wouldn't that be indistinguishable from an AI? I mean it would have to make decisions in an intelligent manner.
The thing with that is, who tells the supercomputer what is more important when dealing with usually subjective matters? In zero sum situations (say, a famine that has to be dealt with, keeping your people with less food that has to be regulated, who gets it? The 20 years old former criminal? The very old man that worked all his life for a good pension? The ill teenager?) the computer needs to know what to prioritize, and the person that teaches it what is less important than what will stick their biases into it
I just want to point at that the OP is just a natural extension of the method for sharing a cake; that is, if two people want to split a cake so that each gets an equal size piece, then the person who cuts the cake should not know which slice he is getting. The reasoning is similar to the OP reasoning, since the cutter would like to maximize the size of the smaller slice, which happens when both slices are equal in size.
"Those who are blond tot he past are blind to the future."
_or however exactly that quote goes_
Thank you, Idea Channel.
After a hard day of school, where you are expected to absorb, not think, it is always a joy to sit back and watch some Idea Channel. Thanks for the thoughts.
I was about to start outlining how I would set up what I see as a fair and just society, but the youtube comment section didn't seem to be the right place for what would have turned into a thesis. Even as I write this comment, it threatens to turn into an essay outlining the thesis that I just said I wasn't going to write.
Please begin outlining your hypothetical thesis by writing a review of it for a non-existent policy journal.
My Political Science professor thinks that anyone without a Political position would never claim they have no Political position without an ulterior motive. I think this society Rawls envisions is that of extreme liberalism. It isn't democratic or authroritative, it's lazy. Alot of presumptions exist in order for this to work. The way our Political system works is that everyone can voice their opinion on how the goverment should work. Not having an ideology is different from not knowing your ideology. Any basic knowledge of how society works will affect your ideology. Those without that knowledge are no help to our society. How will people transition peacefully to the newly formed society?
Exactly. I think the impossibility to know nothing about the world (or, in other words, to be neutral) is what breaks the proposal to be a methodology in which people would "aim to get the closest possible". Because the closest possible is the world in it's current state: neoliberalism.
Wow, this was an amazing episode, I wish I had something to add, but I don't know what to even say.
I like this channel, but I disagree. If a "just" society is even possible, then it will be though the efforts of the entire society regardless of "policies" that are put in place. So the discussion of this video becomes meaningless at best.... a red herring at worst.
even the best system can be ruined by uncaring humans with lots of time. like that Jerry mandarin thing. the people in charge play the system like a game during a long period of time.
@noah schaefferkoetter: Excellent point. Society "works" because individuals in the society work. Another good argument for spontaneous order instead of intentional design.
In the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special there was a point where they actually adopted this philosophy in order to create a treaty between two warring races. The Zygons were invading the humans, and they have the ability to shapeshift into others and even steal their memories. Eventually the Doctors got a bunch of them in a room with the leaders that they were imitating, but then the Doctors wiped all of their memories of who was on who's side. And he refused to let them back out and give back their memories until they had finished the treaty, effectively returning them to the OP since all people doing the negotiating had no idea what side they'd be on.
I would think the society would be communist, as the committee would want everyone to get the same amount of "stuff" as they don't know who they'll be
Orange Aeronaut I mean they may want to devide up wealth evenly at the start of the new society. But think it wouldn't be universally accepted that everyone should be equal from that time forward i think alot of people would expect to get more if they worked harder.
Aaron Smith the notion that that's how capitalism works or is entirely incompatible with communism.
Orange Aeronaut That's not communism. Communism is about ending labour exploitation. Not everybody has the same, but nobody gets the profit from somebody else's work. Factories are organised by its workers and they get the value of their work instead of letting the owner get most of it. Look up "surplus value".
I have a 3 step plan to bring about a just society.
1. Every gets a puppy. Even the allergic people get puppies.
2. Pizza will be eaten every Monday.
3. Pants will always be optional.
I think I'm pretty good at this.
So.... just according to whom? I mean what is just?
Is it just to, for example, kill animais to eat them? Probably not according to the animals, but we are okay with it.
Is it just to, for example, people in Africa work for a 1 dollar a day in order for us to have cheap electronics products? Probably not to the African poor people, but we are okay with it.
Well what one is "okay with" is not necessarily the same as what they would consider just. I don't think most people find Chinese sweatshops "just," so much as they are unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
And the other thing, apart from assuming that animals have a concept of justice, which I find specious, given how many of them eat other animals, I feel like they wouldn't want the practice banned.
I see the problem as being one of perspective, a true and just society boils down to a utopian ideal and after a long discussion with a few friend we all collectively came to the understanding that utopia is only a perspective, it cannot exist if multiple perspectives are to be considered, if just one thing is out of place it will eventually cascade back down to chaos.
Even if you set someone or something (AI) to the OP they will, by lack of knowledge have a unique perspective of what utopia would be and this perspective wouldn't be translatable amongst people who actually have background knowledge.
My final quote is this "The universe slowly pushes us towards disorder and we are not yet clever enough to push back" ~MaJiCiDe 2017
First of I have theory of justice on my self, great book! Second Ollie of philosophy tube helped with this episode, great dude and great channel! Third, great video!!!!
Coming back through and watching all the old favorites. I feel so old seeing the age on these lol
sounds like the idea behind the anime psycho-pass.
I actually wrote a philosophy master's thesis on this exact topic!!! However, that was a few years ago, so my Rawls is a little rusty. Still, I think I identified a few places where we aren't being entirely fair to Rawls in this video.
