The provided answer was that wanting absolute equality might not be a good idea, because of (at least) the following reasons. The lack of financial repercussions for not working favors the rise of “free riders”. It also removes a natural motivator for setting goals for oneself. A society where material wealth equality were forcibly imposed, under any circumstances, would thus slowly level down to the point where material wealth would vanish for everyone. When resources become scarce, this society would face the problem of fighting over resources. It would also face problems regarding law enforcement: the required system seems very hard to implement, and also, who would agree to doing this hard work?
The following argument was sketched (but not quite finished in the debate):
as more and more free riders appear in the hypothetical equal society, the global material wealth diminishes. By assumption of full equality, the material wealth of all free riders diminishes. Maybe, this could trigger a reversal of their behavior: them going back to work.
Following up on the above hypothesis, we notice that just a single individual going back to work isn't going to make a difference. The individual needs to trust that other people are going to go back to work as well. There needs to be a collective action, and this is a matter of social trust.
We believe that there are always going to be free riders but we need a society where it is hard to be one.
During the session the lawn-mower example was given to explain the difference between fairness and equality. The point was made that fairness can be mathematically represented as an equality of ratios. But even this equality won't yield the absolute equality implied from the initial question.
Finally, it was proposed that since the motivation for the original question seems to be in the aim of justice and fairness, perhaps there is a better way to achieve those things other than
absolute equality. One alternative is equality of opportunity. It is difficult to define and quantify opportunity but we can get an intuition: opportunity should be related to how much we have to struggle to achieve commensurate ends. It is naive to believe that we are born with equal opportunity in today's world. Therefore, even this suggestion will require large-scale changes to a lot of rules, regulations and enforcement.
A:
Alright, so let's take some time to figure out what the question will be.
B:
Okay. Do you have anything in mind?
A:
The questions I like are questions around poverty and wealth inequality.
B:
Okay.
A:
Are we bound to this fate, like is it not achievable to to have overall equality of material wealth? That's one type of question I like. Another type of question I'm interested in would be the objectivity of the mind. Objectivity versus subjectivity. Objectivity of our thoughts or of our inner world. Like if I say, I'm sad. You know that can be understood subjectively, but can it be understood objectively in any way? Is it possible to be a materialist or a physicalist? Can somebody defend even that point of view? Or is there something in our subjectivity that can never be attained or comprehended through science and objectivity. So those are, in broad strokes, the type of question I like, but I'm open to hearing questions you like, or some overlap.
B:
Let's stick with one of those two, I'm happy to talk about either of them, I feel like it would be easier for me to talk about the first one about poverty, but I have thoughts on the second one; it is just that that's not something that I'm an expert in.
A:
The objective of these meetings is not to interview an expert, but on the contrary, it's to just take two human beings and have them authentically debate with whatever level of knowledge they have, because the point is to make it universal.
B:
Gotcha.
A:
Let's go with the first one. With material wealth inequality.
B:
Is inequality inescapable? I think that's how you put it.
A:
Yes. Our question will be "Is material wealth inequality inescapable?". We are now going to enter the 20 minutes of interview slash debate.
B:
Okay.
A:
So what do you think? Do you have a personal belief as an answer to that question?
B:
I have an intuition, a gut reaction to the question, and that is that I think it's probably possible to get rid of material wealth inequality, but I don't think that we would want it.
A:
Oh, okay. Cool, cool, so can you explain? The bit i'm really curious about is when you say "we would not want it", but let's say a little bit about how it would be possible first. How would it be possible?
B:
Well, I think the two are connected, I think the only way to make it possible is to have such strong laws and regulations that would require that wealth be distributed evenly across the population, and I assume here we're talking globally, not just within a particular small subset, right, not like in a neighborhood?
A:
That's right.
B:
Um. I think it would be at least theoretically possible, maybe not in human nature, but theoretically possible. You could structure societies such that everything was distributed evenly. The reason I think we might not want that is because the law or the level of regulation required there, I worry would be destructive of personal ambition and setting goals for oneself, because if you know that you're going to be equal with everyone else whether you try or not, then why try?
A:
Okay. So you're saying, if there already is a system in society, like strong laws, by which everybody is going to be equal no matter what they do, that is, everybody's going to have the same material wealth no matter what they do, then there's no reason left for any particular individual to work, to try to contribute.
