Ideas - How a nation could be both free and equal

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Freedom and Equality — can societies aim for both at the same time? Author Daniel Chandler argues that they can, with some help from the American political theorist, John Rawls. He tells IDEAS what a political platform based on Rawls’ books would look like.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. The free world. If that term means anything today, it refers to countries with liberal democratic governments, places where journalists are free to report the truth, where citizens are free to think and explore new thoughts, where we figure out for ourselves what to believe using the freely available

information from those freely operating journalists, as well as authors and scholars, and government officials, freely elected and accountable. Freedom means moving about freely in public spaces, choosing a career to pursue. And all of this freedom is the greatest boast of liberal democracies, more important to national self-respect than any triumphs over the enemy, more vital to our country's existence than GDP or the standard of living among the poorest citizens. We should tolerate a degree of inequality in society, but only where those inequalities ultimately benefit everyone.

Equality is the other side of the coin. The dream of a just and fair world, where the strong are prevented from trampling on the weak, where might does not make right. This dream has motivated communists, socialists, and John Rawls, a leading American political philosopher of the 20th century. It has been common to think that you have to choose between these two values, and I think that intuitively most of us think that can't be right.

This is not John Rawls, but Daniel Chandler, economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics, former policy advisor in the British Cabinet Office under Prime Minister David Cameron, former student of the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen. But most importantly, for our purposes, he's among John Rawls' greatest fans. What I wanted to do with this book, Free and Equal, was to write something that was really focused on solutions and Rawls is really my inspiration for doing that.

Rawls is a fundamentally hopeful and constructive philosopher. Rawls is a fundamentally hopeful and constructive philosopher. Chandler wants us to see what he sees in John Rawls' philosophy, a guide to building what we've so far failed to create, a society where freedom and equality truly thrive alongside each other. Daniel Chandler spoke with me from the CBC studio in London, England. Are you able to give me a sketch of the sort of person who could use a little bit of knowledge about John Rawls? What are they worried about? What's their mood? I think it's people who are worried about the state of democracy and capitalism today.

So people who are worried about the role of money in politics, rising inequality, poverty, climate crisis, ecological crisis. You know, I guess there's a long list of things for people to be worried about today. But I think rules is for people who are worried, but who also feel like there must be a better way of doing things. And they're not quite sure what that is. I think that's one of the kind of intriguing and distinctive features of the political moment that we find ourselves in, is that, you know, it's easy to point to that long list of problems, roughly along the line of what I just described, and which worry lots of people, but surprisingly difficult to point to a coherent vision of what a better, fairer society would actually look like. And that's where I was when I started thinking about

writing this book back in, I guess, kind of 2018, 2019. It was post Brexit in the UK, Trump in America. And I was reading all sorts of books about the crisis of liberal democracy and was struck by how those books were almost exclusively diagnostic. There were books about how and why we've ended up into this very worrying situation, but mostly lacked solutions or solutions often kind of packed into a final chapter. And I think often don't feel like they really match the scale of the challenges that we face. I adore the idea of focusing on solutions rather than the problem. But I do want to dwell on the symptoms a little bit longer. I love the idea that there is a post worry state, which you appear to be in.

But can you? Well, I don't know. Yeah. I think I'm still worried. Yeah. Go on. What are the symptoms of a pre-Rawleyan state that we're in? Like when we're worried about the state of liberal democracy and the way we organize ourselves in our societies, what are the symptoms? I think it's anxiety, possibly a feeling of despair and a feeling that it's somehow become impossible to have a reasonable conversation, that the conversation across political lines has become much more difficult, that political debate more broadly seems trapped within quite narrow confines, that it's become more difficult to think about genuinely different ways of doing things rather than just tweaks to the status quo.

So I think it's those, it's feelings of worry, anxiety, verging on despair, you know, I think which would be reasonable reactions to the state of our politics and society today in Canada, and I think across many of the world's rich democracies. So you've just described how we all feel. In this moment, it's a it's a great description. I want to slowly enter the world of Rawls and take it one step at a time. So I want to first ask you the idea, you know, freedom and equality. We like, of course, the sound of both, but they're often felt to be in conflict. What's the hard problem at the heart of trying to bring together those two things? Yeah, I think, you know, that problem or the idea that there is a tension between freedom and

equality is something that goes very far back. It's right at the heart of the sort of democratic and liberal tradition of political thought. People have been grappling with the challenge of how to balance these two very important values for a very long time. And I think pre-rules, both in philosophy and in politics, and I think probably the same is true in politics still today, people have tended to divide themselves into one camp or the other. So you had a classical liberal or libertarian tradition that's tended to prioritise freedom above everything else and has been willing to

prioritize freedom at the expense of tackling inequality or alleviating poverty. And then on the other hand, you have a socialist tradition, which I think is often seen as having prioritized equality at the expense of freedom, particularly in the kind of authoritarian communist and socialist societies that we saw during much of the 20th century. So I think that both in philosophy and politics, it has been common to think that you have to choose between these two values. And I think that intuitively, most of us think that can't be right. It's counterintuitive. Right. It's sort of people realize it doesn't take very long to think that both of these values are necessary.

