Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

pass along!

What happens when you prioritize money and economic growth above all other social, moral, and political considerations? Look around. This is the world neoliberalism created—unbounded greed, delusional faith in “markets,” rampant inequality, political incivility, environmental destruction, and widespread psychopathology. After 40 years of failed “trickle-down economics” based on the shoddy philosophy of Hayek, Freidman, and Nozick, it’s about time for a new plan and a new direction.Luckily for us, we already possess the intellectual foundations for a better society, developed by the twentieth century’s greatest political theorist—John Rawls.In this urgent political manifesto, Daniel Chandler describes and defends Rawls’s theory of justice and outlines its practical implications. The result is a vision for society that transcends the culture wars and reestablishes core values in society that cannot simply be reduced to the maximization of profits.The core ideas of Rawlsian philosophy are simple enough. Society should be, above all, fair—the kind of society you would agree is fair if you didn’t know what position you’d hold in that society ahead of time. It’s the world you would want to live in regardless of whether you were born rich or poor, black or white, male or female, gay or straight. It is, essentially, a society where you would be best off if you happened to be born into the least advantaged position financially, intellectually, or socially. It’s a society that tolerates inequality (in contrast to Communism), but only insofar as it improves the standards of living for the least advantaged.The key idea for Rawls is that in a pluralistic society, we shouldn’t expect to agree on much. We each have our own religions (or no religion) and various ideas about how to live a good life. We therefore can’t base our society on specific religious or philosophical viewpoints because we should never expect these to attain universal assent. Instead, our political institutions should establish and protect basic liberties (that we can all more or less agree on) that allow us to pursue these different goals according to the dictates of our own conscience. And it should establish and promote an equality of opportunity for everyone to do so—not, as is currently the case, an opportunity for the rich to simply get even richer. For Rawls, crucially, economic rights—to own unlimited amounts of property and to exploit others in the process—do not trump all other rights.Chandler not only does a terrific job of explicating the theory and defending it from criticism from both the left and right, but also advances the thought of Rawls by showing us what its practical implications might look like—something Rawls never did, which probably explains why his ideas are not more politically actionable. This book is hopefully, for the sake of all of us, a remedy for this shortcoming.

I had long thought that, as a white middle-class male, Rawls did not pay sufficient attention to questions of race, class and gender. Chandler has done us all a favour by showing how the machinery of the Original Position can be put to work to make out a reform programme that also takes in a good deal of what is awry wiith capitalism in its present form and that might even mitigate the ecological disaster we are facing. Though it is only June, this sure to be my Book of the Year.

My son-in-law loves to read and I make it a point to find books with interesting subjects for his perusal.

I approached this book with some trepidation, it's a chunky volume on a quite complicated subject. It examines the work of John Rawls and his Theory of Justice. However once into it it was a bit of a page turner, certainly one of the better books I have read on this subject. You don't need to have read John Rawls to gain anything from it, in fact you can come into it quite 'cold' and still get a lot out of it.