First, The Veil of Ignorance: It is important to recognize that Rawls constructs his method to have different degrees of ignorance at different stages of the designing of society. The high level of ignorance that the video describes is only in place while the representatives are deciding on the principles of justice (a fairly general topic). As the representatives descend into more narrow and specific decisions, they are allowed more information about history, social conditions, theory, etc. Still, all the information allowed is always of the public sort. That is, at no point do the representatives have access to information about themselves. The idea is that if they do not have access to information about themselves, they will only agree to things that anybody and everybody would agree to; this allows for a sort of hypothetical unanimous consent. At least, this allows for hypothetical unanimous consent in western countries. In POLITICAL LIBERALISM, Rawls concedes that his method is based upon (seemingly ubiquitous) western values, values that he can give no argument as to why people should hold them, if they don't already, but values that by historical accident every western country seems to hold. (That all said, I disagree with Rawls's supposed need to withhold information about history, theory, and social conditions from representatives in the original position, at all. It always seemed to me that it is necessary to keep the hypothetical representatives ignorant of information about themselves, but that the representatives should have free access to information of the public sort, i.e. information about history, theory, and social conditions.)
Second, Rawls DID NOT think that his method led to a political situation basically resembling mid-20th century United States. To think this about the principles of justice that Rawls comes up with is to ignore that Rawls's principles of justice require a robust and actual, not merely formal, respect for civil rights and equal opportunity. That is, and Rawls is clear on this, a person's expected life outcomes should in no way be linked to any social group or class that the person is a member of or associated with. This is clearly not true about mid-20th century USA. Further, Rawls's second principle of justice gives the so-called difference principle: That any inequality should be of the greatest advantage to the least well-off in society. American capitalism clearly does not meet this requirement. And, Rawls says as much in part IV of JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS, when he compares his preferred just society, a "property-owning democracy," against mid-20th century American welfare-state capitalism. Rawls repeatedly states that it seems to him that either "market socialism" or property-owning democracy could fulfill his principles of justice, and he merely prefers property-owing democracy; however, what is clear to him is that neither soviet communism, nor American capitalism, can fulfill his principles of justice.
Lastly, The Social Basis of Self Respect: Martha Nussbaum's critique of Rawls is a common one, but it stems from a misunderstanding of Rawls. The criticism assumes that Rawls is primarily discussing distribution of material goods and that Rawls believes that if material goods are distributed fairly that everything else will work itself out. This is simply not the case. Rawls is at no point discussing the distribution of mere material goods. Rawls clearly states that he is always discussing the distribution of what he calls "primary goods." Rawls defines primary goods as those things that any individual would need to be able to pursue any conception of the good life that they might hold. Rawls recognizes that different people have different ideas as to what a good life might be. Thus, Rawls imagines a list of things that any person would need to be able to pursue any possible conception of the good life. Material and financial well-being are on this list of primary goods, but Rawls clearly states that the most important primary good is the social basis of self respect. With a quick glance of the index of A THEORY OF JUSTICE, I already found that he claims the social basis of self respect as the most important primary good in section 29 of the revised edition. So, basically, Rawls agrees with the criticism. He agrees that we shouldn't only focus on material goods. Self respect is important. In fact, Rawls clearly states that he thinks self respect is the most important.
Anyway, I apologize for the length. Brevity was never my strong suit. Hopefully these comments forward the conversation.
+
This made me think of religious societies who believe in rebirth like the Hindu. As long as the rebirth is somewhat random, politicians in those societies have a similar position as the ones in the OP committee of not knowing what they will become in their next life or the life after the committee. The problem there is, of course, the problem of incomplete knowledge and also that most religions with that believe design the rebirth mechanism so that it mostly gives incentive for submission to the religious and societal rules.
But you forget the shortsightedness of humans, If that form of religion was so useful to make people realize the importance of doing good, why do they still have criminals and people of bad character? It poses the same problem as most other systems do. Maybe instead create a committee where everyone will be given the job of someone else on the committee and have it so every job/position is correctly accounted for. (though even then that would be nearly impossible as one cannot adjust for age or disability or sex in the same way they can job and position) But still that would mean that everyone in the committee would have a reason to support people of every other position as they do not know where they will end up.
This makes me consider the Doctor Who + Religion episode, and I guess using Sociology's definition of Religion; in a guess, how will people's attitudes, values, & beliefs and to extent identity play into designing a just society.
And I guess how ought that society 'enforce' attitudes, values, & beliefs- Religion on its citizens and itself. I mean there's explicit, plus there's also systemic bias too which in turn establishes institutions.
yeah, except that how well did you behave in life dictates where will you reincarnate. so if you think you are good, then you have nothing to worry about.
@@speedy01247 maybe because those criminals and bad people dont believe in that form of religioin
Why I think we can't ever get a utopia is because we could all have a perfect world, but can't together have a perfect society. If I got into a cloning machine and left it on overnight, me and all my copies could get together and produce our vision of a perfect society. But to literally anyone else on the planet, that society would seem positively bonkers... because we rarely have enough in common with others to agree in everything. Like in the real world, elections swing from party to party as their attempts to build a great society with their philosophy is almost always met by people pointing to the mistakes or side effects as being fundamentally flawed.
I think first we should replace the soda fountains at least partially with fountains that spray regular water instead.
