'Freedom, fairness and responsibility in the Big Society’

There is always going to be limited ‘available’ environmental resources, limited ‘available’ wage-labour hours, limited ‘available’ money and limited ‘available’ land. How we choose to organise and distribute these limits to our survival and these limits to the enhancement of our well-being will directly determine the structures, patterns and processes of freedom, fairness and responsibility within both the State and the Big Society.

The Big Question is, how are we going to use our freedom to create structures, patterns and processes of fairness that reflect both responsibility to ourselves and responsibility to each other. This obviously includes non-human-life-forms, since to neglect non-human-life-forms does not reflect a fair and responsible expression of freedom but an expression of freedom that reflects irresponsibility and unfairness.
In order to answer this question and so create a sustainable and perhaps even enlightened Big Society we need to correctly understand Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility.

We need FREEDOM in order to pursue the fulfilment of ourselves and others within the Big Society;

We need FAIRNESS in order to make available through sharing and exchange the necessary resources, labour and money to pursue fulfilment;

And We need RESPONSIBILITY in order that we ensure fairness is applied across the broadest spectrum of life-forms within the Big Society.

This means we need to more evenly distribute OUR social, economic and political capital in order to achieve the highest degree of freedom and the highest level of fairness and thus allow the greatest amount of responsibility that can be experienced by everyone and everything.

To do this means unlocking the social, economic and political capital reserves that are held by the rich and the powerful and distributing this capital more evenly across the Big Society so that the poor and the weak can have the available resources to educate, train and empower themselves.

It also means unlocking how wage-capital is presently distributed and organised in order that the time, space and energy becomes available for the greatest amount of people to engage and participate in the democratic organisation of the Big Society. In particular, this means reducing the working week to 30 hours and so allowing the greatest number of people access to paid employment as well as allowing the greatest number of people to empower themselves and their communities by having the time, space and energy to actually engage with the on-going creation of the Big Society.

In conclusion, We need to create greater social, economic and political equality, because whether we like it or not, we do live in a world of scarce resources. Not so scarce that we rarely see them, but scarce because at any given time, social, economic and political capital has limited availability.

Therefore, is it fair to have to fight to have the best of what we collectively create and produce whether it be social, economic, political or cultural goods and services? Of course it isn’t since this type of fairness – fairness as competition – does not allow the greatest amount of freedom. Similarly, is it responsible to allow limited capital reserves to be owned or managed by a select few? Of course it isn’t since this type of responsibility – responsibility as selfishness – does not allow for the greatest amount of fairness or freedom either.

The type of responsibility that would give the greatest amount of fairness and freedom is responsibility as sharing. And the type of fairness that would give the greatest amount of freedom is fairness as fulfilment. Therefore, responsibility as sharing and fairness as fulfilment is the only way in which We in the Big Society will experience true Freedom - freedom as empowerment.

Long live freedom as empowerment, fairness as fulfilment and responsibility as sharing.

One of the fascinating findings that the renowned moral development researcher Lawrence Kohlberg, and his followers, made is that pre-conventional moral development and post-conventional moral development can often look superficially the same.

Movements such as the anti-Vietnam counterculture were made up of such disparate elements, that would unite behind a single slogan – one person out of hedonistic rebelliousness and another out of global compassion for distant victims.

But when you ask the person why they support the slogan, their moral stage is fairly quickly revealed...

It's only once you penetrate the 'flatland' view of politics to see these differences that you really see what's going on in politics.

Here – for instance – is a view of current British political developments drawing on very systematic, and nationally representative, Maslow-style values research:
http://www.cultdyn.co.uk/ART067736u/democracy2010.html

To fix our 'Broken Society', I suspect the insights of Maslow, Kohlberg and like minds, will need to be taken into account...

Matthew

There is much to be said for the Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility approach, but it is essential to bear two critical factors in mind when attempting to apply this philosophy in practice ...

1. In most (almost all I think) Western (and probably developing world) socieites the gap between the rich and poor is increasing .... not only is this not sustainable over the longer term, it is hardly fair that, in essence, it is primarly the poor that are paying for the consequences of the recent economic crisis. I believe according the latest Sunday Times Rich List the wealth of the top 1,000 wealthiest people in the UK increased by about 25% (about £100bn) between 2008/9 ... roughly equivalent to half the overall UK debt probelem .... surely there is a simple 'fair' solution to our problem here?

2. The underlying problem over the concept of 'Freedom' is whether we are (or should be)free from our Responsibilities ... Almost all legislation restricts our Freedom and is an attempt to make us behave more Responsibly ... Try this test on speeding and smoking restrictions?
If the legal system does not help that process, we need to seriously re-think what is going on.

It is easy to talk about these FFR issues but they need to be seen in terms of the (harsh) realities of what they really mean in practice ....

I have for many years tried to live my life (not always as succesfully as I or indeed others would have liked!) both at work and at home based around four simple questions:
Am I doing the Right thing?
Am I doing it in the Right way?
Am I doing it for the Right reasons?
And...is it based on the Right moral values?
I believe that if more people were just to stop and consider carefully what they are doing and how it might impact others and the environment we all share, less careless decisions would happen.
It does of course require some basic grasp of what virtues underpin moral values and how these, if properly lived out can lead to a life of integrity - the sum of all the virtues.
Most people have a pretty fair idea of what is right and wrong and run their private lives in accord with these codes of behaviour. The sadness is that when those same people are confronted with power, money and perceived threats their moral compass can quickly go askew.
Focusing on the greater good - which is what the Con-Libs appear to be doing - is a healthy reminder that a just happy and successful society has to be based on give and take.
Lets hope that this 21st Century New Deal creates some fresh paradigms for how we organise ourselves!
Peter Lewis - Founding Partner, principledconsulting.

intellectual musings (interesting all the same) but where does it lead?
Explaining that change is needed doesn't make it happen...

@mikeriddell62

Dear Roger - I couldn't agree more.

The idea that ethics are some sort of superfluous addition to other more fundamental truths is the exact reverse of the case. Morality is almost the first things humans do that allows them to be human. Aristotle said that the difference between man and all other creatures is that man can decide his nature - he is of nature but not bound by it. The first moral decision is then deciding what we are and of course we never simply make this decision for ourselves it comes from the culture and commmunity we are raised in and that inculcates us with its codes and values. Without a notion of an objective moral order we would then be simply permanent prisoners of a perpetual past - only the sense that our codes are imposed on and relate to a truthful world and an objective moral order can give us both a relationship to our past and the sense of a better alternate future. As such morality lies at the heart of politics of change and of all social organisation and construction, it preceedes the market, contracts and all other forms of governance, it is both innate and culturally learned and something else as well - the notion of a truth beyond relativity, position and perspective - we are truth discerning animals and that is why morality matters