Three crucial elements of the Just Package contribute to its total significance. These are shown in Figure 8.1 individually and as they contribute to the Package. Now, these elements--order, power, justice¹--are basic to all societies, although they vary in the degree of social order; the domination and combination of force, coercion, and authority; and the justice of their laws and institutions.

All that has gone before provides definition and substance to these elements. Social order means an overarching social contract:² that is, peace as I defined it in Chapter 2. Force, coercion, and authority³ are those powers based on physical capability, threats, and legitimacy, which to some extent underlie all societies,⁴ especially through their governments. For government is an institution whose purposes are achieved by some combination of these powers. And finally, justice is basically a moral attitude about what is impartial, fair, and right.⁵

To define a just society we are really seeking some combinations of order and power which we call just. Figure 8.1 is particularly helpful in illustrating these alternative combinations. The first alternative is the conjunction of power and justice, without order. This defines what we call just war⁶ or, more generally, just violence. It is the use of force, coercion, and authority to pursue or defend through violence a just cause or to right an injustice.⁷ In my terms, it is the violent balancing of force or coercion to achieve a just structure of expectations (status quo)--a particular just social contract.

In general, however, a just social contract is the conjunction of justice and order and may exist independently of force, coercion and authority, as in a loving relationship or a fair exchange.⁸ Small communities may exist entirely by love and devotion or by exchange and persuasion. As these orders are just they lie entirely in the overlap in Figure 8.1 between justice and order. This overlap is also the space of the Just Principles. For as developed and conceptualized, these principles are wholly concerned with an order in which people are free to seek and found their own communities.⁹ This is a voluntary order, a just peace unsupported by force, coercion, or authority. That is, alone, the Just Principles frame a pure, anarchical order.

For larger societies (and we are encompassing even global societies) an anarchical order could not long remain just, however.¹⁰ With no one to guarantee a person's right to free choice and liberation, the operation and continued existence of these rights become a matter of interests, capabilities, and wills--a matter of balancing powers. And in the clash of powers there is no assurance that people's rights will win out. Indeed, if world history provides any lesson it is that force and coercion soon triumph over any unprotected abstract rights.¹¹

For this reason the Constitutional Principles add necessary security to the Just Principles. They provide the element of power essential to secure a just order. Together, both sets of principles combine justice, order, and power; they create the central overlap in Figure 8.1 which is the space of the Just Package.

Finally, in the overlap in Figure 8.1 between order and power is a peace without justice that is enforced by power. This is tyranny: an arbitrary and oppressive use of power to impose and maintain order, such as a system of involuntary slavery or servitude, or a military conquest and coercive absorption of a nation. The Just Principles and Package define why tyranny lacks justice--because people are denied the freedom and security to choose their own order, the right and help to throw off the chains imposed by others.

No one who seriously considers an ideal society can ignore justice, order, and power, separately or in combination. We require order. We desire peace. But we also seek justice. And sometimes peace and justice are inconsistent and peace must give way, as for a just war. But when a just peace is found, when our social institutions manifest our freedom to seek and choose our own community, then we must bow to power.

Some force, coercion, and authority are necessary to secure and maintain a just order. Every student of peace or justice always should keep in view the question: what is the best combination of order, justice, and power that establishes an equilibrium--a balance of powers--securing the best peace with justice? I believe the Just Package to be a good answer. It is a philosophical solution based on a particular ontological perspective and metaethics. It is a theoretical solution based on social field theory and a normative social contract model. It is an empirical solution based on scientific research and an assessment of human interests.

But what about this peace? Could it be better in some sense other than just? In answering this, keep in mind that nonviolence is also an aspect of justice,¹² and that the just peace, defining as it does a global exchange society, tends to minimize social violence in comparison to the major, alternative types of social institutions. However, this just peace is not the optimum for nonviolence, for there are different kinds of exchange societies, and this optimum is achieved by that exchange society in which no authoritarian or coercive communities exist. That is, a global exchange society of exchange communities (states) would be the least violent of all. This is illustrated in Figure 8.2. Therefore, the answer to the above question is yes, the peace--social contract--could be better. It could comprise a more nonviolent, exchange society.