The main problem with humans is that we're too diverse. One person's utopia is another person's hell. It's literally impossible to create a society in which every member accepts it as just without modifying the individuals in some way; which would be morally questionable at best. Compromises will have to be made, and nobody will be entirely satisfied; and what do people do when they're not satisfied? They blame the system that creates their dissatisfaction.
I'm definitely not first. But I am not unremarkably close.
By my count you're 30th (maybe 28th?). Not bad!
Hen Barrison or are you remarkably close
Should just take the game show approach, "Right decide on some stuff for the local jobs, tomorrow we'll toss some jobs into a hat, by we i mean me not you, and you'll draw to see where you go next week. Have fun!" :D Or don't tell them at all and see how they react for the first week or so XD
Ok, you raise a group of children in isolation. You teach them all the pertinent information (that information will have to be debated on later) You hide their race and gender from each other and themselves. And them let them go out it.
By the way, I think this is a terrible idea
It's not a lot different from what Aristotle wrote on Politics. If I remember correctly, he thinks all children should be separated from parents and raised by "experts" so they would become experts in what they "naturally" were born for.
I am actually for this, but instead hiding the race i think its better to make artificial neutral race (mate everyone with everyone). Hiding gender is silly. I wrote a really long comment on my idea of it, you can read it if you can find it here
You just described the infamous ~myth of the racial democracy~ here in Brazil. I will just say this to you: it doesn't work.
+Matheus Graciano Andrade You're thinking of Plato in the Republic.
This is the best argument I've ever heard for why seeking diversity of opinion in groups & power structures is important.
Thank you.
Pity Doctor Steel has retired. His propaganda made him look like he had a good grasp of what was needed.
Also looking up CGP Grey's Keys to Power video seems interesting.
Also what this 'original position' committee sounds like is AI designed for this task. However AI is only as effective and unbiased as it is programmed and if the coder knows the AI's task then the coder could theoretically introduce biases for the AI to follow once past the selection process.
yes but what about an sequence of ais trying to unbias the others
That's undistiguishable from generations of people raising their children with a less biased upbringing than themselves.
Sure that's what we're doing right now and it isn't necessarily bad, but what guarantee do you have that they will ever reach that "unbiased" state?
yes but as you live you pick up biases this would design something over and over to make it less biased without living a life
But then again, we come back to the original issue: if how do you design an ai who can detect its own biases? How can you prevent bias from infiltrating your bias detection algorithm?
That stuff just goes in circles, man.
which is why this machine would dilute it as much as possible
This reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. And this is a spoiler for the end of the second book in the "trilogy" in which it is revealed that the person in charge of the Universe is actually one guy who lives in a cabin with his cat. He doesn't believe he rules the universe; he's not even sure about the existence of his cat.
Presidental democratic systems are bad, I prefer a coalition democracy like Germany has, where the chancellor is not voted but the parties are and they have then to find together and choose then the chancellor based on which parties could work out to work together.
Drudenfusz
I disagree.
To create a perfect society, you need perfect people. The same with caring, hopeful, just, etc.
can we some how make it were everyone can feel the effects of there actions on everyone else. would that make a just society?
maybe justice is one of those things that you can't pursue directly, like happiness.
The more you chase it the more you get embroiled in *trying* rather than just *being* happy (or just). In my opinion what would _really_ help if we could agree on aims, and then strive toward that... like hey, let's focus on figuring out space travel. With a unifying aim, everyone might band together and achieve justice as a happy side effect?
The idea of removing a person's personal desires and status is ok but from there I wouldn't limit controversial material but rather include all of it. As well as having Karl Marx you have Ayn Rand and even Mein Kampf and include history of where those ideas have led in the past. One idea if you don't mind the whole process taking a life time is to take very young children and shape their whole lives and education towards the task of designing this society without telling them it's anything but hypothetical.
I would read that.
Well in the Douglas Adams book "The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe" the ruler of the universe is a man who takes everything as hypothetical, even his memories and the existence of a universe outside his front door. Some men ask him questions every few days about the running of the universe and he just answers whatever comes to mind.
A brilliant quote from that book, "It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
Thanks for the recommendation & quote. : D
"I wouldn't limit controversial material but rather include all of it."
But that's part of the problem. Even assuming you have people in the "original position" designing society, there are conflicting ideas about how to achieve a just society. Being in the original position doesn't make them more able than anyone else to decide which ideas are right and which are wrong.
In order to design a just society, social approval (the core abstraction of value to humans beyond survival needs) must reward ethics for their own sake as an ethos. You create that social environment by having all dominant authoritative influences act from that premise in their every waking action, reflecting it as their highest priority in a wide enough scale to form a social culture. You become influential by some combination of positive feedback and being the source of survival in terms of resources and respite. Thus those influences raise a generation of kids who tacitly understand that social acceptance and their subsequent survival benefits means being an ethical person for its own sake and thus those qualities are implied and reflected in every interaction and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy which expands on itself. Ergo a just society. I believe minority delinquency can be ameliorated in a single generation using this method. The problem has always been the laws and logistics to getting better influences to those at risk.
