What are the characteristics of a good society?

In my last post, (Is there such a thing as a good society?) I suggested that a good society would have good institutions – norms and laws that are good for its members.

In thinking about the characteristics of a good society different people tend to emphasise different things that they consider to be important e.g. egalitarianism, personal freedom, moral values and spirituality. Rather than just agreeing to differ I think it might be useful to try to identify some characteristics of a good society that nearly everyone would agree to be important. Then it would be possible to consider what evidence might be available about the nature of the institutions that would foster those characteristics. This might enable us to develop a view about the nature of the institutions of a good society that would be widely accepted.

So, what are the characteristics of a good society? First, as I suggested in my last post, the most important characteristic of a good society is a set of institutions that enable its members to live together in peace. This entails an absence of major threats to persons or property such as those associated with civil war, high levels of corruption and absence of rule of law. The institutions should also prevent use of the coercive powers of the state by despots or influential interest groups to enrich themselves at the expense of others or to restrict the freedom of others to choose how they will live their lives. Institutions that promote the peaceful co-existence of individuals and groups with differing interests and values are obviously a necessary condition for human flourishing.

Second, nearly everyone would agree that a good society would provide its members with opportunities to flourish – to have more of the things that are good for humans to have. This would include opportunities to live long and healthy lives, economic opportunities, opportunities for educational and cultural pursuits, opportunities to make important decisions affecting themselves and their families and opportunities to participate in political processes.

Why focus on opportunities rather than outcomes? Good institutions can make it possible for humans to flourish but humans can’t be made to flourish – for much the same reasons as you can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink. Human flourishing is an inherently self-directed process. The best we can hope for is a set of institutions that will maximize the probability that any individual chosen at random will be a flourishing individual.

Third, I think there would be widespread agreement that a good society would provide its members with a degree of security against potential threats to individual flourishing. For example it would endeavour to maintain good foreign relations and provide national defence capability sufficient to deter foreign aggression; it would maintain safeguards against government corruption and misuse of the coercive powers of the state (e.g. processes that make it difficult for narrow interest groups to acquire or maintain disproportionate influence in policy-making processes and processes for removal of governments that do not have popular support); it would maintain appropriate machinery to prevent or deal with environmental disasters; it would prevent “the tragedy of the commons” by maintaining appropriate institutions for ownership, pricing and use of natural resources; and it would provide members with a degree of personal economic security against misfortunes such as accidents, ill-health and unemployment.

What evidence do we have about the institutions that tend to foster these characteristics of a good society? An attempt to answer that question will be left to a later post.

Postscript 1:
The best place to look for further discussion by me of the concept of a good society is Chapter 6 of my book Free to Flourish, which is instantly available for a very modest price. 

Postscript 2:

In March 2024, I decided that my view that peacefulness is a characteristic of a good society does not actually depend on the degree of support for that view in any society. Please see: Why should peacefulness be viewed as a characteristic of a good society?

Is there such a thing as a good society?

Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society. What she was actually reported as saying was that some people "are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

I think that Mrs Thatcher probably meant that human societies consist of nothing more than individual humans and the relationships between them. Society is not some kind of magic pudding that has an existence that is separate from the individuals that comprise it.

Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships among individuals who share distinctive institutions. It seems reasonable to suppose that a good society would have good institutions.

Good for whom? If our focus is on humans, there are two possible answers: those outside the society and those within it. It might make sense to think of a good society as one that acts in ways that benefit people outside it, for example by fostering peaceful relations and trade. But it seems more relevant to focus on the way the culture and institutions affect the lives of those within the society and the quality of their relationships with one another.

What are the characteristics of a society that is good for the people who live within it? Different views have been expressed. For example, John Cruddas and Andrea Nahles write: “The good society is about solidarity and social justice. Solidarity creates trust, which in turn provides the foundation of individual freedom. Freedom grows out of feelings of safety, a sense of belonging, and the experience of esteem and respect.”

The main problem I have with this approach is that social justice tends to be a divisive concept. Even if there is widespread agreement that a lot of people deserve higher incomes and better health care and education etc than they obtain at present, the people who would have to pay higher taxes to make this possible through government intervention often feel, with some justification, that they deserve to keep the incomes they have earned. Policies to achieve social justice tend to increase distributional conflict.

Some authors suggest that the concept of a good society is inherently subjective. For example, in attempting to provide an answer to the question of what is a good society Lyndsay Connors writes: “Our answers to this question will always draw upon our personal values and describe the kind of society in which we could feel a sense of well-being.”

The personal values of Walter Lippmann, the famous journalist who wrote a book entitled “The Good Society” in 1937, are evident in his perception of the good society. Lippmann saw the good society as being synonymous with “the liberal, democratic way of life at its best” (“Essays in the Public Philosophy”, 1955, p.96). He also wrote: “The ideals of the good life and of the good society fall far short of perfection, and in speaking of them we must not use superlatives. They are worldly ideals, which raise no expectations about the highest good. Quite the contrary. They are concerned with the best that is possible among mortal and finite, diverse and conflicting men. Thus the ideals of freedom, justice, representation, consent, law, are of the earth, earthy. They are for men who are still (as Saint Paul says in Timothy I, 9-10) under the law. (op cit, p. 142-3).

