In his 2009 book Justice, Harvard Ethicist Michael Sandel looks at the evolution of moral philosophy from Aristotle to Rawls and uses their teachings in order to answer some of the hardest moral and ethical problems of the current day. What becomes abundantly clear, in the reading, is that these questions are difficult due to conflicting values that make resolutions hard, if not impossible, even if you are aware of the moral philosophies that are being drawn upon to defend or refute them. Aristotle has been dead for a long time. We’re not any closer to reaching a consensus on the ethical way to live. Sandel does a wonderful job in laying out the central ideas of several philosophers and tries his level best to give a fair and full account of each, even if, as a communitarian, Sandel has qualms with each of their ideas. One philosopher that Sandel doesn’t cover is Josiah Royce, though the two would have much common ground, ideologically speaking. The concept that Royce is best known for today is the Beloved Community, later popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Per his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Royce considered the notions of truth and knowledge unintelligible for the individual unless we posit an ultimate knower of objective truth, the infinite community of minds. The notions of personal identity and purpose are likewise unintelligible unless we posit a community of persons that defines causes and establishes social roles for those individuals to embrace. The concept of community is thus central both to Royce’s ethics and his metaphysics. Not just any association or collection of individuals is a community. Community can only exist where individual members are in communication with one another so that there is, to some extent and in some relevant respect, a congruence of feeling, thought, and will among them. It is also necessary to consider the temporal dimensions of community. “A community constituted by the fact that each of its members accepts as a part of his own individual life and self the same past events that each of his fellow-members accepts, may be called a community of memory.” … These common past and future events, which all members hold as identical parts of their own lives, are the basis of their loyalty to the community….Beyond the actual communities that we directly encounter in life there is the ideal “Beloved Community” of all those who would be fully dedicated to the cause of loyalty, truth and reality itself. Royce stressed that the sharing of individuals’ feelings, thoughts, and wills that occurs in any community (including the Beloved Community) should not be taken to imply a mystical blurring or annihilation of personal identities. Individuals remain individuals, but in forming a community they attain to a kind of second-order life that extends beyond any of their individual lives.” In an article from Religion Online entitled Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community, we see King’s definition of the term. “In 1957, writing in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he described the purpose and goal of that organization as follows: "The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living -- integration." And in his last book he declared: "Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation . . ." I believe that King meant the word loyalty in the Roycian sense – from Lectures on Royce by Matthew A. Foust, loyalty is defined as the “voluntary devotion of a self to a cause.” Many people have dedicated their lives to causes – I would argue that every non-profit that has ever existed was founded by someone willing to sacrifice time and effort (and often material reward) to change the world in a way more aligned to their ideal. The idea that there are people who would sublimate their own desires for the greater good, in my mind, isn’t controversial. The controversial nature, I believe, rises from the idea that a large number of people would choose to live in a community where this is the case. Before we move to the second half of the show, a word from our sponsor. The ideals of a Beloved Community require every member to have strong ties with every other member in the community. This is what Royce’s concept of loyalty requires. The maximum number in a single community would then be 150, based upon Dunbar’s Number. From Wikipedia, “Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.” In all likelihood, given the time requirements for truly deep and intimate personal relationship, this number may be over estimating the size of a community but let’s use the 150 for now. 150 people isn’t many. As seen in the Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country, in the mid-1980s, in Wasco County, Oregon, there was Rajneeshpuram, which Wikipedia described as, “a religious intentional community” which had roughly 7,000 residents. The community lasted 7 years before devolving after a series of criminal activities led to charges against the leadership of the community. The land was later sold to a life insurance company. There have been other failures of utopian communities over the years. Sometimes religious. Sometimes not. The failure of Biosphere 2, an