I've hated this idea since the first time I came across it. The problems with the veil of ignorance are numerous, but let's just focus on a couple. The video already went over the impossibility of creating a biases-free committee, through the leader, the general knowledge allowed to the committee, or simply willing the committee from not having biases, so the idea of attaining the original position is impossible from a strictly practical standpoint. The lack of practical applicability, even as a thought experiment, is the first problem, but that isn't it's worse sin. There's no denying that material wealth and justice have some value to individuals and society as a whole, but this value is negotiable. The real problem with the original position/veil of ignorance is it's denial of human perspective as having value. This idea starts off by assuming that human experience is fundamentally a poison, despite that experience is fundamentally what defines our identities. If no one's perspective has value, then how do those without perspective in the original position assume greater value? Either perspective and experience matters and only a respective body made of a plurality of human identities could create a just society, or nobody's perspective and experience matters, in which case attaining the original position is useless endeavor. It's an obsolete ouroboros.
And frankly, this is such a white man answer to ills of society. Obviously, we can't go back in time to restart society, so this experiment must be under the operating position of society exists in a current conditions and that the just society would be built upon these conditions for a hypothetically better world. This means all previous sins and inequalities go unaddressed, because one would not be able to act in a just matter to remedy these existing issues- only prevent future occurrences. Even if the focus on material wealth and justice, there's no getting around how interlocked material wealth and justice are with our socio-political identities. Read Ta-Nashei Coates' "The Case for Reparations" to see evidence and personally understand just how interlocked black identity and black wealth are together. Look at the history of the Native Americans; there is no getting around that their modern extreme poverty rates and social ills accompanying such poor living conditions are the direct result not of their capability to produce and work, but of who they are as a people. The white man came in at a low point in Native American history after disease had decimated many tribes, and then proceeded to slowly and violently exploit their land, resources, and living conditions to the point where living as their ancestors did is a practical impossibility for the majority of living Native Americans. I'd be happy if the veil of ignorance made a hypothetically better future for my descendants, but I don't them and I do know people now who suffer and would not see justice now if such an endeavor through the original position were pursued. Justice at the expense of the innocent is not justice.
Much in the same way that an earlier Idea Channel proposed that media= political, so too is this true of the existence of a human being, even if that person is in a vegetative state.
And should it not be a big red flag that there is something wrong with his argument if it turns out that the results of his thought experiment are the society he is living in? Doesn't that seem like a lazy way to morally justify one's life- 'no significant change is required of me, because through my philosophical pondering, I've come to the conclusion that I'm already living in a just society,' says the white man in the ivory tower. (I don't mean that to be a snide remark at all of academia, as I wish to pursue my own doctorate work one day, but academics like this piss me off.)
The idea of creating a just society is a dream, and like dreams we should understand both how we will never quite be able to achieve it's beauty and that we should strive to make the world more like it's beauty. Racism, sexism, ableism, gender performance bias, and the many other ways we have found to deny humans of basic respect and dignity will not disappear anytime soon or likely ever. Our goals in building a government that acts in a just manner on behalf of the people is minimize the conditions that produce such psychic and physically violent biases by building better and more plentiful housing, create more effective transportation systems, find better ways to open and regulate labor markets, and encourage an education system beyond compulsory elementary and high schools. We need to create systems that allow people to find what they do in their day to day lives as satisfying and/or meaningful, and this doesn't necessarily have to be through work or education- it could be in a monastery of pop culture, since Nietzsche did envision culture as a future substitute for religion. Dreams are worth striving for, but they are the horizon of human thought as they are always the guiding light just beyond our reach.
Links:
The Case for Reparations: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
What if Jobs are not the Solution but the Problem: aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem
"Buried Treasure," Existential Comics: existentialcomics.com/comic/37
*slow clap*
"And frankly, this is such a white man answer to ills of society."
I was itching to say that earlier, can't remeber now why I didn't do it.
I spent the entire video trying to come up with a good joke about doin' it in the Original Position.
And this is all I came up with.
I think the entire idea of trying to build a society from the ground up is flawed. No matter how careful your planning, you can't predict every little problem that'll arise, every loopholes in your plans. A society needs to be built by iterations, you try things, you see what works and what doesn't and then you try other things.
It's also required for the imperative of the rules of conducts that are understood and agreed upon by all who are subject to them. How can you expect people to understand or agree with rules that they aren't accustomed with. If you want to build a society from scratch you are going to have to carefully plan the transition that is going to take at least a century.
Also when building a society from scratch, how do you plan for possible innovations that'll change things? Do you plan for a mostly agrarian society to find out that two century later farm work is almost entirely automated and only requires a small fraction of the work force?
Do you destroy your society every once in a while a redo the all commity thing, rebuilding it from scratch?
what if you have a supercomputer that can
It doesn't solve any of the problem I mentionned, unless what you're talking about isn't a computer but a god.
the definiton of a god is debatable but regarless if you had a strong enough computer you could predict every possible path of the future and if pre determinizm has any truth behind it you could predict the path of the future im starting to feal an entity that can predict the path of atoms is paradoxical as it could then probably move agenst that path although it might not be able to
Not how computer works. Plus quantum mechanics is non deterministic anyhow.
why not with complete knoledge of physics in a determinsitic world you could predict the future with a good enough computer a human from what we can tell is basicaly a fleshy computer why cant a computer chose to act
The idea of making a perfect society is addressed in Plato Republic where the letter of the nation would have to be prune to become the leader while not knowing he will be leader
So, in other words, it's impossible to have a just society.
Matt T its impossible given that the definition of "JUST" society is culturally and historically situated and is not static.