Why should an exchange society in which people are generally free be the least violent? I have already answered this in Section 7.4.2 and elsewhere, as footnoted therein. Here I need only reiterate that the greater the freedom and the more the diversity, mobility and cross-pressures, the less the tendency for society to polarize and associated violence to occur.

The Just Package permits--indeed, positively helps--each person to explore the question of what is Just. Each can apply his own knowledge to his individual situation; test the consequences of his own beliefs and attitudes toward justice. To these consequences each is then free to adjust.

Fundamentally, the question of justice is like that of truth.¹³ The accumulation of human knowledge about the world and ourselves is a process of discovery, testing, and falsification. More significantly, it is a continual process of trial and error in which the singular implications of general beliefs are tried in particular circumstances. If the implications are false, then the general beliefs come under pressure to change. Enough negative experiences and our ideas, our empirical perspective on the world, will shift.

This applies similarly to our beliefs about and attitudes toward social justice. Justice comprises a universal moral statement about human relations, such as that all people should be equal. From these ideas of justice flow certain consequences for particular behavior. But as we try to practice the specific implications of our attitudes toward justice and get social results painfully inconsistent with our other, more deeply held moral beliefs, then we will be inclined toward changing our attitudes.¹⁴ As these moral contradictions accumulate, eventually we may alter our attitudes completely.¹⁵ A good contemporary example of this is the conversion of former Marxists¹⁶ and non-Marxist socialists¹⁷ from the equalitarian creed to liberalism, once they have experienced or seen such equalitarianism in practice.

Let me sharpen this argument. Scientific method consists of a number of aspects, but the basic idea is that general empirical ideas and beliefs are subject to public testing and criticism. The public factor is critical. Theories or hypotheses must be clearly and publicly articulated; data must be available or replicable; tests or analysis must be reported. All this is necessary so that others can independently check and criticize claims and proclaim counterresults. And out of this critically important public balancing of intellectual power, this scientific dispute and conflict, grows without plan or coercion, a scientific consensus, our accepted scientific perspectives on the world. Truth, insofar as we can discover it, emerges when free people openly balance their beliefs and methods.²⁰

Similarly with social justice. Through the building of varied communities that the Just Package allows and encourages, each community will be an experiment in social justice, an empirical test of different conceptions and beliefs about justice. Social Justice, perhaps insofar as we will ever know it, evolves from this global and public assessment, and experience with the practical consequences of each conflicting idea of justice.²¹

All this is to say that the counterpart to scientific method for justice, what we might call a metaethical method,²² is the Just Package²³--that is, the just peace.

Is there, then, a practical solution to our imagined utopian building that justly manages this inevitable clash of utopias? Yes, the just peace. By the Just Principles each person is free to balance his ideals with others and to found his own utopian community. No outsider can dictate the nature of this community, so long as it allows people to leave freely and does not develop police or security forces beyond its internal needs. Under these constraints people can then voluntarily balance their utopian dreams.

Who will decide conflicts between utopias, then? Those involved in terms of their knowledge, values, interests, and willingness to adjust. Who will distribute utopias, then? No one. The distribution takes place as people adjust to each other's utopias. This is a free market of utopias, with distributions occurring spontaneously and evolving from the diversity and confrontation of different utopias. There need be no one to decide among utopias. There need only be a government to oversee and secure the process of adjustment, and to protect those utopias that are founded.

This system can surely be described as a metautopia.²⁴ And this metautopia is the just peace.²⁵

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.

This principle has priority over the second, such that social institutions must first and foremost satisfy it.²⁷

Now, according to Rawls, his first principle is what people would agree to were they ignorant of their own interests and the positions and advantages they would have in society. It is what "a person would choose for the design of a society in which his enemy is to assign him his place."²⁸ Although there is considerable dispute about the logical claims for this principle,²⁹ especially concerning the initial position, the principle is Rawls' "reflective" and intuitive judgment about the superordinate idea of social justice.

