Social Justice

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. which

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 was 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.