I think the inability to anticipate potential inequalities is the biggest death-knell to the Original Position. I can imagine some sort of injustice developing in the society--say racism or sexism--but any complaints would be immediately silenced by, "Don't be silly; we carefully planned a society free from bias and inequality. You are living in the best possible of worlds."
the problem is human nature. it's imposible for an imperfect being to imagine perfection
Imagining one is possible,realizing it is not,it's called utopia,in fact every time in history someone has tried doing just that,they ended up kickstarting a war or country-wide rebellions. The reason behind it is that you have to be obsessed with the design,eventually as you see that pieces do not fall where you expect them to,you turn into a dictator and attempt to force it - also the main reason how/why power corrupts.
6:22 Justice is not about debating controversial ideas, but finding the truth. And the truth is not subjective.
LMAO yeah capitalism has no place in a model of a just society. that dude couldn't do any better?
shiretsu I think he was biased
Everybody wants to think the society were they thrive is "just". Because if not, it means you became successful because the world was nicer to you than to others, cheater.
There's a Walden 2 type community near my city called "Los Horcones" which works as a real-life experiment for this precise theme.
It's true that no one can have all possible perspectives, but everyone could.
The process would just be a lot more chaotic and it would take much longer.
I feel that the core idea behind the original position is essentially the same as the "many perspectives" idea. Since the intended motivation is that no one knows their own rank so would they would be motivated to consider all the possible positions found within a society. So essentially the ideal original position would come to the same answers as "many perspectives"
Whoa, I think I've got it, and this is where the anonymity of the internet can really come into play. You randomly select people for your committee, from all walks of life, and get them to work together without ever meeting, and instruct them that they should make decisions without regard to their own station, and that everyone else should too, or the rest will call them out, remove them from the committee, and choose someone else. They never meet, never talk, and are selected based on relative intelligence, all higher than average, but not too high. And all have unique perspectives due to their class, station, position, and social standing, but are not allowed to talk about their personal experiences, nor allowed to let it influence their decisions, lest they are expelled from the committee. Hard to know though... Maybe they have handlers who know whether they're staying too close to personal subjects? Wow this is hard. Maybe the secret is that you need two societies, and each governs the other, and they never interact with each other outside of that.
Rawls' Original Position reminded me a lot of the Ruler of the Universe in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". The Ruler was determined to be the person most fit for the job because he is the least ambitious person ever born and has a philosophy of pure solipsism. He only believed what his senses could perceive at the time, and even then, he had his doubts. The point didn't seem to be that this was the best choice to rule the Universe-- as The Ruler cannot understand the consequences of his decisions, and therefore has no moral or ethical ground on which to stand-- but it more highlights how a man like Zarniwoop (who is arrogant and manipulative) should *not* have this kind of power.
Is the OP committee made up of only humans? The decisions they make about building a just society would be very different if a member might enter "society" as a cow, deer, tree, etc.
All lifeforms shall be bestowed citizenship!
My dad was a student of Rawls so I asked him some questions about this. He says the idea of capitalism being the best way forward and inequality being necessary to motivate competition is a common misscharacterization of rawls. Rawls said that the two rules of a just society that people would agree upon would be equality, and helping and giving resources to the person in the worst position. This would result in things like the disabled being given what they need to live a comfortable, good life, medical assistance would be provided to those in need, and it would promote science and research in medicine to help those in need and make things readily available to all. It is not inherently capitalist, or anything else, and promotes equality, not inequality.
1984 and Brave New World. Maybe from a less malicious ideal, but this concept reminded me so much of these works.
Science Fiction example of this, in the special episode of Doctor Who "The Day of the Doctor" he manage to made a deal with the Zygons by making the Zygon leader and the human leader forget what each was, this is not knowing if they were human or Zygon during the negotiations of a peace treaty to avoid a full on invasion.
"Pirates are evil? The Marines are righteous? These terms have always
changed throughout the course of history! Kids who have never seen peace
and kids who have never seen war have different values! Those who stand
at the top determine what's wrong and what's right! This very place is
neutral ground! Justice will prevail, you say? But of course it will!
Whoever wins this war becomes justice!" Donquixote Doflamingo One Piece
I see people talking about an AI but as a game designer the first thing that popped in my head to solve this problem was iteration, essentially AB testing.I think the original position could be a great tool but as you pointed out it's limited in that it has no hindsight.however, if we could create a society simulator and give each player input as to how the society should be run along with a knowledge base about the people, resources, technology, etc. They could have no knowledge of their avatar in anyway, only be able to shape the rules of the game. Then after a period of time the results of the game test are factored into the knowledge base and any factors that can be interchanged such as skin color and geography are randomized and it begins again. I think this could be a good starting point, but my gut instinct is telling me players would try to make things really really unequal in the hopes of being one of the lucky 1%.
So in brief, what about running this as a crowd sourced simulation and let it tweak itself until it gets things 99% right or completely destroys itself?
Our society has a deep problem with judging people by who they are, rather than what they do. All forms of discrimination have at their roots this notion that who a person *is* defines them more than what they *do*. If Rawles's Original Position tries to eliminate unfair treatment of identities by eliminating knowledge of identities, then it's not exactly the same idea, but at least in the family tree of the pernicious idea that racism is caused by people being aware of racism. "Just don't talk about it, and it will go away," becomes "Just don't know about it, and it will go away."
Let's take the idea of police policy. I grew up in an ethnic group that is not typically afraid of police. My relationship with police as an adult is entirely informed by that experience. I never understood why people who grew up with a different identity from me had a different attitude toward police until I started learning about their experiences. However, even now my understanding of their experiences is imperfect. Even if I magically forget what my identity is, if I'm to make meaningful policy I'm still going to be influenced by my own experience, which may be an imperfect and incomplete picture of how police policy works. Identity isn't what we do, but because other people may do to us based on our identity, it ends up shaping how we see the world and *why* we do what we do. It doesn't go away if we pretend we forget about it.