By "liberty" in the principle Rawls means the basic political liberties (right to free voting and to run for office), as well as freedom of speech, assembly, thought, and conscience.³⁰ It also means freedom of religion, even if intolerant sects are formed. In effect, therefore, the Just Principles could be clauses of Rawls' first principle. And if people in his initial position would select, above all, Rawls' first principle, then they would surely find the Just Principles acceptable, although incomplete. For while the Just Principles do not specify the standard political and human freedoms, each person is given freedom to seek and found his own community of whatever freedoms he and others can agree upon. While in my view there is good reason for not accepting Rawls' more expanded view of liberty as a principle of justice (which is, in sum, that it imposes a particular conception of justice as freedom on all),³¹ the fact that Rawls' and my different social contract conceptions would still agree on at least the basic ideas in the Just Principles lends additional credence to them.

There is yet one more consideration. In a second stage in his social contract model Rawls also sets up a constitutional convention to institutionalize his two principles of justice.³² Here I need note only that his resulting constitutional government is a form of constitutional democracy³³ "guaranteeing moral liberty and freedom of thought and belief, and of religious practice."³⁴ The government is limited in that majority views cannot impose on these freedoms. Rawls also places a major emphasis on the role of government in maintaining public order and security.³⁵ And the constitution provides for representation (presumably one person, one vote), equal participation, and free elections; separation of powers and checks and balances are assumed.³⁶

Clearly, Rawls' government is a limited, constitutional system, balanced to ensure that power is restricted and diffused. It is also a welfare-oriented government, as defined by his second principle. Now, my Constitutional principles guarantee only the Just Principles; they provide no general rights to freedom of speech, religion, and so on (for this would contradict the right of people to establish or not to establish these conditions within their own community). Moreover, communities as well as people may be represented, and there is nothing in the Constitutional Principles establishing a one man, one vote procedure (although this may be done by a subsequent constitutional convention). There are other differences as well, but the important thing is to note that Rawls' constitution and my Constitutional Principles both create a limited, constitutional, representative system of government. In this, therefore, our institutions of justice agree, although for different reasons. He is trying to erect a first-order, sociopolitical system to protect the right of people to their own first-order principles and sociopolitical system. Regardless, there is substantial agreement.

In total, then, the Just Package--just peace--is close to Rawls' first principle of justice plus the political institutions for their implementation.³⁷

The plethora of sociocultural and sociopolitical divisions--each institutionalizing first-order principles of justice--is reflected by the great pluralism among nation-states. These are formally sovereign, independent and equal, and represented equally in the United Nations (except for the veto power of five in the Security Council), our contemporary world federation. And while a right to found or seek a community is not guaranteed, there are international norms emphasizing anticolonialism, the national self-determinism of peoples, and the right of people to flee repressive states and seek political asylum.

And I have already mentioned the violence-repressing aspects of international relations.³⁹

While a fact cannot prove a principle of justice, international relations nonetheless provides a convergent argument to the complex of ethics and facts interwoven into the Just Package. This is especially true because of the method used here. In the social contract model the just peace is what people would choose. International relations shows that historically, over hundreds of years, out of billions of people making choices about and relevant to social institutions, something roughly like the just peace has evolved globally.

First, one clarification. The just peace is a global society of sovereign and equal communities. People can form coercive or authoritarian communities if they wish. Some may desire and personally prosper under such systems. After all, many people voluntarily join and remain in a military organization, which is a totalitarian, coercive system; or monasteries and nunneries, which are absolutist, authoritarian communities. But the people's right to exit communities they find undesirable⁴² and the existence of a government to prevent intercommunity conquest and aggression would ameliorate the most pernicious aspects of such communities. For if their elite allow conditions to become too generally harsh and repressive, then they soon will begin to lose those upon whose labor they are most dependent. Without the ability to erect a Berlin-like wall around their people, totalitarian leaders must seek some level of wide legitimacy--of acceptability--to keep their people.

In any case, the point is that the just peace is not an exchange society for all people. It is an exchange society of communities, some of which themselves may be based on exchange. This qualification in mind, I claim that the just peace is a spontaneous social field that, given the global socialist and authoritarian alternatives, best achieves the following common ends: the adjustment to change; human welfare and equality; and the reduction and amelioration of poverty and hunger.