experiment in the mid-1990s to understand a closed bio-system, also has a streaming documentary exploring its failures. Given the seemingly high rate of failure, it begs the question – is this ideal realistic, not just now but ever? Consider this thought experiment. Assume a society where we’ve eliminated material concern – Everything that you buy today, you have for free. This would eliminate much (but not all) social class strife that we’ve seen rise in the last forty or so years. In Sandel’s most recent book, The Tyranny of Merit, he notes that there is more to the resentment of, in his words, the losers of globalization than simply economic frustration. He writes, “It is not surprising that they are unhappy. But economic hardship is not the only source of their distress. The meritocratic age has also inflicted a more insidious injury on working people: eroding the dignity of work. By valorizing the ‘brains’ it takes to score well on college admission tests, the sorting machine disparages those without meritocratic credentials. It tells them that the work they do, less valued by the market than the work of well-paid professionals, is a lesser contribution to the common good, and so less worthy of social recognition and esteem. It legitimates the lavish rewards the market bestows on the winners and the meager pay it offers workers without a college degree. This way of thinking about who deserves what is not morally defensible.” It’s possible in a closed loop system the work that others do is more easily appreciated by those who would otherwise be blind to it. It’s also possible that work that is now considered less economically rewarding than, say, tech or finance – things like teaching, home health care workers, as just two examples – would be more appreciated in a world where material concern has been eliminated (and one where technology can not easily replace care workers). However, even in a world where work is more appreciated (and, in this thought experiment, material concerns have been met), there would still be divisions. In a recent article in New York Magazine, the writer Grazie Sophia Christie talks about meeting her husband at Harvard and choosing to marry him when she was relatively young – she was 24. This article caused a backlash. Per NBC News, “people who commented on Christie’s essay called it “an insult to women of any age,” “a sad piece of writing,” and “pitiful in so many ways.” Some readers wondered if the article was a satire or a joke. One of the kinder comments on New York magazine’s website said: “This is one of the most embarrassing things I have ever read. I am truly mortified for the writer.” This is a lot of uproar for a 24-year-old woman marrying a 34-year-old man. Do we think that in a Beloved Community, which is centered around interconnectedness that these attitudes would wither away and die? Or the opposite, to harden and create a shunning society where difference of opinion is frowned upon? Admittedly, the Beloved Community is theoretical – there has not been a lasting community that has lived up to its (lofty) ideals and ambitions but the impulses behind it are clear. From Yes! Magazine, “Utopia-making emerges in force especially during times of economic and social precarity—after wars, depressions, natural disasters, sexual revolutions. And when a utopia issues from a Christian framework or tradition—whether during the Second Great Awakening, or today in liberationist or fundamentalist communities alike—it almost unilaterally grounds the understanding of that divinely pure or sanctified life as something that takes place only by a life lived in community. Almost always, Christian or not, the American utopia vanquishes the nuclear family, the blood tie, the marriage, often sex, so that we are only, all of us, strangers and pilgrims together on the same path.” Writing for Vanity Fair, in an article entitled, “’California Forever’, the Billionaire-Backed City No One Asked For,” Jon Skolnik writes, in reference to California Forever’s founder, Jan Sramek, “though unprecedented as it may seem, Sramek’s proposal for a new city is far from the first of its kind. Back in 2008, Peter Thiel cofounded the Seasteading Institute, which aims to construct a crypto-loving, tax-hating town off the coast of French Polynesia, where it would float on seaborne platforms that call to mind renderings of the lost Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. In a similar vein, billionaire Marc Lore is pursuing the proposed community of Telosa, envisioning a 240-square-mile metropolis that would shine as a beacon of “reformed” capitalism, complete with autonomous EVs, high-speed transit, solar roofing, and a massive skyscraper. Remarkably, Lore and Thiel’s are just a few among the many proposed techno-utopias that have surfaced; others in the mix include Spectra, Neom, Praxis, and Painted Rock. The notion of master-planning the platonic ideal of a city has, as The New York Times reports, “been bouncing around the meetings and salon parties of Silicon Valley’s tech elite for years.” It’s easy to sit and laugh at the hubris of tech billionaires and hope for the inevitable failure of their folly. However, what they are doing, in some twisted