Hot Take (I literally paused the video 10s in): Considering a bunch of recent papers on ethical algorithms it may actually be of vital importance to know society incredibly well: If you know too little about correlations of preferences and identities of groups in a society you may all too often accidentally act unjustly towards particular groups. - Of course, knowing all this means you could exploit it to very intentionally discriminate maliciously. But if you want to be serious about it, mathematically speaking, you also need to exploit this info for good. See this for a couple papers which more or less independently have come to roughly that conclusion: www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is-mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say
K, now let's see where this episode actually goes.
Ok if you _truly_ could make the constructors of society not at all know what role they'll then play in while giving them all the information they could possibly have for it, that seems like it should work. (Of course the premise is impossible)
I think you shouldn't exclude any works though, but rather include them with, and that's important, both theoretical critique and practical scrutiny. If you ONLY put in Marx without information about how communist regimes _tend_ to develop (how ever close or far to genuine Marxism they started off), that would be problematic. But if you can reference empirical effects of various basic ideas I think it should be fine. Ideally, if we stick to this ridiculous premise, the entire concept would be iterated. Say, every ten or twenty years everybody would lose their position again but get an opportunity to shape the future. Even less reasonable but over time this ought to converge against something great.
It's kind of a mix of a (modernized) platonic ideal of Society with Kantian ethics "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
I highly doubt that could work in real life though...
Just a note on the graphics, I found the turquoise text over the similar background to be very hard to read. A possible solution is either to change the colour or just to use a black out line around the text to make each individual word pop more.
I believe that the criticism's of Rawls' original position are problematic due to the assumption that the creation of a committee of wise men who know noting about the societies history, demographics, and past oppression is an all or nothing idea. The main point Rawls' tries to make in "A Theory of Justice" is that in order to create a better society you need to have a more inclusive in it. I believe this is a classic case of "the perfect is the enemy of the good", instead of designing the "perfect utopia" that is theoretically possible (But not likely) we should try to apply the "veil of ignorance" when examining feasible political proposals. In other words the original position and veil of ignorance are extremely useful as guidelines for us to think within when examining policies rather than a specific institutional proposal by Rawls.
If I were "leader of the world", I would implement this rule in every constitution, and see what happens:
"The right to participate in rule-making. Every member of a social structure (City, country, region, municipality, living area) must have the right to vote on the rules and laws concerning that organization. Votes are decided by simple majority. Every citizen has the right to initiate a vote, if they reach a number of signatures decided on by that structure." I would also experiment with adding this right to other organizations: government agencies, bureaus, companies, etc., because I'm not sure of the result. If it turns bad, the society can always vote to change it back, because it's guaranteed by the rule itself.
My first thought was to have the committee design multiple societies so that we may let them run and see which one(s) are best, but with the explicit knowledge that after they design the societies, they will personally be picked to live in whichever one benefits them LEAST. Then select a diverse committee.
After some given amount of time, meet and see what worked and what didn't.
Something about the discussion just makes me think about that one Discworld line about grinding the universe down to a powder and finding a molecule of justice.
Removing personal bias automatically makes a fair society since nobody knows who is benefiting from that culture.
This idea is illustrated fairly well in the Doctor Who episode "The Zygon Invasion":
*The Doctor(s):* Any second now, you're going to stop that countdown. Both of you. Together. And then you're going to negotiate the most perfect treaty of all time. Safeguards all round, completely fair on both sides. And the key to perfect negotiation? Not knowing what side you're on. So, for the next few hours, until we decide to let you out, no one in this room will be able to remember if they're human or Zygon.
I'm not sure that this would work on a larger scale, though, designing an entire society rather than a single treaty. Something that Mike didn't touch on at all is the issue that to even set up this situation requires solving several ethical questions first, chief among them being how to define "society".
Can the theoretical committee members know that they're human, for example? Is it possible for them to leave the committee room and then discover that, surprise, they entered this new society as, say, livestock?
When will the committee members be entering the society? Will it be immediately? If so, how would you avoid them creating a society that lives extravagantly for a single human lifetime, and then leaves future generations to deal with the consequences? If the entry is randomized, how do we determine the range of dates at which they can enter?
That leads to the question of *how* they enter as well. Will children be included in this hypothetical committee? When the members enter society, do they simply walk into it at their current age, or do they have to be born into it? Further than that, do they have to be *conceived* into it?
These issues are very important, because they mean that any society designed according to the original position will inevitably be in at least some respects a reflection of the one that set up the committee, because these kinds of decisions will need to be made. I could certainly imagine that if the committee were formed in antebellum Dixieland, the architect very well may have made sure that the committee members would know that they would not be entering society as slaves, reasoning that slaves are chattel and not true persons or members of society.
Obviously, the line has to be drawn somewhere; we're not going to have cabbages or gemstones sitting in our committee, but how the current society deals with edge cases will determine where we draw that line, which will have a profound effect on the implementation and results of the hypothetical process in this thought experiment, shaping how the resultant society deals with issues such as animal welfare, sustainability, the treatment of children, abortion, slavery, and so forth.
The original position doesn't work. To meet all needs representation is required, and with no point of view there is no possible representation. The cabinet should be a way for the leader to here the opinions of all classes of people through knowledgable and intelligent characters.
