New Country

When I was a student, I thought the idea of Utopia was the idea of and ideal place that we might strive for and even try to acheive in communitarial experiments. When I learned that it literally means no place, I realized that for many people an ideal culture represents something unacheivable, and even if you acheive it you are vulnerable to all sorts of straight-jacket orthodoxies. I suspect that is a straw-man from the cheer-leaders of the status quo. My ideal includes dignity for all, so I certainly wouldn't coun't any of those distopias as the ideal except in some empty (formal) form. The way we must ground our political ethics is through Rawles and his idea of the Original Position (OP). Generalized, this principle would be useful in almost every branch of philosophy. For example, how would you formulate an Anthropic Principle that is neutral on "what kind of intelligent being is asking the questions". Knowledge and experience are embodies and carry with them all the particulars of our radical individuality, but a political ethic needs to be neutral on the particulars. The distribution of particulars is a property of the collective. Rawles is pointing out that the duty of the citizen and the leader is to the entire collective, treating every individual with dignity. It is exactly the principle expressed in the maxim, "there but for the grace of God go I." as well as the Golden Rule.

New country names a thought experiment. What if your band of colonial explorers landed in a new world with a native ecosystem but no other people? What form of government would I want? Would I want any (anarchy)? All of us is everyone, there are no others, and any stratification we bring with us. This is a bit like the original position for a society as a whole. Such a society may not satisfy Rawles' principle that justice entails it being just for each individual and that justice is acheived only from the perspective of OP. Could I accept this if it were done to me or to my sister or children? If not, then I cannot accept a society that does it to anyone.

The purpose of the thought experiment is to transform an abstract consideration of rights and duties into a practical problem of Process Architecture. It must be a system designed to evolve as we deliver as much justice in practice as we know how to. We assume mistakes will be made and we will need to learn how to do better as individuals and collectively.