And when you sort of pick a bit closer, I think, into those traditions, too, when push comes to shove, classical liberals also recognize that some degree of equality is important. Many socialists are democratic socialists and advocate some kind of notion of freedom. socialists and advocate some kind of notion of freedom. And I think what Rawls' great philosophical achievement was to put forward a synthesis of these two values that really worked, that was seen to be genuinely coherent in a way that hadn't been true of previous political thinkers. He did that by moving us beyond this very abstract idea of a tension between freedom and equality in the most abstract sense towards two principles that are really at the heart of Rawls' theory, these two principles of justice, the first of which he called the basic liberties principle, and that basically sets out a list of the most important liberties,

the truly fundamental freedoms that should take priority over everything else. And then the second equality principle that spells out exactly what kind of equality and how much equality we should be aiming for as a society. And those two principles, you know, they're really where Rawls's theory, I guess, moved from being philosophically interesting to useful. They're like this toolkit that each of us can use to think through a really enormous range of questions that animate our political debate, from questions about free speech to how we should fund political parties, what we should do with the school system if we want real equality of opportunity, how we could think about the future of capitalism. But yeah, I think the thing that Rawls does to move us forward in this

age-old tension and debate between freedom and equality is to spell out a list of the freedoms that really are fundamental and a precise account of how much equality we should be aiming for. And to do that in a way that then allows us to take on more specific questions that come up in our political debate. I feel like I'll probably need to spell out the principles soon. Otherwise, I'll be at risk of sounding impossibly abstract in a way that I think Rawls isn't. And we're trying to parse this conversation in a precise way. But at the risk of doing that, I do want to just reiterate maybe a clearer version of my question, which is, I'm trying to get a sense of just how big a deal it is what Rawls did to get past the hard problem between the tension between freedom and equality. What is it that prevented those two things from

existing at the same time? That's a great question. I'm not sure. In terms of giving a measure of the significance of Rawls' achievement, I think the best thing to look at is just the response to his ideas within academic political philosophy. So Rawls is widely considered to be one of, if not the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. This is someone who's routinely compared to the greatest thinkers in the history of Western thought, people like Plato, Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill. To me, that's the gauge that he really achieved something that was of historical significance is the response of other philosophers and the way in which his ideas have gone on to shape contemporary political philosophy in a really very, very profound, and I think very helpful and constructive way. Great. So ignorance isn't generally considered a positive quality,

but it plays an important role in his thinking. What is the veil of ignorance? And how do you use it? Yeah. So yeah, you know, the heart of Rawls's theory is this idea that society should be fair, which on its face sounds kind of obvious, and you quickly realize that different people disagree about exactly what fairness means. And Rawls put forward a thought experiment that he thought could help us move from the abstract idea of fairness towards a more concrete articulation of some principles that we could use to organize society. And that thought experiment, he called it the original position. The idea was that if we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organize it

if we didn't know what our individual position in that society would be. So as your question indicated, as if we were ignorant of our, you know, whether we would be rich or poor or gay or straight, black, white, Muslim, Christian, the whole variety of individual characteristics that we actually have in society. So his idea was that we should, if we imagine that we didn't know what our position would be, we might come up with a way of organizing society that would be fair to everyone. So the purpose of this hypothetical ignorance in Rawls' thought experiment is to encourage us to put ourselves in other people's shoes, to come up with a set of principles that could be justified to everybody. In a sense, that thought experiment

is a secular interpretation of the golden rule, this idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you that's, you know, that's found in almost every major religious and cultural tradition. So I think on the one hand, it can sound like, well, I think it's actually a very intuitive thought experiment. But I think it's sometimes presented as this kind of academic curiosity. But it also is a thought experiment that I think has very deep roots in the public culture of lots of different societies. And that's, I think, part of why so many people have found it such a appealing way of thinking. You say it's an interpretation of do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Is there any

difference at all between those two things? Yes, I think the difference is that I think traditionally that golden rule has been interpreted more at the level of how we should treat others as individuals. So it's more a question of individual morality and ethics. How should you treat your your neighbors or your family members? What Rawls is interested in, though, is obviously he realizes that those are very important questions, but his is a philosophy aimed at politics. It's a political philosophy. So for him, the question is more, how should we design the basic institutions of a democratic society in a way that can be justified to other people?

