Somehow I caught myself thinking that the absolute freedom that people love to talk about so much in movies or over a glass of wine is actually a terrible thing.
Imagine this: no governments, no police, no traffic laws or courts. Do whatever you want. Life without limits. It sounds like a teenage dream, but in practice it means that anyone stronger can easily take your breakfast, your home and your life, simply because they feel like it.
Back in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes quite aptly observed that in such a state of nature, human life would be “solitary, poor, vile, brutish, and short.” No art, no morning coffee, no peace—only paranoia and the fear of getting hit in the head with a stone.
Therefore, humans, being lazy and comfort-loving creatures, once decided to enter into a social contract. We give up some of our cherished freedom in exchange for someone else guaranteeing our safety.
Poison for Socrates and a banal calculation
Even the ancient Greeks understood that there is no state without rules. Socrates, when he was sentenced to death for allegedly corrupting the youth with his conversations, refused to escape from prison. He told his friends: I have enjoyed the benefits of Athens all my life, I agreed to live by their rules, and now, when these rules have turned against me, it would be a pity to flee. He drank poison because the social contract was more important to him than his own life.
Dramatic, I agree. I would probably run away. But there is logic to it.
Hobbes later gave this an even more pragmatic basis. People are selfish, but rational. It is beneficial for us to live together. Even if the government is so-so—some boring government or a greedy king—it is still better than a massacre in the streets. But here another problem arises: what exactly should these rules be, so that we don’t all want to go to the afterlife?
The mathematics of happiness that doesn't work
There was this English eccentric named Jeremy Bentham. He invented utilitarianism, the idea that the state should provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. He even tried to measure pleasure and pain in some abstract units.
It sounds like a good idea: let's widen the sidewalk, because there are many pedestrians, and they will be happy, and there are few drivers, so their irritation can be ignored.
But the problem is that human life is not a table. It is impossible to compare my joy from a quiet morning with someone else's pleasure from loud music under the window. And most importantly, where is the justice here? If for the happiness of 90% of the population it is necessary to make 10% suffer, utilitarianism will say: “Why not, the mathematics converge.”
Later, the Italian Vilfredo Pareto proposed a different approach—efficiency. The ideal world for Pareto is one in which no one can improve their situation without making someone else worse off. This may be brilliant for economics, but Pareto, like Bentham, had no thought about humanity at all.
You can have a society where one person owns everything and the rest eat the crumbs, and according to Pareto it will be “efficient” if the rich cannot get even richer without taking the last crust of bread from the poor.
The saving power of ignorance
And that's where John Rawls comes in, a philosopher who in the second half of the twentieth century proposed what seems to me to be the most sobering concept of all. He understood a simple thing: it's almost impossible to agree.
The rich want lower taxes, the poor want higher benefits. Men are pulling the blanket over themselves, women are fighting for equal pay. Everyone has their own truth. And for many people in this world, the question of justice is not about the right to express themselves, but about how to make it to the next paycheck.
Rawls proposed a thought experiment that is ingenious in its simplicity. Imagine that you are going to write the rules for a new society. But there is one condition: you do it behind a “veil of ignorance.”
You don't know who you're going to be born into this new world. You don't know your gender, your race, your health, your IQ, or the size of your bank account. You could be born the heir to a tech empire, or you could be born a disabled person in a depressed mining town. You don't know anything about yourself.
What rules will you write?
Because people are rational and, let's be honest, risk-averse, no one wants to play the lottery. Instead of creating a world of crazy opportunities for the chosen and a chasm for the losers, we'll start laying the groundwork. We'll make sure that society has basic rights for everyone. And we'll allow economic inequalities only when they work to the advantage of the least protected.
That is, let the CEO of a startup earn his millions if, thanks to his taxes and the jobs he creates, the janitor in the same startup will have normal health insurance and a decent life. Because behind the “veil of ignorance,” each of us understands: that janitor could very well be me.
It turns out an interesting thing. Justice is not born of high morality or some innate goodness. It is born of ignorance and a completely healthy egoism.
Of course, in reality, there is no such thing as a curtain. We all know our starting positions very well and pull the blanket over ourselves. Life is not very fair, that's a fact. But sometimes, when I read the latest news about tax initiatives or social benefits, I wish the decision-makers would imagine, at least for five minutes, that they would wake up tomorrow morning as one of us. I think that would make the world a little more livable. At least more comfortable.
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