B:
Now, I mean, certainly we could try to build a sense of duty within everyone, right? But we all know human nature, we sometimes know our duties and don't follow them. And so the worry that I have is that lots of people might know they have a duty to contribute but if they know that they're going to be materially the same as everyone else either way... so say, I'm waking up at seven in the morning and I still feel tired and I think to myself "well, I have a duty to go and clean the park" (maybe that's my job), "but it's really hot in Houston today and it's humid outside and I'm not going to experience any negative effects if I don't do it, so I'll just wait for tomorrow. maybe tomorrow will be cooler. Maybe it'll be easier for me tomorrow." That kind of thing, and then just the slow slope of that kind of thinking.
A:
Is it possible though that... Let's carry out that scenario, let's imagine society is already at a level where wealth is equally distributed. And let's take that example of the park janitor. Let's say the park janitor starts doing what you said. For a full week, a full month, six months, the park is not being cleaned. Now according to your logic, not only the park janitor will do that, but the traffic controller, the policeman, many people will just stop doing their job because they're not feeling like doing it today. At some point, wealth will stop growing, we will stop having food in the supermarket, we will stop having running water, we will stop having a lot of stuff because people are going to stop working.
B:
To be clear we will still be equal, it just will be equal at a lower level.
A:
Until we're all homeless.
B:
Right.
A:
If the wealth is equally distributed and it just diminishes and vanishes, we will all be homeless. And at that point what will happen? I think we can imagine that some civil war will break out maybe, I don't know what will happen.
B:
Well, I don't know because there wouldn't be any reason to fight, at least no economic reason, to fight against another group of people, if everyone is equally homeless. But I don't think civil war, but probably arguments between individuals over whatever resources are available, and then, all of a sudden, as soon as you and I are fighting over the bottle of water and I win, we're no longer equal. So now we've ruined society.
A:
No, but wait. We are under the assumption that the regulations and the laws are so strong that even if there's one water bottle and two individuals, there will be some law that says you must split it in half. I mean it's kind of a silly assumption, this will never happen. If there's one water bottle and two or ten people and a single water bottle I hardly see how... I mean, unless there's a machine that puts down anybody who touches a water bottle.
B:
Yeah, that's the other question I had about enforcement, because these laws are going to require lots of enforcement and those people are going to be equal with everyone else, too, but it sounds like a really tough job to be the enforcer. I don't think I would sign up to be an enforcer if I'm not being benefited any more than anyone else. Maybe I have some sort of internal benefit, it makes me feel good to enforce the laws of this ideal society.
A:
So where are we at right now, I mean where do we stand?
B:
The idea is just that if it were material wealth equality that was legislated
universally, my worry is that we would just start a slow decline through human laziness. There will be the occasional person who goes above and beyond right out of altruism or whatever, but those occasional people I don't think will be enough to hold the rest of society up. But that's just talking about material wealth equality, and I think there are other sorts of equality that are much more plausible and doable, that won't result in exact material equality, but something closer than what we have now. A lot of philosophers have talked about this idea of not material equality but equal opportunity. To make every person have the same ability to achieve their goals and to reach their potential as everyone else. Even that requires a lot of legislation and a lot of regulation given the current state of the world. People who are born into poverty are going to need a lot more help to have the same opportunity as someone who's born into a wealthy home. And how we quantify opportunities is a separate question.
A:
Alright, but let's stick to the material wealth just for the sake of the exercise.
B:
Okay.
A:
I mean you're still making a point about the original question "is material wealth inequality inescapable?". What motivated this question in the first place, maybe, was some implicit desire for universal happiness or more justice universally, and you're saying maybe material wealth equality is not the best way to achieve this implicit goal of universal happiness or fairness, but rather equality of opportunities.
B:
Yeah. I think it could be equality of opportunity. There are other things that people say too, but you just mentioned the word fairness, and I'm not sure that fair is the same as the word equal. But if we care about fairness there's a guy, a philosopher named John Rawls, who says that justice is fairness, not equality.
A:
I'm a bit unclear on how fairness and equality are different. I can feel they're different, but I wouldn't be able to put it into words.
B:
Suppose we're twelve year old boys and we're asking our neighbors if they want us to mow their lawn and they'll pay us $20 to mow their lawn. So we get one of the neighbors to agree, and he says, "okay, you two mow my lawn and i'll give you $20 to split as you like". So I start mowing, and I walk for 10 feet and I say, "Oh, I'm tired" and so you take over the lawn mower and do the rest of the lawn, and then we get the $20 and I say "where's my $10?". That doesn't seem fair. It would be equal, but it doesn't seem fair.