That shift of focus from individual behavior, the justice of individual behavior towards the justice of institutions. That was also another very important innovation that Rawls brought to particularly to liberal political philosophy. I think the socialist tradition had, for a much longer time had a focus on the justice of institutions or the injustices of capitalist institutions. And liberals had tended to focus more on individual behavior. Rawls brought that focus on the justice of institutions right to the heart of the liberal tradition. And I think that's what makes it useful for thinking about politics, basically. I'm curious about the thought experiment and its role, its imagined role in our lives. Is

it something that we're to hold in our minds at all times? Or is this something that happens at a particular moment in designing what we do and how we live? How do you envision it? It's not that we should be, we don't need to invoke that thought experiment at every moment. It's something I think that's particularly helpful when we are, either when we find ourselves conflicted about a particular question. Part of what I like about Rawls's philosophy is that it acknowledges that political questions are difficult, that they're complicated, and sometimes we're not sure what we think ourselves.

And partly the thought experiment is a device for helping us work out what we think. But it's also meant to help us when we're having discussions with other people, when we find ourselves talking to people who have different political views that we might struggle to understand or feel that we really disagree with.

It's meant to be a way for helping both parties in a conversation where people disagree, step back and find some kind of common ground. And, you know, as we've indicated, sort of alluded to before, what Rawls does is use this thought experiment to identify or to justify his two principles of justice, this freedom principle and this equality principle. And I think, you know, the idea is that once you've, you know, you do the experiment, the thought experiment, you identify these guiding principles. And then when it comes to most political questions, you can refer to the principles to work out what you think about a specific issue.

Given all of this and what you know, of course, about Rawls, where would you put John Rawls on a conventional political spectrum from left to right? Rawls on a conventional political spectrum from left to right? I would put Rawls down as a, I guess, a left liberal. Unfortunately, I don't know. I think I don't know enough about Canadian politics to give a good Canadian example. My mind is going to American examples. And I think we know those well. The two politicians who I think both best reflect Rawls' thinking would be Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren. Barack Obama was studied at Harvard when Rawls was there. Quite a bit has been written about how Rawls influenced his thinking. Obama really went to some lengths to make it clear that America should be a place where people with radically different ideas about how they want to live, what religion they believe in, should be able to live side by side in a spirit of mutual respect. And I think that spirit of pluralism and a commitment to reasonableness is something that really infuses Obama's rhetoric and approach to politics in a way that I think many of us probably wish that we could

get back to right now. Obama really reflects Rawls' liberalism, his commitment to a tolerant and pluralistic society. The reason I mention Elizabeth Warren is that I think Elizabeth Warren had a critique of contemporary capitalism that was very powerful. I think she was committed to quite substantial reforms to America's economic model, whether that was reforms to corporate governance, she was very in favor of a much more equal division of power between workers and owners. She also made strong arguments for a wealth tax. But she was clear that those, although those were quite radical policy proposals, given the context of contemporary American politics, and they would be quite radical ideas in many other liberal democracies, too.

There are also ideas that are consistent with liberal principles and which are trying not to abolish markets or abandon capitalism, but to reimagine capitalism in a way that would harness the benefits of markets in a way that would harness the benefits of markets in a way that would be beneficial to everyone. And so that those benefits would be much more widely shared. So I think those, yeah, that those those two politicians capture two of the aspects of rules is thinking that I think are so needed right now, and which we can really benefit. Interesting, you mentioned two fairly mainstream names in modern politics because I wonder why Rawls' ideas, if he was a contemporary or alive when Obama was studying, why his ideas aren't more widespread? Yeah it was interesting

just as you were saying that I realized that I think both Obama and Elizabeth Warren came from Harvard so it may be that they just had a particular exposure to his ideas and I think both Obama and Elizabeth Warren came from Harvard. So it may be that they just had a particular exposure to his ideas. And I think, you know, it's interesting thinking about Rawls' influence outside of academia. Within academia, he's been, you know, just enormously influential. I think it's almost impossible to overstate the influence that he's had within academia. And that does mean that his ideas have influenced many people who have gone into politics because lots of people who've gone into politics have studied in elite universities have studied political philosophy or economics where Rawls's

ideas might have come up so you know on the one hand there is I think there's a kind of subtle influence that his ideas may have had through being a part of the education of many of the people who've gone on to lead rich liberal democracies. But his ideas don't have much recognition in the wider public debate. You know, this Rawls is not a household name. And I think that's a kind of intriguing thing about Rawls, this gap between his almost unrivaled stature within academia and the almost total lack of awareness of his ideas outside. And, you know, I think there are a few reasons for that. I think it's partly Rawls' personality. Rawls was a very shy man. He had quite a severe stutter and he hated public speaking and really never, never wanted to play the role of public intellectual.

