Difference between revisions of "Social Justice"

Latest revision as of 16:21, 6 July 2025

Full Title or Meme

Social Justice needs to be more than some abstract philosophy, it must inform all laws, regulations and standards of behavior in both the real and the digital worlds.

Context

• One primary context for this paper is John Rawls' Theory of Social Justice.^[1] where justice is comprised two main principles of liberty and equality; the second is subdivided into fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle. A fair ecosystem not only creates rights, but also obligations on each Entity in the Ecosystem.
• "It will be recalled that the general conception of justice as fairness required that all primary social good be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution would be to everyone's advantage. ... Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group of society."^[2]

Problems

New Technologies

Billionaire tech CEOs love to tell us AI will cure diseases, end poverty, and combat climate change; as if they’ve ever cared about any of these issues before.

They run the companies that fight against labor unions, hoard personal data, and commodify our attention for profit. Their track record isn’t one of solving societal problems; it’s one of exploiting them.

If AI was going to solve all our problems, it would have to exist in an entirely different economic system. These utopian “AI will save us” visions will never materialize in our current profit-driven societies.

We’ve seen this before.

• Uber claimed to revolutionize transportation but is exploiting drivers.
• Airbnb promised community-driven travel but is actively worsening local housing crises.
• Social media was supposed to connect us, but it’s fueled polarization and surveillance capitalism.

If AI were truly designed to serve humanity, it wouldn’t be owned by trillion-dollar corporations. It wouldn’t be trained on stolen labor, copyrighted works, and unpaid human effort. And it wouldn’t be deployed in ways that maximize profit at the expense of workers, artists, and even the environment.

Imagine if AI was developed under an entirely different economic system—one built around human needs instead of corporate profit. That’s the real conversation we should be having.

So the question isn’t just what can AI do? But who controls it?

Solutions

From a political perspective this theory can seen as a way of resolving a major political schism of our time, one which separates the libertarian right from the egalitarian left. It reconciles the idea of both individual freedom and a fair distribution of wealth. It insists on supporting both the Kantian foundation of the right of individual as well as the utilitarian insistence on means-end calculations. See also the wiki pages on Social Contract as well as the Utility Function.

The Veil of Ignorance

Rawls posits that under a Veil of Ignorance the rational choice would be his principle versus a Utility Function of any other principle. Any economic policy must be made without any consideration of the risks or advantages that will be faced by any group that are effected by the policy as though every one impacted by the policy is ignorant of what their own situation will be when the policy goes into effect.

Justice as Fairness

"Justice as Fairness" is a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise Political Liberalism (1993). As Rawls writes in the preface, the restatement presents "in one place an account of justice as fairness as I now see it, drawing on all [my previous] works." He offers a broad overview of his main lines of thought and also explores specific issues never before addressed in any of his writings. This book still relies on the idea that the citizen can be modeled as making rational choices. As the section following describes, this is not a realistic model of a voter, even in a "free" democracy.

The two principles of "Justice as Fairness"

1. “Each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with similar liberties for others.”
2. “Inequalities are permissible only if they improve the situation of those who are worst off.” The two parts:
   1. Fair Equality of Opportunity: Positions and offices must be open to all under conditions of genuine equality, not just formal equality. This means addressing structural barriers like class, race, or gender.
   2. The Difference Principle: Social and economic inequalities are only just if they benefit the least advantaged members of society. This is not trickle-down economics—it’s a maximin strategy: maximize the minimum position.

Rawls is well aware that since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, American society has moved farther away from the idea of justice as fairness. Yet his ideas retain their power and relevance to debates in a pluralistic society about the meaning and theoretical viability of liberalism.^[3]

Rational Choice

It should be clear in light of elections held in the 21st century that rational choice is not producing the desired result.^[4]

What Rational Choice Theory Assumes

1. Voters are self-interested, utility-maximizing agents.
2. They make decisions by weighing costs and benefits.
3. Political outcomes are the aggregate result of rational individual choices.

This model has been dominant in political science since the mid-20th century, especially through the work of Anthony Downs, William Riker, and John Rawls.

Where It Breaks Down in the 21st Century

1. Empirical Failures
   1. Low voter turnout contradicts rational choice predictions: if voting is costly and the impact of one vote is negligible, rational actors shouldn’t vote—yet many do.
   2. Emotional, identity-based, and tribal voting often overrides policy preferences or self-interest.
   3. Disinformation and cognitive biases distort the information environment, undermining the assumption of informed rationality.
2. Cultural and Institutional Blind Spots
   1. Rational choice theory often ignores history, culture, and emotion, which are central to real-world political behavior.
   2. It struggles to explain populist movements, authoritarian backsliding, and irrational policy preferences that have emerged in democracies worldwide.
3. Critiques from Within the Field
   1. Scholars like Herbert Simon and Charles Lindblom introduced concepts like bounded rationality and incrementalism, arguing that real-world decision-making is constrained, heuristic, and often non-optimal.
   2. Others argue that rational choice theory mathematizes the obvious and fails to predict meaningful outcomes.

Bounded Rationality

Herbert A. Simon went on to argue that profit maximization cannot be accomplished, in part, because of the lack of complete information. In decision-making, he believed that agents face uncertainty about the future and costs in acquiring information in the present. These factors limit the extent to which agents may make a fully rational decision, thus they possess only "bounded rationality" and must make decisions by "satisficing", or choosing that which might not be optimal, but which will make them happy enough. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the process of decision-making influences the decision itself. The term is used to designate rational choices that take into account the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity.^[5]

References

1. ↑ H. G. Blocker, E. H. Smith (eds) John Rawls' Theory of Social Justice 1980 Ohio UP ISBN 0821404458
2. ↑ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice 1971 ISBN 978-0674000780
3. ↑ John Rawls, Justice as Fairness §26 2001 ISBN 9780674005112
4. ↑ Mark P. Petracca, The Rational Choice Approach to Politics: A Challenge to Democratic Theory https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/rational-choice-approach-to-politics-a-challenge-to-democratic-theory/C3B9AB9F66FA4D36912F07D408DEA198
5. ↑ Herbert A. Simon, Bounded Rationality In Eatwell, John; Milgate, Murray; Newman, Peter (eds.). Utility and Probability. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. (1990) pp. 15–18. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-20568-4_5. ISBN 978-0-333-49541-4.