"And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God." 4 Nephi 1:16
this is a passage of Scripture that is describing a society that has completely accepted and followed the teachings of Jesus Christ the son of God. I could not be more certain that his teachings bring true happiness and bring about justice. I have seen first hand in my life how those things have brought increased joy and peace to my life and the lives of all those who have followed them.
As a thought experiment, it was designed to argue the impossible. Pure objectivity is impossible: even our objectivity is subjective. The real question is whether we should stop trying to be objective about what constitutes a just society, and accept that this debate is and will be ongoing in every society. Societies are human artifacts, and like humans they must evolve to survive. So change and uncertainty will always be present. Each generation can only hope that they are not judged too harshly by history.
Did you forget to link the tweet of the week? I can't find it.
Ask the aliens to forget about themselves and then to design for us 20 supercomputers that will design our just society.
Something very similar was done in an episode of Doctor Who. A leader of a human shadow military organization and a shape shifting alien had their memories altered so that neither of them could remember which of them was which. I don't remember the results being shown. I think The Doctor left or the show cut ahead before negotiations really got started.
Here's an idea: we know about what a society would be like with an Original Position, at least in microcosm. It's called The Sims.
*rewarp sound*
So first, let's take the rather large assumption that the player is playing the game "properly" - attempting to improve the lot of all simulants in their household. I'd argue that the player meets the conditions required to maintain the original position, have the information needed to make informed decisions, and the power to implement that household, which itself forms a kind of society. The player has no position within the household and as a result can act without prejudice and self-interest.
(An aside: Sims household as microcosm for society. As with society at large, there are a number of jobs that need to be handled (both income and household chores), and a diverse set of workers with different skillsets and goals. Some workers require additional care, and change in how they provide for the household over time. The arrangement of the house even mirrors the arrangement of our cities and resources, providing a model for the physical space our society occupies.)
For our player to not to know their own position, they need to know nothing about how the world around is arranged nor how society has been historically constructed, save for what their people need and desire. Sim society starts at the moment the player hits play; there is no historical precedent on which member of the family performs which role. Likewise, the player remains ignorant to the actions of Sims in the world at large, which means that the household they construct, the society they construct, will be the first that they see. Race and gender are non-issues to the player: the virtual denizens aren't really either.
They can know what the house's inhabitants require, using perfect information about how each Sim functions, what they physically need and emotionally seek, but can have no prejudice about what that is because of the second aspect: the player does not join their Sims in this world, and yet remain motivated to improve it. In the opening the player is encouraged not to create a player avatar but a family, vesting their interests not in an individuals lot but how the family performs as a whole. They feel all suffering, since any Sim that falls behind starts whining away on the player's HUD. In essence, this is equivalent to "not knowing your position in society". Instead, the player has every position in society, at once.
It may even give us a clue as to how an Original Position society would function. Often all chores are divided equally among all members of the household, in a kind of "need it, do it" attitude. One Sim is hungry: then they cook, if they're complaining about the dirty plates, then they're doing it. In other words, less family, more flatmates. Essentially we could say that The Sims' Society maximizes autonomy to stay just. In Rawls' original thought experiment, this makes sense for a risk averse committee that don't know their own attributes: they don't know what they want to do, so all members of their society occupy all roles, to guarantee that they meet their own interests.
Or maybe such a committee would inevitably create an underclass of painting goblins or some such similar idea.
Yes! One of the best, most overlooked philosophers is getting the credit he deserves! This makes me so happy for some reason
Please investigate a resource based economy.
Was douglas adams influenced by John Rawl's ideas when he wrote the president of the universe into the hitchhiker's guide or did he reach the same conclusion on his own?
I remember something in hitch hickers guide to the galaxy stating the only ones worthy of power are whom don't want it.
On Nussbaum: Rawls thought of justice in material terms EXACTLY because a super committee could never have nor SHOULD have effect on how people "respect" or "are nice" to each other. THAT, my friend, would be fascism.
I, as Supreme leader, would just tell my committee members that I randomly wrote down their future occupations on a piece of paper. They will only be able to know their job/place in the world after they discuss the policies. This way, they have the Original position without needing to invent any shenanigans to make them lose knowledge. The trick is the fact that one remembers the past, but not the future.
0:39 YES MY DREAM HAS COME TRUE, I cant finally initiate all my plans for the brighter future!
I think ideally you would avoid these problems (theoretically) by ensuring OP committee members genuinely had *no perspective*, i.e. No idea what their gender, race, sexual orientation, class, education, wealth, geographical location etc are. In one version of the thought experiment, OP committee members wake up in hospital covered in bandages with severe amnesia, with none of this information.
A Just society must be completely free from the initiation of force. Which means no government, no laws, and no taxation as those are examples of the initiation of force. Many assume this will lead to chaos, but that is not true. Most people do not want to aggress against others. To protect ourselves from the few who do we will form private protection agencies, funded voluntarily. Voluntary funding is key to all good services. As soon as we are force to pay for anything injustice and corruption creep in.
I tend to agree with Martha Nussbaum & the idea that we need a plurality of perspectives to form a truly Just Society.
Imho, no blank slate of a person/A.I./sentient being will be able to perceive & meet the needs of many different beings, as that being cannot perceive needs outside of their own needs without encountering and understanding the controversial topics that John Rawls would rather not allow them to have awareness for.