He very rarely accepted any interviews. He didn't really write things that commented on topical political questions. So this is someone who really did not want to put themselves in the public limelight in contrast to some of his more well-known contemporaries like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who were, you know, very vocal and prominent in politics, advocating for a completely different set of ideas that I think ended up pulling America and other countries in a very different direction. So I think one thing is Rawls' personality. The second is the political climate around Rawls. I think that, as I just alluded to, just as Rawls' ideas were coming to dominate

academic political philosophy in the 70s and 80s, real politics was moving in the other direction. This is the era of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and those were thinkers who were looking to Hayek and Milton Friedman and drawing on a quite harsh and individualistic account of liberalism, which was very, you know, really at odds with Rawls' philosophy in many ways, but came to dominate politics in a way that didn't leave much space for Rawls' ideas.

So I think personality, political climate. And then the third thing is that Rawls really didn't say very much about what it would look like to put his ideas into practice. You know, he was really a philosopher's philosopher and he focused on setting out the principles and the thought experiment that he used to justify the principles,

responding to all of the different critiques that were thrown at him by different academics. But he hoped, I think, that social scientists, that the people outside the philosophy would pick up his ideas and really think through how we might put them into practice. And unfortunately, I think that hasn't really happened, partly because of the way in which academia has become much more siloed, that there's much less conversation across disciplines. And, you know, the purpose of my book really is to try to pick up where Rawls

left off. And I'm trained both as a political philosopher, as well as an economist. And, you know, I suppose part of my broader mission is to try to bring those disciplines closer together. And the aim of the book is not just to discuss Rawls's ideas as an interesting artifact of political philosophy, but to use them to think through a practical agenda that would actually change our democratic and economic institutions for the better. So you're the Rawlsian ambassador he was waiting for. I hope so. I hope he would be pleased with what I'm doing with his ideas.

His ideas. I wonder if you could provide an example of a really radical policy that you believe would follow from Rawls's ideas. I wonder if you could provide an example of a really radical policy that you believe would follow from Rawls' ideas. Is there something like truly radical? Yeah, I think there are quite a lot of radical ideas, actually, that follow from Rawls' philosophy. What's the most radical? Which is now I'm struggling to sort of rank them. I'm going to name a few. Maybe you can tell me which you think is most radical.

So one would be, or maybe this will be take me too long into describing each one. But one, I think, pretty radical idea would be a complete change to the way that we fund political parties. So I think that if we were to follow Rawls's principle, his first principle includes a commitment to equal political liberties, to the idea that everyone should have a roughly equal chance to participate in and influence the political process. And I think if we take that principle seriously, the first thing that we would do would be to put a very low cap on private donations to political parties. I'm actually not completely sure what the system exists in Canada is today. In lots of countries, parties primarily rely on private donations for their funding.

And what that means is that funding is massively skewed towards a rich and largely unrepresentative class of political donors. So I think what would follow from Rawls's ideas is first, a very low cap on political donations, I'd say in the sort of low hundreds of dollars or pounds. And then, you know, obviously politics still requires money. Political parties serve a really important function in democratic society. They need to develop ideas and to have resources to campaign. And what we would need is some form of public funding.

And the idea that I put forward in my book is what's known as a democracy voucher system, where every citizen will be given an equal amount of money per year or per election cycle that they could donate to the party of their choice. And you know, that's a reform that would follows in a very immediate and direct way from the basic democratic idea of political equality. It's very radical. It's pretty radical. And I think it would completely transform the incentives of our political system. It would mean that political parties would have to appeal, have an incentive

to appeal equally to everyone in society, and everyone would have an equal amount of resources with which to respond to those parties rather than parties going sort of cap in hand to a donor class that is not representative of the values and beliefs and interests of the wider population. You're listening to Ideas. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Nala Ayyad. my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best

in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Daniel Chandler wants to put theory into practice. Specifically, the theory of American philosopher John Rawls, who died in 2002. As for the practice, it's Chandler's mission to propose radical policies for a free and equal society based on Rawls' principles. Ideas that, as Daniel Chandler puts it, match the scale of the challenges we face. Enough with diagnosing what's wrong. Chandler wants to push us past that. His challenge to us is to decide for ourselves which vision of society is truly reasonable, assuming we are among those committed to both