However, it seems to me that there are objective characteristics of a good society, that nearly everyone would agree on. The most important characteristic of a good society – one that is good for the people living in it – is that the institutions of the society should enable those people to live in peace. In an earlier post I have discussed Friedrich Hayek’s view of what living in peace entails. In broad terms, it requires the ideals that Walter Lippmann identified.

Is there virtue in serving a purpose we do not know for reasons we do not question?

When I recently re-read John Galt’s speech (in “Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand) I was reminded of Rand’s view that the mystics of spirit, who believe that the good is God i.e. beyond man’s power to conceive, and the mystics of muscle, who believe that the good is Society, a super-being embodied in no-one in particular and everyone in general except yourself, have similar moral codes. Galt says: “No matter how loudly they posture in their roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter – the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit –the destruction of his mind”.

In the next paragraph Galt explains: “Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgement and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know for reasons he is not to question” (p. 1027).

A few pages earlier Galt said: “Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is ... the act of blanking out, the wilful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think ... . It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgement ...” (p 1017).

When I read this stuff 20 years ago it was like being at the sidelines at a football match cheering for my side to win. I thought that people who unquestioningly adhered to customs or the teachings of religious or secular authorities were behaving like zombies. It seemed obvious to me that individuals should be using their minds to decide for themselves how they should live.

So, what has changed? Not much, except that, having read a lot more of the writings of Friedrich Hayek since then, I now also see merit in the view that “submission to rules and conventions we largely do not understand ... is indispensible for the working of a free society”. Hayek argued that in our efforts to improve our institutions “we must take for granted much that we do not understand”: “We must always work inside a framework of both values and institutions which is not of our own making. In particular, we can never synthetically construct a new body of moral rules or make our obedience of the known rules dependent on our comprehension of the implications of this obedience in a given instance” (“Constitution of Liberty”, p. 63).

Is it possible to reconcile the view that it is good for people to decide for themselves how they should live their lives with the view that there is merit in observing rules that serve purposes beyond our understanding? I think Hayek was right to emphasise that it is unwise to reject customary rules just because we do not understand their purpose. Many customs deserve respect because they evolved through an evolutionary process in which groups that adhered to superior rules were most successful. Hayek recognized that for this cultural evolution to occur some people had to break with custom in order to introduce new practices advantageous to themselves, which then proved beneficial to the groups in which those practices prevailed. He noted that one of the benefits of freedom was to enable this cultural evolution to occur: “The existence of individuals and groups simultaneously observing partially different rules provides the opportunity for the selection of the most effective ones” (“Constitution of Liberty”, p. 63).

However, I think Rand was right to emphasise that the purpose served by rules protecting lives, liberty and property are capable of being understood. As John Galt explains: “there are no conflicts of interest among rational men” ... “I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice” (p 1022).

Did Ayn Rand regard selfishness as a virtue?

People who are familiar with Ayn Rand’s writings may consider the answer to this question to be obvious. Rand made no secret of the fact that she regarded selfishness as a virtue. So, why ask the question?

Having recently read “Atlas Shrugged” properly for the first time (rather than skimming through it) the heroes, including John Galt, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, did not seem to me to be selfish. By the end of the book they had chosen not to live their lives for the sake of others and not to ask others to live for their sake. But this did not make them selfish in the sense of being deficient in consideration for others. Hank Rearden left his mother without means of support when he went off to start a new life, but it would be difficult for anyone who was aware of the way she repaid the kindness he showed her to argue that he had acted selfishly towards her.

Rand’s view that selfishness is a virtue follows from a narrow definition of selfishness as “concern with one’s own interests” and of individual happiness as the moral purpose of life. In the words of John Galt: “Happiness is the state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values” (p 1014).

Galt explains: “Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy – a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your minds fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer” (p 1022).

Rand’s narrow definition of selfishness enabled John Galt to say: “This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgement of truth” (p 1030).

Why did Ayn Rand adopt a narrow definition of selfishness? She could have avoided a lot of confusion by using another term, e.g. “ethical egoism”, to describe the virtuous concern for one’s own interests and accepting the popular usage of selfishness to describe unethical behaviour that involves pursuing one’s own interests at the expense of others. I suspect that Rand adopted a narrow definition of selfishness in order to argue that selfishness is a virtue. And she wanted to argue that selfishness is a virtue in order to draw attention to her opposition to the view that self sacrifice is a virtue.

The view that self sacrifice is a virtue was clearly one of Rand’s main targets. In John Galt’s words: “If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty” (p 1029).

Postscript: 
Readers might also be interested in a later post on this topic based on a Cato seminar.