DreamMaster89 brilliant!
Here's my two cents on this:
From where i see it, assuming we go with the Rawl's premise there are two ways to achieve a comitee that resembles rawl's. First is to design a computer with that exact purpose in mind. This solution is obviously flawed with the obvious pitfalls of deciding what information we should let the computer have etc. And there is a second solution, that is to make a comitee from members of society from every class, every gender, and every interest group, in which these groups should be given the task of deciding policies for another group that has no, or the least amount of connections to each other and let every pair decide each other's policies that way they would have an incentive to not screw the other group over because the other group would be able to do the same to them. Now there are quite some flaws with this solution too because a member of one group might as well be a member of another group that has conflicting interests with the groups whose policies they decide, but imo this would be the most optimal way to create a "just" society seeing as notions of morality and equality is not something that can be taught to a being that knows only precious little of themselves and the world. Policies such as healthcare and social justice and equality should also be decided this way, while taxes and fiscal policies should be calculated by measuring the amount of money needed to achieve the policies and factoring in the average incomes and spending of every group with a logarithm that should be designed to be as cold as it can be to reduce the amount of bias for any group to generate the optimal amount of revenue. Who knows, it might work, or it won't i'm just a random dude on the internet.
I think there's an episode of Doctor Who which (unintentionally) deals with some of this. The Doctor's Daughter was about an army of clones who were at war with another group, and all they knew was what they had been told (other side is bad). The episode ended when the doctor stopped them from fighting, but if it had continued, they would have had to create a society with the new knowledge that what they knew about the other side was not necessarily true, and they said they would work to create a new society together. In that situation, I think that it might be successful, but only because they are literally only working with two types or groups of people. I would also imagine it to be a very rigidly structured society, since all they know is military structure. I think we naturally see rigid hierarchies as being injust/unequal, but if you knew nothing else, and had no reason to question it (cruel treatment) I don't think you would see it that way. Then you can ask the question, if nobody, anywhere in the society knew of anything different, and they never thought to see themselves as unequal to somebody else, even if by our standards they might be, would it still be an unequal society?
A Theocracy could possibly qualify as a society designed from the Original Position. Gods advising the priesthood or appearing before the people would need to not know they are gods, though. They wouldn't ask for worship or sacrifice. They probably wouldn't overly favour the priesthood either.
...bias would be a major interference with the whole "make it as good as possible because you don't know what you'll be" so even if it's something's considered "lowly" you'll still be living goodish...but you will never be unable to separate yourself from your own bias as to what makes living "goodish" as it will always be the goodish in relation to you, your own personal idea of goodish, and even with a consensus on the goodish, so your not basing it on the things that make life goodish for just you, the consensus is still making it so it will be goodish for them no matter where they end up... you're always operating for your own goodish... In this way the idea is flawed as it relies on a specific outline of human nature and doesn't confer onto that outline the possibility of actually considering the value in making life goodish for others, the goodish for others is assumed in the making it goodish for oneself, which will always be based on what that individual considers a goodish life.
Interesting, I was thinking of something similar for an idea I had for a book that's basically the opposite of 1984
I cannot believe I have only just discovered this channel! And it's indescribable how happy I am! I watched every single Crash Course Mythology episode. It was a family event; we'd all gather around the screen and watch your lessons. So glad this channel exists, so sad I found it a bit late. But better late than never!
We did a mock version of the original position in my ethics class last semester. We came up with various policies, voted on them, and then were given a randomized identity, which was usually something that would be considered a minority or other "less than ideal" position in society. We then repeated the process with the understanding of what the possible identities were.
Unfortunately, it devolved into a more and more socialist society.
The only society that is truly "just" or "fair" would be a minarchy. A society where you are free to do whatever you choose, so long as it doesn't cause physical harm to another or their property. It has a minimal government that basically only functions to protect its citizens from said harm.
Anything else is unjust. To try and force the "moral" or "just" action on another (literally or figuratively by making the opposite action illegal) is the worst kind of immorality. Anything beyond what I described in the paragraph above does that. For example, in the United States, the welfare system is funded by taxes. While it is the moral obligation of those who have the means to give to the poor and needy, forcing them to by requiring them to pay taxes is a much worse offence. 99% of the services provided by the federal government are less efficient than those of the private sector anyway (look at UPS vs USPS, for example).
This concept is somewhat explored in the book The Traitor, where the society is apparently ruled by an intelligent citizen who is given a potion that causes them to forget their former life, allowing them to be in the Original Position. Said society is expansionist, deeply homophobic and has other issues. Worth a read if you enjoy fantasy novels.
Is it possible to *design* a just society in practice? Do any societies exist or has a society ever existed that "played out" according to design? Your point about perspective is golden. Societies are not designed; they evolve naturally. Rather than attempting to conjure up an entirely new Just Society out of whole cloth, it seems that we would be better served by endeavoring to maximize the justice of our existing society, a process that must surely come about as a result of employing and embracing a multitude of perspectives in a broadly popular movement that is concerned with justice and intent on realizing justice.
I could imagine the Original Position theory working however only under a single specific circumstance. Infants randomly picked would be placed in a pseudo-society and only be taught about the importance of society and its current values. For about 4 years they would live separated in this model society and discuss how they feel about the "rules" and how best to change them. An anime, Psycho Pass, created a slightly different society where those who could not fit in were removed and set to govern society. It seems to suggest that only those who could see society but were never truly part of it could possibly make fair decisions on how to govern it.