freedom and equality at the same time. Particularly when it comes to questions about reforming the political system, where almost by definition, the politicians who are in power tend to benefit from the system as it is. That leads to quite perverse incentives and makes it very difficult to change things. So I think particularly in that context, it's helpful to come up with other mechanisms like citizens assemblies, which can lead to different outcomes. And those are not radical, because those are being tried and have been tried successfully in places like Ireland. Canada led the way, I think, in the sort of modern use of citizens assemblies. I think there was a British Columbia had a citizens assembly on electoral

reform in 2004. And that really started this modern interest in new forms of deliberative democracy. And we've now had, you know, 20 years or so of really interesting and fruitful experimentation with these new forms of deliberative democracy and citizens assembly. And the time has come to try to think about how to move these things from being interesting experiments on the fringes of our democratic structures to incorporating them into the core of how we organise our democracy. So, you know, in the UK, we have an unelected House of Lords. I think one thing that we could do is replace the House of Lords with a standing citizens assembly that is selected at random from members of the population that could exist alongside an expert body as well. But I think it's those kinds of things that we should be thinking about now. Just changing gears a little bit here.

What does Rawls suggest we'd want to see happen to poverty from behind the veil of ignorance? Yeah, so Rawls would want us to eliminate poverty as a very high priority. For Rawls, actually making sure that every citizen has enough resources to meet their basic needs, he actually considers that as part of his first basic liberties principle, that none of those basic liberties really mean anything if you don't have clothes to wear, enough food to eat. The point of having those freedoms is that they give people the space to

go about their lives as free and independent citizens and to participate in politics. And none of that is possible unless you at least have a very basic level of resources. And Rawls would like us to go well beyond meeting people's basic needs. And his second principle is all about that is about reducing inequality more broadly. But before we even get to thinking about that, I think tackling poverty is really fundamentally important. That actually brings me to the other idea that I was toying with in my mind as one of the most radical implications of Rawls' philosophy, which is a universal basic income. You know, I think there are lots of different ways that we could make sure that people have the minimum resources that they need to meet their basic needs.

Is that still considered radical at this stage, given, you know, the pandemic and what governments have done? Yeah, well, I think it's promising that it's perhaps becoming less radical. definitely one of the ideas that has moved from being a totally fringe idea just discussed amongst a few kind of kooky academics to something that's really part of our public debate and an idea that lots of people have heard of. I think it's also, you know, because it's just so easy to grasp what it is, I think that's helped it gain a foothold in our public debate. But I think it would be a very radical idea because it would be extremely expensive. And in my book, I try to think through why it would be that the universal basic income would be better than our existing welfare systems, which target resources just on those who need them most. And, you know, I think it's clear that a universal basic income is not

the cheapest way in which to meet people's basic needs. The argument for a universal basic income rests on taking seriously the importance of making sure that everybody has a sense of independence and dignity and self-respect in their lives. And part of what is very appealing to me about Rawls's philosophy when it comes to economic questions is that he's very clear that economic justice isn't and self-respect in their lives. And part of what is very appealing to me about Rawls' philosophy when it comes to economic questions is that he's very clear that economic justice isn't just about the distribution of money. Obviously that matters,

but that's not the only thing that matters. We also have to think about the distribution of economic power and control. So for example, the way in which shareholders really call all the shots in most private companies in lots of countries. So the balance of power between workers and owners, that's on the table. But also he talks about the social bases of self-respect, the way in which our society and our economic institutions do or don't give people opportunities to feel, to have a sense of self-respect, which depends on

having independence, on having independence on having opportunities for meaningful work on being part of a community that that recognizes your values and you know it's it's a much uh richer conception of how to think about inequality and economic justice than i think we that we commonly find and it's it's from there that the argument for a universal basic income really becomes much more compelling because the problem with targeted welfare systems is that they very often involve intrusive and often quite demeaning systems of means testing and leave people with a sense of dependence on the state, whereas the idea of a universal basic income is that it's this floor that everybody has as a basic guarantee of citizenship and which is a springboard for them to pursue their dreams, to participate in society, to make a contribution. It's a very compelling idea.

And I think that's why we should consider moving in that direction, even though it would be an expensive thing to do. And you're right. To implement it permanently would be a radical thing. So I take back what I said. But I do want to go back to the idea of this veil of ignorance and just push back at you for a minute and ask you this, like, why wouldn't I gamble in a thought experiment from behind this veil of ignorance? You know, I could make life really hard or terrible for some minority of people, like 20%, let's say, of the population, and really wonderful for 40% and just play the odds. Why wouldn't I do that?