A. Adjustments. Any society, global or otherwise, has basically two ways to adjust to the diverse situational needs, interests, capabilities, and wills of its members. One is for government to study and plan what adjustments should be made, to apply rational and scientific procedures, and to command and control society so that the findings, results, and beliefs of leaders and experts are implemented. In effect, society is then hierarchical organization with a task orientation. The role of the people is to obey, for otherwise government plans, controls, regulations, rules--the whole apparatus to make proper adjustments--might be defeated. This creates an antifield.⁴³

The other way of reconciling differences and accommodating change is for people (or communities) to freely and reciprocally adjust to their own changing interests and knowledge. Rather than an adjustment imposed from the top, which enhances the possibility of large-scale polarization and violence, adaptation develops from the bottom as people establish their own equilibria. These balances overlap and interlock into increasingly general and more abstract adjustments extending to define the limits of society. These individual level accommodations create a flexible and responsive division of labor for society as a whole, a balance of supply and demand, and prices that efficiently direct action and resources. Free and voluntary adjustments create a social field.

Besides minimizing violence, of which I have already said much,⁴⁴ a virtue of the social field over an antifield, of the voluntary exchange society over a directed-commanded one, is that society can evolve in response to its challenges and the growing knowledge and changing interests of its people. In that lies the best possibility for growth in human justice. In the same way, a spontaneous system of expression and discovery, of freedom of thought and speech, offers the best possibility for human growth in understanding and social justice, as our ideas and beliefs adjust to others and our changing situations. In the same way I argue for freedom of speech and against a command system of truth.

To be sure, in some areas individual and private group activities affect the larger society in a way that normal field (free market) adjustments cannot solve, and therefore require some limited government intervention. Pollution control and equality of educational opportunity are prime candidates for such considerations. But when government must intervene, it should assert only general expectations about the means people and groups employ to pursue their ends. A government of free people or communities should not favor the end or goal of one over another. To minimize violence and the social problems government intervention creates--to foster a just peace--government should be blind to purposes but watchful and facilitative of their pursuit. It should be like the traffic officer in the middle of a busy intersection. He is not concerned about a driver's purpose or destination; nor with the driver's race, ethnicity, sex, religion, wealth, or education. His only interest is to facilitate the driver's orderly and safe passage through the intersection toward his chosen destination. When government becomes concerned with why people do what they do, when a government becomes end directed, it begins to turn a field into an organization with a goal, ordered by an organization chart and divided into command and obey classes. Society becomes coercive. Social violence increases. Social justice declines.

B. Welfare. The greatest boost to human welfare has come with our freedom to pursue our own lives, jobs, and business without government interference, except to maintain law and order and public morality. With the realization of this freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, common people have, where the reign of individual freedom has reached furthest, fed and clothed themselves as never before, and achieved luxuries of which not even kings could dream. To recite these advances and achievements is to risk boring many readers, so much are they now taken for granted--such goods as radio, television, telephones, automobiles, electricity, commercial airplanes, diverse and exotic foreign food, cheap and plentiful books, movies, and, of course, the computer. The industrial revolution and its aftermath from which all these products or possibilities grew was really a radical revolution in freedom. As people freely used their knowledge, made their own adjustments, pursued their wants, bought and produced as they liked, and contracted for work or workers as they desired or needed, came the industrial revolution and explosion in human welfare.

Certainly we still face many welfare-resource problems, such as in "energy scarcity," unemployment, and still the existence of poor and starving people. However, these problems do not reflect a lack of government intervention, socialist policies and planning, or paternalistic programs. Rather, they largely result from government intervention itself. Where government commands adjustments from the top, coercively interferes in the voluntary accommodations among people, then major dislocations, maladjustments, and distortions in the social field occur. To wit, the so-called energy crisis (aside from its international political aspect involving the control by a few states of the oil necessary to the economies of most of the world--but even this is a problem of government intervention) is a result of government regulations and taxing policies. Were there a free energy market, which would allow spontaneous adjustments between buyer and seller, additional energy resources would be developed as they became economic; and there would be a decline in use of particular energy sources (such as oil) and a shift to alternative energy quite naturally in response to increasing prices. Free prices would manifest all the adjustments that occur in society with regard to energy; they would reflect people's expectations; and they would signal what people should do to satisfy their interests. No socialist or interventionary system has developed, or can develop, an alternative to the free market price system for distributing resources, determining wages, allocating goods. It would be the same for energy. The current energy crisis is a result of ignoring this [written in 1998: this crisis in fact ended as energy and price regulations and controls were eased or ended].