A:
Yeah, but I can turn this into an equality problem, mathematically. If you divide the money received by the time spent, let's say you mowed the lawn for 10% of the time, I mowed the lawn for 90% of the time, and if we are paid proportionally to the time worked then fairness is a mathematical equality: the ratios are equal. We're being paid the same ratio in terms of dollar per minute spent.
B:
That's not going to result in the kind of universal material equality that you started with, right?
A:
That's a very good question. There are several ways to interpret the word equality. What does material wealth equality mean? It's true that the simplest way to interpret it is "one house per person", or "five pairs of shoes per person", like "the same thing". I guess you're right. It's the way of writing the question. It wasn't explaining that there could be these subtleties.
So I think I'm following what you're saying about fairness.
B:
What you are thinking is some sort of universal set wage where everyone is paid the same for the work that they do, and if you don't do the work, then you get paid for the small amount that you did or your rating is the same, something like that.
A:
Yeah. To be honest, where my question stemmed from was very experiential. Like today on my way back from work I crossed paths with probably four homeless and they were in horrible states materially. They were in rags and in really bad health, and even if they're paid proportionally to their amount of work; they're not working so they shouldn't receive any wage. I still have a problem with it.
B:
Well sure, but that's where the opportunity comes in right, because the homeless often don't have an opportunity and I hate it when people blame the homeless for being homeless. There's so many factors that go into ending up in that situation, a lot of them having to do with opportunity. And so the fact that, say a homeless person, is doing no work, and therefore under the hypothesis that we're considering now wouldn't be paid anything, but that's only because they're not doing work, not because they don't want to be paid anything. It's because they don't have the opportunity right, so there's got to be opportunity along with something like this universal wage.
A:
We have 4 min left of debating before hitting the writing part.
B:
Then maybe one conclusion we can draw is just that we don't want the kind of flat universal equality, that might be the initial assumption where everyone, no matter what, just has the same across the board, or at least that's the thing that worried me at the beginning.
A:
Right, yeah, like the same material wealth per capita. Like you have two cows, I have two cows. Our neighbor has two cows.
B:
Right.
A:
So this is not what we want, and you're advocating for something else. Maybe what we would want would be equality of opportunity. Can we say a few words about what opportunity is? How do you figure out whether two people have the same opportunity?
B:
Yeah, so that's a really difficult question, I don't know exactly how to quantify that or describe it fully, but it's got to be something about how much one has to struggle to achieve their goals.
A:
Let's say you feel like having dinner tonight and the homeless next door also feels like having dinner tonight, so you have the same goals; and opportunity is linked to how much you have to struggle.
B:
Right. I have to walk to my refrigerator, the homeless guy has to stand on the corner all day, hoping to get enough money so that he can buy a Mcdonald's meal. That's not equal opportunity.
A:
Right but it's all still interrelated because for you the solution is walking to your fridge because for years and years you've managed to establish some financial stability for yourself. So the difference in opportunity started a long time ago, maybe.
B:
Yeah, but we can't imagine that the world as it is provides everyone equal opportunity the moment they're born, that's just not the case. And I'm a white male, so I got a leg up from birth.
A:
If we start making changes now in that direction, maybe a hundred years from today this could happen.
B:
That's possible, and then another thought. The equal material wealth, the absolute equality, that actually, I think could be a good idea as a starting point like if we were inventing a new society. Say we planted humans on some alien planet, if we started the situation with everyone with absolute equality, and then let them kind of adjust as they go. Some of them are going to work harder, and some are not. Then whatever inequalities result might be justifiable. It's not a bad idea for a starting place, but I don't think it's a good idea to maintain that across the board long term.
Session 2
Date: 2 July 2023; Participants: Anonymous Person 1, Anonymous Person 2.
Résumé
Question 1:
Est-il avisé d’établir une distinction entre raison et sentiments?
Exemple:
Exemple de la métaéthique, les rationalistes contre les sentimentalistes.
Chaque position est réductrice, dans le sens où chaque courant estime que la connaissance morale engage
uniquement une faculté à l’exclusion de l’autre.
Thèse 1:
Toute activité émotionnelle engage nécessairement une activité rationnelle.
Thèse 2:
Toute activité rationnelle engage nécessairement une activité émotionnelle.
Précisions de Personne Anonyme 1: Toute activité mentale fait intervenir des émotions.
C’est une coloration de l’expérience. Par conséquent, même l’activité
mathématique engage des sentiments.