Yeah. I think the answer is that the stakes are really extremely high in this thought experiment. high in this thought experiment. You know, we're thinking about how society allocates fundamental rights and freedoms and access to resources. So I think the answer is slightly different depending on which aspect of Rawls's principles we're talking about. And I think the argument is clearest and strongest when it comes to choosing his first principle to protecting basic liberties, that those basic freedoms are a guarantee of our most fundamental interests. Nobody in their right mind would want to gamble on living in a society where they might be persecuted because of their religious beliefs or prevented from living with the people that they love. So I think that that argument is very strong.

But part of the description of the thought experiment is that we have to choose principles that we genuinely believe that we could live by no matter where we ended up in society. And I think it's implausible to think that people could happily live in a society that did persecute them in those kinds of ways. I think when it comes to equality of opportunity,

I think that the argument is similarly pretty clear cut, that there's really no benefit to anyone from living in a society where opportunity is not equal, if you don't know which group you're going to end up in. That if we live in a society with equality of opportunity, we're able to make the most of everybody's talents, and that's something that everybody benefits from. And obviously, if you knew you would be in one,

the group that would benefit from unequal opportunities, if you knew you would be white in a white supremacist society, then it would be rational maybe to go down that route. But the thought experiment rules that out. It says that, you know, it's because we're trying to think about principles that could be justified to everyone that we precisely't, we precisely don't know those things.

We don't know where we would end up. But even with equal opportunity, there is always a subset of society that is miserable. And, you know, living trapped in horrible, dangerous situations in their work, you know, doing really unpleasant things. Why would that subset of society agree that, you know, the situation they're in is a fair one, or that it's reasonable they're living the lives they are? It's out of concern for that group that Rawls ends up with this, the second part of his equality principle, this idea of the difference principle that we should try to organise society so that the least welloff are better off than they would be under any alternative system. I guess if we just step back and remember that the purpose of the thought experiment is to come up with principles and with a way of organizing

society that can be justified to everyone and that everyone can willingly endorse no matter where it is that they've actually ended up. From that perspective, we would, you know, it's natural to worry most about the people who are least well off in society because they have the most reason to resent their position and to feel that society hasn't been organised in a way that works for them. And I think the least well off in our existing societies will be totally justified in feeling extremely angry and resentful towards the way that society is organised because it hasn't been organised in a way that would benefit them. Often their interests have been sacrificed in order to promote economic growth through weakening of labour protections and of the welfare state, economic growth that ultimately ends up benefiting other people and

not them. So at least in Rawls's vision of society, the least well-off would know that in any alternative economic system, they would be even worse off than they are now. I suppose that's as good as you can hope for, basically, in a society where a degree of inequality is being tolerated. I'm just pushing a point here, but is it important in that scenario, is it important that these people who are the least well off, that they genuinely believe in the reasonableness of their condition in society? Yeah, I think that would be important. I think it would be essential that those people actually thought that we had done everything we could to design our society

so that they would be better off and that to the best of our knowledge about how institutions works we've done everything that we can to to raise their standard of living and to make sure that the inequalities that exist are justified that they serve some useful purpose that you know it's not that people pop stars or um you know executives in big private companies they're not being paid more because we've decided that they deserve it in some deep moral sense, but because paying them more serves some wider social purpose that's beneficial to everybody else. So it wouldn't be enough that well-off people feel able to argue in good faith that these people ought to see the reasonableness

of the lives they're leading. Oh, I see. That's a good, yeah, I think I see more the distinction that you're getting at now. I think, yeah, that's, I mean, I think that's, it's a, I think it raises a difficult point, which is that ultimately we can't be sure that other people will be persuaded by the reasons that we give them. No matter how reasonable we think we're being, there's no guarantee that other people are going to agree. So the way I think about democracy is that we, it's impossible to secure universal consent for every policy. And what we need to do is justify, is we need to do our best to justify policies

in a way that we think other people could accept, that we think is the best that we can offer to other people. In the end, that's the best that we can do. And I suppose the reason that we also have a democratic system is that it's not just up to me or the well-off or any individual group to just say, well, we think this is reasonable and therefore you should do what we say. Ultimately, these arguments about what's reasonable are contributions to a democratic debate and the decisions that we make will ultimately depend on how persuasive those reasons are. Does that go some way to answering your question? Why is reasonableness such an important concept for John Rawls? Reasonableness really is the core concept, I think, of his whole theory. To be reasonable just means to want to live in a