Unemployment is likewise mainly a consequence of government intervention in a free market--the attempt to command adjustments rather than allow them to voluntarily take place. Specifically, involuntary unemployment in the United States, which hits minority groups and the poor the hardest, is largely a consequence of the government-mandated minimum wage. This decreases the number of people who can be hired (which is why unions so ardently favor it) and, especially, the ability of businesses to hire trainees or apprentices who learn on the job. Were people free to work at whatever wage they and an employer agreed upon, unemployment would be less of a social problem.⁴⁵

Consider that most anti-welfare scourge, inflation. Pure and simple, this is largely a result of government printing (or otherwise creating) money in excess of the growth in production of a society (which itself may be retarded by anti-capital formation taxes and regulations). As the supply of money rises relative to available goods, demand for goods increases and their prices are bid up. Inflation occurs. Governments have many reasons for purposely "printing" excess money, particularly that it is a source of revenues. Inflation is a hidden tax. It is imposed by government leaders who, fearing to increase taxes but wishing nonetheless to fund favored programs and policies, then resort to deficit spending. Were government denied this power or capability, or were government radically reduced in size such that its monetary impact was small, then inflation would cease to be a great potential or actual problem. Again, this is a matter of people freely adjusting to monetary demands and needs.⁴⁶

Next, consider depression. Any free market is subject to periodic ups and downs. Economic fluctuations are a concomitant of private enterprise and serve to reallocate resources more efficiently, break up rigidities that have developed in the market, flush out incompetent or unproductive personnel who have accumulated in business during good times, and rid the market of uncompetitive firms. If the market (social field) is left alone, these booms and busts are relatively short and shallow, compared, for example, with the Great Depression of the 1930s or the combined recession-inflationary periods of today.

Now, one myth that has gained wide currency is that the depression following the October 29, 1929 stock market crash was a failure of free enterprise. In fact, the depression was caused by government intervention and manipulation of the currency.⁴⁷ What further deepened and prolonged the depression were the controls and policies of President Roosevelt. Trying to ease the burdens of a depression already caused by government, he further intervened massively in the economy, thereby restricting its ability to adjust, restructure itself, and recover.

While the Depression is history obfuscated by socialist mythology, the present state of affairs in the late 1970s is easy for all to see. Huge government outlays, massive deficit spending, continued manipulation of the currency, controls over savings and lending, and other government induced monetary distortions of all kinds have now created the worst of all welfare worlds: high inflation combined with economic stagnation or recession, and individual taxes running somewhere between one-third and one-half of personal income (depending on how income is defined). No longer is there doubt about the major cause of this great contra-welfare problem. It is Big Government, specifically, a socialist-oriented government devoted to interventionist welfare policies. [Written in 1998: the free-market policies of the Reagan Administration in the 1980s and the conservative monetary controls of the Federal Researve during his tenure practically eliminated the inflation of which I wrote in the 1970s and created economic growth that we are still benefitting from today.]

C. Poverty and Hunger. Anyone concerned about mankind is particularly sensitive to the plight of the poor and starving. Indeed, a major impetus to socialist policies is to help these unfortunate people. Ironically, the centralization and use of force and coercion on their behalf has often worsened their condition, consigned many to a permanent state of poverty and dependence, and eroded their dignity,

Historically the greatest help to the poor and hungry has been the growth of an exchange society, with its attendant free market. People could find jobs or use their intelligence and skills to create employment. They could improve their social positions and quality of life. They were no longer dependent on one employer, one master, one region, one skill.⁴⁸ Moreover, the diversity and cost of products, especially food, came within reach of the poor. For example, although the productivity of the free market and opportunity it makes available have been severely strained by wholesale government intervention and controls, if not outright takeovers, many of the poor in America today consider as necessities of life automobiles, television, telephones, radios, washing machines, and refrigerators, not to mention hot running water and indoor toilets. Over the past century our definition of the poor has been gradually uplifted. The poor in exchange societies are by comparison to those of history or of other social systems often very well off.