way, is trying to answer a basic question – what is the ethical response to a world that appears to be crumbling? Another question, perhaps more important, arises from the answer to the first: how do we live with people who are different from us, with values that we may not agree with. The Top Down Utopia where the ultra-rich set rules that everyone with less money has to endure, is not likely to bring about the Good Life for most. The alternative would be something akin to the before mentioned Beloved Community where a community is formed organically by like-minded people. The Beloved Community has been, historically, much more likely to be aligned with religious communities than with tech billionaires. Nevertheless, there is an impulse in both to find a utopia – a perfect place, where everyone loves everyone else and peace, justice, and harmony reign supreme. Setting aside the practicality of creating a Beloved Community, and assuming material concerns are not primary due to either a shared agreement on the minimal resources needed for contentment or the advancement of technology to make material concerns less potent, why would humans choose to live this way? An individual’s sense of belonging is in short supply in modern society, especially in wealthy countries. We are seeing a rise in loneliness and health issues associated with it. People are becoming further and further enmeshed with technology, technology which is increasingly dismissive of attempts to alleviate real human suffering in favor of removing rent seekers and reaping the profits by doing so. As an example, Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist active in the tech space, recently wrote a book entitled “Read Write Own”. It is, for all intents and purposes, a 200-page brochure for the wonders of the blockchain technology. He laments that the technology, which was once thought of as being revolutionary, has faded in luster when compared to augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. His main complaint seems to be that entrenched Big Tech has monopolized profits for themselves at the expense of content creators and users of their platforms. The solution to this problem (is it a problem?) is blockchain which will put the power back into the hands of creators by reducing take rates and allowing for a broader group of voices (Dixon claims). There is nothing about the technology he describes that solves a real problem – by real meaning, a need that is not being met by other forces. Certainly, a world where people are able to remit money more cheaply is a better world or where one can make more off of their stupid cat videos BUT given the time and space and money already invested in this technology, it is shocking to me that the greatest accomplishment of Blockchain technology may be, ultimately, increasing skepticism of those, like Sam Bankman-Fried, who claim to be Effective Altruists. Sandel sees the Sam Bankman-Frieds and Chris Dixons of the world as great ills created by the meritocracy, though he puts as much blame on politicians in his book as he does on the CEOs for the winner-take-all mentality we have seen on the rise over the last four decades. The appeal to the average person – those unlikely to make millions of dollars moving balls through hoops or digital ones and zeroes through cyberspace – of a system where there are stricter societal and economic limits on inequality is self-evident. A beloved community would also allow for much deeper bonds than would alleviate the earlier mentioned problems of loneliness and perceived worth. I ask again, however, if people would want to actually live in this system. In modern American society, it’s debatable if there is a single consistent theory of distributive justice that drives our laws and policies. I will examine this more deeply in my next episode by comparing and contrasting four popular approaches to distributive justice as they apply to a single hypothetical. For the sake of this episode, let’s just take one approach, one that Sandel has written extensively on: Liberal Egalitarianism, as exemplified by John Rawls, one of the most famous American philosophers of the 20th century. From a paper by Bernard Matolino entitled “Defending Rawls on the Self: A Response to the Communitarian Critique,” Matolino writes that, “Rawls argues that all goods are secured in the agreement that is reached by individuals in democratic societies. He says in arriving at this agreement disputed philosophical, moral, and religious claims are avoided. These disputed questions are avoided not because they are seen as unimportant, but because they are of a far greater importance; there is no way… they could be resolved politically. Essentially, this means that Rawls has limited his conception of justice as fairness to a purely political consideration.” One of Rawls’ greatest contributions is his Difference Principle which could be summarized thusly – In a capitalistic system where every prejudice and bias has been removed (racism, sexism, ageism, etc), income inequality is allowed only when the income inequality allows for the least advantaged (read: poorest) to be better off than they otherwise would be. Sandel’s 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit is not aimed at ending income inequality. Instead, he takes aim at meritocratic thinking and systems that have led to an acceptance of grossly uneven levels of income and wealth distribution, both in the United States and countries around the world. In order to correct this imbalance, he proposes something that would be along the lines of a Beloved Community – a deliberative discussion of the value that certain jobs bring to society and their corresponding compensation. For instance, teaching has, historically, been seen as a job that is high in status but low in monetary compensation. Sandel believes that this process would lead to a more equitable distribution of compensation. Sandel’s vision of reaching a more just, less meritocratic society, relies on reaching a consensus (or something close to it); he believes that a deliberate process will lead to a society-wide agreement on the just rewards for each occupation. Admittedly, this is truer the more self-selective a group is – if you begin with a group that is prone towards cooperation and understanding, say a group of kindergarten teachers, they will likely be able to come to a consensus much easier than, say, a group of wall street bond traders. There in lies the rub, the world is made up of both wall street bond traders and kindergarten teachers. Casino Owners and social workers. Basketball players and nuns. Per a 2023 article from Pew Research, “about four-in-ten workers (39%) say their job or career is extremely or very important to their overall identity.” With such a high percentage of people identifying with their jobs, how would disagreements over which roles determine higher status and / or compensation be handled, realistically? For instance, what should the delta be between a home healthcare worker and a high school science teacher be? In his book, Sandel uses the example of a casino owner as someone who is grossly overpaid given the benefit gambling brings to society. Is this the correct way to look at how people are rewarded? Maybe a case by case examination of compensation works in a group of 150 people who have chosen to live together, sharing much deeper in the ebbs and flows of communal live. However, I feel comfortable saying that this is unlikely to scale to our current ideas of towns, cities, states, and nations. Would we, as a society, forbid certain roles because they inherently lead to less equality? What about jobs that require mass amounts of education? Would we eliminate these roles or simply reduce the compensation for them in a wage cap like system? If we did this, what would motivate anyone to be a doctor or lawyer? Would status alone be enough? For some people perhaps. For most people, I’d argue, not. What is status anyway? How do we define it? What does it look like? In addition, Sandel identifies 3 obligations in Justice: Natural Duties, Voluntary Obligations, & Obligations of Solidarity or membership. Sandel writes, in Justice, that natural duties, “include the duty to treat persons with respect, to do justice, to avoid cruelty, and so on.” These are, at times, broad and fuzzy but I believe that most people would not have difficulty agreeing that these are traits we would like to see in our fellow citizens. Voluntary obligations – those we consent to – would, likewise, not be outside the normal, modern understanding of obligation. It’s the third category, however, that Sandel would have the hardest time, in my opinion, of convincing the average person, someone used to a more individualistic system of living, of taking up. Obligations of solidarity are those that individual members of a group owe due to being identified members of a group. An example that Sandel uses in Justice is obligations to family members or obligations that may arise from national identity. While obligations to family are well established in society, obligations to group affinities are much less universally accepted. To give just one example, a few years ago, undergraduate students at Georgetown voted to provide special accommodations for any potential students whose ancestors were sold to help pay off debt that the school owed creditors. What’s important isn’t that the measure passed but the degree to which there was resistance - 1/3rd of students voted against this measure. It’s dangerous to extrapolate too much from one example but it’s illustrative to use when considering the difficulties of achieving consensus when debating continuous issues. Georgetown is a private school and its students tend to come from wealth - the tuition in 2022 was over 60K a year. Is it more likely or less likely than a less affluent group of people would find it hard to acknowledge harms done in the past, especially if they were required to make monetary amends to redress them? The Difference Principle does not recognize group obligations and Rawls, in sidestepping this issue, allows for a system that, while inherently unfair, doesn’t have to answer these deeper, thornier question like group debts and obligations. It is a system based around compromise. Ultimately, I think a realistic society is one where compromise, not consensus, carries the day. Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.