Note: This is Part 2 of the “Justice as Conditionals” series.

For clarity, we will begin by considering a two-person case, the people named A and B. Suppose A has a preference regarding the behavior of person B. Such a preference is rational only if the behavior of person B impacts person A in a negative way or, more generally, if person B’s future behavior has the potential to violate person A’s morality on a level which the morality ascribes an allowance or obligation for person A’s intervention.

Person A may either physically control person B’s behavior or socially control it. The first option is a topic for another day, clearly offering complications for a verbally-oriented theory. The form of person A’s social control is a very broad subset of communication I will call a Conditional. This is not A’s only option for social control, but is the one which doesn’t rely on some kind of prior relationship between the two, aside from the capacity to communicate.

A Conditional consists of a description of person A’s future behavior conditional upon person B’s future behavior. Tacitly implied by the Conditional is the concept that the contents of the enumeration are backed by A’s goals or sub-goals (coming from the field of AI safety, sub-goals are the concept that many large-scale goals an agent may hold share sub-goals necessary to accomplish any of them; an example of a goal is becoming an astronaut and an example of a sub-goal is surviving until then). That is, making a Conditional implies that the giver of it will actually follow the actions they are prescribing themselves in each case; preserving one’s reputation in this way is a sub-goal of incentivizing their own morality using Conditionals.

The preferences that person A is inducing in person B are not actually new to person B’s reasoning. Rather, person A is simply providing them with carefully-constructed information that allows them to control the future behavior of person A. By presuming preferences that person B has for the behavior of person A, such as preventing person A from punching them in the face, person A is able to associate those preferences with courses of action person B themselves may take.

This series of posts argues that Justice may be considered the study of conditionals, the forms they may take, and the way in which they fit into the rest of human life. (First Drafted 10/2021)