This does not mean we should be less concerned for the poor. Moreover, pockets of extreme poverty and hunger do exist in exchange societies.⁴⁹ But the way to help them is not by blocking--through government rules and paternalistic policies--the means of the poor to improve themselves, and the benefits they would get from a free and expanding market. Except for emergency situations, it is best to leave helping the poor and hungry to voluntary, charitable organizations. People more fortunate or better off, many themselves emerging through their own efforts from poverty, will voluntarily provide the help, if necessary. The heyday of the free market in the nineteenth century also marked the greatest expansion in private charitable organizations ever seen. But as the government has increasingly taken from workers their earnings so as to provide welfare to the poor, it understandably has driven out or reduced much voluntary, charitable effort.

Historically, the greatest help to the poor and hungry has been the opportunity, jobs, and inexpensive products of an exchange society. Freedom best promotes human welfare.⁵⁰

D. Equality. Inequalities in wealth and power are prima facie unjust to many. Inequalities of some sort, however, will always exist, since people have different capabilities, interests, and wills; have different hereditary and family backgrounds; and confront different situations. And some are simply lucky. But all this aside, what also should be realized is that some people decide not to do what is necessary to achieve reasonable wealth, power, or prestige. Some decide to drop out of school. Some would rather fish, watch television, or socialize than do hard study or work. Some simply refuse to make the sacrifices necessary to move upward, or to maintain high status for those born into it.

Nonetheless, excessive inequalities based on coercion, force, or inequalities due to unalterable physical characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or sex are unjust and should he eliminated. This is an ideal we should try to approximate, and that which does this best is the freedom of an exchange society. The great inequalities in wealth and power that existed historically and still exist today are the products of coercive and authoritarian societies. As man has become free to choose, he has become free to move up the economic and social ladder, to develop and use his knowledge, intelligence, and skills to better himself. The great gap between the powerful and weak, the rich and poor has narrowed with freedom. Even a poor person can become a millionaire;⁵¹ even an average person can become powerful.

Moreover, while culture-based intolerance of certain races, ethnic groups, and women continues to exist, it is progressively undermined by the diversity of opportunity of a free market. The color or sex of whoever made a product is usually incidental, even if known, to a buyer. If a person can provide a needed service, then his color or sex is generally irrelevant. But if such factors are important, there are other buyers or sellers, other opportunities. However, if government controls an economy, these decisions become a matter of coercive controls, enforced discrimination, and institutionalized racism or sexism. Where slavery has existed or does exist, it is a government-enforced system.

But there are other arguments for this just peace that some may consider even more important. First, it assures that people can mutually and reciprocally adjust their different conceptions and attitudes and learn through trial and error about the nature and consequences of their differing views.

Second, it constitutes a method through which the consequences of different ideas and beliefs about justice can be tested through experience. Like science, which is a truth-seeking process of learning and accumulating knowledge, the just peace is a metaethical method for gaining experience and consensus about social justice. To both science and ethics, freedom is essential. If an idea about justice is a good one, it need not be enforced with a gun, which is what socialism and authoritarianism do. People should be free to be persuaded about or discover this them selves--which they will, if the idea is really good.

Third, through a guaranteed freedom to form communities, the just peace permits each person his utopia. He can test in practice his dreams and visions, provided he can persuade others to go along. For this reason the just peace is a metautopia--it is a framework for utopias.

Fourth, the just peace is consistent with Rawls' priority principle of liberty plus his supporting political institutions. Although Rawls goes beyond the just peace in emphasizing individual liberty in his just society and he includes a second welfare principle, nonetheless there is sufficient agreement with the just peace to show that it is in line with at least one highly acclaimed and influential philosophical perspective on social justice.⁵²

Fifth, the just peace is similar to many facets of contemporary international relations. If one can argue that the historical evolution of societies reflects the challenges they confront, the needs and interests of their members, and their general sense of social justice, then contemporary international relations shows that something like the just peace is not only supportable by a social contract model but does in fact reflect the evolution in diverse, global choices of all people through the centuries.

Finally, but surely no less important, the just peace would actually achieve a social justice that many ardently desire for their chosen community. The just peace would promote as a by-product individual adjustments, harmony and growth, social and economic welfare, and social and economic equality. It would help, as no coercive or authoritarian system could, to alleviate poverty and hunger.

Each of these arguments strengthens my case for the just peace. Together with the social contract model, they provide a rational, empirical, and humanistic basis for the just peace.