society where institutions can be justified to others. Reasonableness is about wanting to explain your political views and your decisions to other people. And I think, for Rawls, the essence of liberalism, as I think he puts it, is the idea that policies and institutions have to be justified. They can't just be imposed by an elite who have power, that democracy is not just about the rule of the strong. Reasonableness is the starting point of Rawls' theory. It's the premise that, in a sense, can't really be justified by anything that comes before it. And I guess the rest of Rawls' philosophy is really a fleshing out of what that idea means in practice. It's, you know, the thought experiment

is the next step of turning that idea of wanting to live with others on terms that can be justified to them into this device, the thought experiment for thinking about how we might choose principles. And then from that, you get principles. And from the principles, you get to think about policies. And the whole philosophy is a process of thinking through what it would be to be a reasonable citizen. So coming right back to the beginning of our conversation

to the present moment, how do you respond to the criticism that this is really the wrong moment to sell us on the idea of civility and reasonableness, given the urgency of the threats that we are facing, democracy and the climate crisis. I think I just see it the other way around. I feel the plea for civility and reasonableness is not just or shouldn't just be a sort of a wish that we hope would come true without taking action. I think it's also something that should inform our approach to reforming our political and civic institutions. and civic institutions. Part of the reason why more deliberative forms of democracy might be valuable is that they're more conducive to reasonable debate where there's a give and take of different ideas and people listen to people they disagree with. This commitment to civility and reasonableness leads us in important practical directions. It would lead us to changing democratic institutions in the way that I just said. I think it would also be very important for thinking about

the structure and ownership of our media system, how we could create a media system that's both more able to offer reliable information as well as a diversity of viewpoints. Part of the polarisation and intolerance that we see in a lot of our political debate is just the lack of spaces that bring people with radically different views and ways of living and religions and political beliefs together. And I think the more that we can do to design things like schools, the health system, public spaces, public architecture, the democratic system in ways

that bring people with different views together, doing that will help move us from this situation of intolerance and polarization towards a more reasonable and civic public culture. And all of that is very important. One really major feature of our political environment is identity politics. And you express some discomfort with identity politics. I wonder if you could explain why? And you expressed some discomfort with identity politics. I wonder if you could explain why. Sure. So it's a complicated topic, and thinking is actually most, you know,

you often hear identity politics, the accusation of identity politics when it's used pejoratively aimed at the left. But I think that historically, that kind of identity politics, and I think the same is true today, is really the characteristic feature of the far right. It's, you know, it's white supremacy, and the kind of nationalist, xenophobic movements that are found on the right, extreme right wing of the political spectrum, that epitomize that idea of identity politics in its truest and most worrying form. That is an idea of politics that is just about the advancement of the interests of one group, for example, white people or Christians or, you know, whatever the group might be over others. That's the truest and most

dangerous form of identity politics. When that accusation is leveled at people on the left, I think it's often a bit disingenuous. You know, I think that groups like Black Lives Matter, who I guess, you know, I guess a focal point for a lot of debate about identity politics. Yeah, I think you could probably find people who say things that suggest that they think their aim is just to advance the interests of black people over and above the interests of other groups in society. And historically, there have been groups that have wanted to bring about a more kind of separatist model of black liberation and justice. But I think that's, you know, it's really not the case

for most of these progressive movements today. I think for the most part, movements like Black Lives Matter are trying to advance universal principles of equality and justice in a way that they feel has that they're, you know, the groups that they represent have been excluded from. And I think that is that's absolutely an integral part of the kind of progressive politics that I'm arguing for in my book, and which I think Rawls's philosophy supports. I think I'm skeptical of the way that that label is sometimes used to criticize people on the left. I think therels' philosophy supports. I think I'm sceptical of the way that that label is sometimes used

to criticise people on the left. I think there's then a more... There is a question about how we go about organising politically and whether particular groups should take the lead in advancing their own struggles. And I don't think that's problematic. If that's what people mean by identity politics, then I don't think I have a very, you know, I don't have a big problem with that. I think that kind of organizing, organizing amongst people who face

common injustices, whether that's black people or gay people or women has been a very powerful force for social justice. And what Rawls' philosophy adds to this is making it clear that all of these struggles are advancing a set of universal principles that apply to everybody, that they're all part of a broader common struggle. And I think that that's where Rawls' philosophy offers a kind of unifying alternative to what people might think of as identity politics. It's not about downgrading the importance of struggles for minority groups, but recognizing that those struggles are part of an attempt to achieve universal ideals of freedom and equality for everybody. This is a difficult question to ask, but I feel it follows from what you just said.

