The challenge with actualizing justice in many contemporary societies is the broad and often conflicting individual beliefs on rights and responsibilities that each member of a society maintains to describe the opportunities and compensations they attribute to themselves and others. This obscurity is compounded through a lack of academic or political alignment on the definition and tenets of justice.
The result of the deficiency of commonality of the definition and tenants of justice often result in myopic decisions by individuals and discontinuity within a society that reduce the available rights, obligations, opportunities, and/or compensations that could be available through alternative modalities.
The paper begins by assessing the challenge of establishing mutual trust in order to achieve cooperation. I then examine utility enhancement strategies available through cooperation. Next, I turn to models that describe natural and artificial sources of social contacts, game theory, and evolutionary fitness to produce beneficial results. I then examine social norms, including the dual inheritance theory, as models which can selectively reinforce certain cooperative behaviors and reduce others. In conclusion, a possible connection among these models to improve the overall fitness of society as defined by the net average increase in available utility, rights, opportunities, and compensations is offered.
Through an examination of concepts that inform individual choice and coordination with others, concepts within social coordination, the nature of social contracts, and consequentialist justice to coordinate behaviors through social norms may illustrate an integrated perspective and, through additional examination, produce a comprehensive model to describe how societies could identify and foster just human coordination.
The commonly accepted goal of sustainability, to fulfill our current needs and maintain the worlds systems so future generations can also fulfill their needs, unifies efforts efficiently and aligns people with future thinking. But the concepts related, and their applications are fairly ambiguous in guiding people to what exactly they can do to make choices for sustainability. Individuals choices make a difference, adding up to societal shifts that change the world for the better. In such a complex world, there is a clear need for guidance through these systems. Sustainability and Resilience (S&R) is an optimistic podcast that journeys through thought-provoking science-based sustainability challenges with a bit of comedic relief. Listeners are entertained and become empowered to know what sustainable choices are, and why they are sustainable. S&R podcast uses systems thinking to pinpoint, realistic actionable items that empower listeners with a broad-spectrum sustainability knowledge for making everyday choices. Foundational research proved, developed and formed the idea of the podcast. Recording research lead to the ability to record test episodes, gather listener feedback and update the podcast concept. The podcast was officially created with the release of the debut episode that can anyone can listen to for free on all major platforms.
Globally we are struggling to match the need for development with the available resources. Kate Raworth’s (2012) developed the idea of a “safe and just space” as a balance between the planetary boundary approach and ensuring a level of basic needs satisfaction for everyone. O’Neill et al. (2018) argue that countries are currently not able to provide their populations with basic needs without concurrently exceeding planetary boundary measures. While attempts have been made to get people to change their habits through moral self-sacrifice, this has not been successful. Kate Soper (2008) argues that a change towards sustainability will only be possible if an alternative to high consumption is offered, without trade-offs in well-being. Technological improvements are often thought to end up providing solutions to the problem of overconsumption, but as Jackson (2005) shows convincingly, this is highly unlikely due to the overwhelming scale of changes required.
‘Alternative hedonism’ (Soper 2008) is a philosophical approach that has been proposed to solve this dilemma. By changing what humanity pursues to be less focused on consumption and more linked to community interaction and living healthy, fulfilling lives, we would simultaneously reduce stress on the globally limited resources and sinks. By developing and understanding satiation points – the point beyond which well-being no longer increases because of increased consumption - affluence that wastes resources without improving well-being could be reduced. This paper explores how ‘alternative hedonism’ and the development of ‘satiation points’ could be helpful in getting humanity closer to the ‘safe and just space’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that taking up of ‘alternative hedonism’ would entail.