Diverse Groups Agreeing on a System of Justice in Distribution: Evidence from the Philippines

Abstract

Can unanimous (or nearly so) agreement be reached by members of a diverse community on a system of justice in distribution used to guide the re-distribution of endowments within this community? Arrow’s impossibility result suggests that this question will receive a negative answer if certain conditions are imposed on the procedures that a community employs in the attempt to make important community decisions. These conditions are reconsidered by allowing for various types of under-insured risk and uncertainty that face members of communities—especially communities in developing countries. Next, two types of uncertainty are allowed for in the designs of various game-theoretic experiments to determine if groups of individuals can come to agree unanimously on a single system of justice in distribution. (These experiments are based on those devised by Frohlich, Oppenheimer and Eavey, and Frohlich and Oppenheimer.) The participants in these experiments are asked to choose one out of four reasonable alternative systems of justice. As for the participants, they are drawn from various sections of Filipino society. The experimental results obtained indicate that groups of individuals, who possess certain characteristics (but nevertheless who hold diverse views on matters of social importance) do agree unanimously to choose a single system of justice in distribution under relevant conditions of uncertainty. The system of justice agreed upon is a version of Rawls’s first principle of justice and the priority rule—a principle that is related to Popper’s principle of minimising avoidable suffering. The participants also explain their decisions in language that reflects that they have an understanding of the uncertain economic and social realities that members of their community face. In the light of these experimental results it is indicated what alternative conditions should be used, in place of some of the Arrovian conditions, in order to generate possibility results. It is also emphasised that this possibility result need not be satisfied in all communities. This is so since the moral intuition of members of a community probably will be influence by the cultural and other relevant circumstances to be found in this community, yet these cultural and other relevant circumstances vary across communities.