to ask, but I feel it follows from what you just said. I wonder how, whether you've had to think about or face any challenges selling the ideas of someone who is part of a, you know, of a white privileged class in this environment where identity politics has become, you know, a lightning rod, and you also being a white man. I wonder whether that's entered into your thinking and your ability to sell these ideas. Yeah, that's an interesting question. To be honest, it hasn't been something that I've come up across that much personally, but obviously it's something that I think about. And I think I'm aware that there is some skepticism, particularly within progressive circles towards Rawls,

partly because there's a broader suspicion of liberalism and the liberal tradition, which Rawls is the kind of preeminent modern representative of. And also because of, you know, of his, you know, the fact that Rawls was an affluent white man. He spent most of his career in universities. There's, you know, I suppose a sort of adjacent critique is that also that he's a kind of ivory tower type thinker. So, I suppose I'm aware of those criticisms. And my response, I have a few reflections, I guess, in response to that. The first is that I think when it comes to thinking about basic political principles, it's important to judge ideas on their own merits.

I think that the ability to do that and a commitment to doing so is really essential to having to living in a democracy that people's views should be assessed on the basis of their merits and not the characteristics of the person who is presenting them in a particular debate. But I also understand that what the critique is pointing towards is a real and valid issue, which is that people's political views are often shaped by their particular experiences and their identities, that people who haven't experienced racism might be less likely to see the need for policies that might actually make a difference to racial injustice and might do something about it similarly people who maybe have very high incomes might be less likely to support policies that would increase redistribution and help the least well off and you know I think part of my response is that these were issues that

Rawls was obviously very concerned about and his thought experiment the original position is precisely designed to help us step outside of the narrow confines of our particular experiences and identities and to to force us to put ourselves in other people's positions and to take that more impartial perspective. And Rawls' philosophy is a powerful antidote to the way in which our individual experiences and identity might shape our political beliefs. In the end, whether I've succeeded in doing that, whether the arguments that I've made in my book, you know, it's possible that they do reflect my particular interests and experiences. And that would be a, but in the end, you have to, I suppose it's not enough just to say,

well, I'm a reasonably affluent white man, full stop. You'd have to point out some way in which these ideas don't follow through from Rawls' thought experiment, don't really take seriously the ideas that these principles have to be justified to everyone, some way in which they actually reflect a kind of biased point of view. So I think part of what to me is so appealing about Rawls' philosophies, it gives us a framework for making these kind of critiques in a rational way rather than just delegitimizing certain voices on the basis of their individual characteristics. Yeah, and you say his starting point is reasonableness, so that sort of follows. You say in your book that we mustn't see politics

as a battle for moral supremacy. And I wonder if you could defend that point. Why isn't it a battle for moral supremacy? Hmm. I suppose what I have in mind is that democratic politics always leads to leave open the possibility that we might be wrong, and to recognize that we need to persuade other people. You know, it's tricky, because I am making the case for a particular moral outlook when it comes to thinking about politics. I am making the case for a particular vision of what a just society would look like and a set of principles that I think would shape that.

But the aim of politics should be to win people over to those beliefs, to engage in debate, deliberation and persuasion. That's part of what I was getting at with that comment is it's a particular spirit or approach to politics that recognizes that we always have our own particular views. We need to bring those views to the public space with a degree of humility and a desire to listen to other points of view and to persuade one another. I think, you know, the other thing that I also had in mind is that there's a particular kind of morality that is relevant to politics. So the set of principles that I'm arguing for, on which you get from Rawls, are a set of principles for thinking about the basic structure of our political and economic institutions. They're not principles for thinking about the best way of living or the best way to think about God or what the right religion is.

And there's a kind of broader sense of morality that encompasses people's deepest moral and religious convictions. encompasses people's deepest moral and religious convictions, that I also think it's important to leave out of politics, that that's the sense in which politics really mustn't be a battle for moral supremacy, that in a liberal and democratic society, part of being reasonable is recognizing that we're never going to agree on these deep and fundamental questions about morality and the nature of the universe and religion. And that the right response to that, if we want to live with other people in a way that shows them respect, is to accept that there's a certain kind of morality that goes outside of the sphere of politics, that we should be careful not to bring into our political debate and to keep more within our own private sphere, I guess. Daniel, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. You've been listening to Ideas. Our guest was Daniel Chandler. His book is called Free and Equal. What would a fair society look like? Thank you to Daniel Pereira in CBC's London studio. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, for more information about Daniel Chandler's work. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive,

where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. For example, if you want to hear more exploration of what it really means to be reasonable, check out our episode called Be Reasonable, where we challenge Canadian thinkers to provide a definition. Technical producer, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.