Thèse 3 (antithèse de 2):
Il existe une activité rationnelle qui n'engage pas d'activité émotionnelle.
Personne Anonyme 1 mentionne que beaucoup de philosophes, dont Kant, s'opposent à la thèse 2 et défendent
la présente antithèse. Kant,
par exemple, estime que les connaissances mathématiques sont des connaissances synthétiques a priori
et, à ce titre, elles sont des produits de la raison pure.
Thèse 4:
Les connaissances mathématiques sont indépendantes des sentiments humains.
Justification de la thèse 4:
Argument proposé par Personne Anonyme 2 en faveur de la position de Kant.
Les productions humaines qui utilisent ce savoir mathématique, une fois produites, ne dépendent
plus de l’esprit humain; et donc ne sont plus connectées à des émotions ou des sentiments.
Thèse 5 (conclusion):
La valeur de vérité d’une proposition mathématique ne dépend pas de nos sentiments.
Précisions de Personne Anonyme 1: cet argument ne réfute pas le rationalisme.
Session 1
Date: 1 July 2023; Participants: Anonymous Person 1.
This is a mock interview where I interviewed myself, as a practice exercise
for the Philosophy debate club project.
Summary
Question 1:
Could mankind do without money?
Question 2:
What would a world without money look like?
Question 3:
Are we certain Barter is not a viable economic solution?
The start of an answer was provided, hints of what a solution
involving barter were provided.
Thesis 1:
Money enables humans to exchange goods and services at scale.
Small justification for this thesis was provided.
The problem seems algorithmic.
Thesis 2:
Barter is not as easy to scale to big societies as money.
Small justification for this thesis was provided.
The problem seems algorithmic.
Definition 1:
Money as a common currency for exchanging goods and services.
Transcript of the debate
A:
The question that we will address today is: could mankind do without money?
B:
So my current stance is that money fulfills a key function in current human
societies and mankind probably needs that key function, but there may be parts
of the social structure superimposed over that fundamental need that could be
changed for the benefit of mankind.
A:
OK so you're saying that money fulfills a key function. What would that be in
your opinion?
B:
I believe that money enables humans to exchange goods and services with more
ease by having a common currency. Money acts as a measuring standard, as a
universal unit against which human populations can measure the value of goods
and services. For example thanks to money I can buy a book with the fruits of
my work as a construction worker, I receive a wage for my labor and I spend
this wage on other goods and services.
A:
So the function money fulfills, if I'm following you, is that it enables
populations of humans to exchange goods and services through this medium;
money is the balancer. Could you elaborate on how important that function is
for mankind and what a world without money would look like?
B:
Sure people inherently are skilled to various degrees in various tasks. some
people are better at running, others at climbing, others at speaking in public,
others yet at cooking, and the list of competencies goes on and on. having a
way for these people to use the skill they are good at in return for a service
in areas where they are lacking seems like a very useful thing. For example
let's say I really need to wear clothes but I'm really bad at making clothes,
but I'm really good maybe at cooking; well it sounds very convenient if I can
cook for somebody who knows how to make clothes and in exchange for my cooking
that person will provide me with clothing. Of course given the long list of
goods and services humans need to exchange, only operating according to the
rules of barter is hard if not impossible. How can I possibly barter my way
through all my needs in life? For example clothing, housing, food, entertainment,
transportation, technology and means of communication... how can I possibly
offer something of value with my own skills alone to all the people that would
be involved in providing me with these goods and services I need?
A:
OK let's pause a little bit here to recapitulate, so you are saying that a
world without money possibly would have to rely on barter, but you are
claiming that barter is inefficient. Maybe we could say that it is not
scalable. Barter might work on isolated cases but at the scale of a society it
seems hard to use. Are you certain that barter alone cannot meet the needs of
a society?
B:
Well now that I think of it I am not 100% certain there isn't a solution that
only involves barter, at least theoretically. Mathematically we can imagine a
more advanced bartering strategy where groups of people are formed, still
solely on the basis of bartering, to perform large scale actions. For example
maybe a collective of cooks are willing to cook for 500 people and on the
other hand a group of 500 workers are willing to build a road if they are
being fed. The cooks need a road to be built and in this fashion the cooks
could still exchange their cooking for the building of the road. but this
example is still too contrived to be credible. Any solution based on barter
would need to, at least, seem possible for more complex examples. We would need
to list important needs from humans and important goods and services that meet
those needs in contemporary societies, and the bartering solution should meet
everybody's need with these goods and services .