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JUSTICE FOR ALL LIVING SYSTEMS
Lane Tracy
Department of Management Systems
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
Abstract: The concept of justice is derived from essential characteristics of living systems. Thus, justice applies to all levels of living systems, from cells to supranationals. This paper develops several postulates of existential, distributional and environmental justice for living systems and discusses the problems inherent in trying to measure and apply justice over such a wide range of recipients.
It is often assumed that justice is a concept to be applied only to human individuals. Under this assumption a just society is one that accords equitable treatment to each individual member. Yet the concept of justice is also applicable to groups and organizations within a society, as well as to the relationships of societies to each other. For instance, we commonly speak of equal job opportunities for minority groups, equitable tax treatment for corporations, and just compensation to nations that have been attacked.
Law, as a codification of principles of justice, is intended to protect individuals and groups against unfair treatment and to regulate commerce among organizations in the interest of equity. Religious and ethnic groups seek justice through international law or armed conflict. Many human individuals, groups, and organizations also pursue justice for living systems that cannot speak for themselves, such as animals, forests, and infants.
A systems approach to the design of a just society must consider and reconcile the demands of justice for all levels of living systems. This paper employs living systems theory to explore the problems of securing justice at multiple levels, and offers suggestions for establishing priorities when all systems cannot be equally served. It proceeds from the premise that the aim of justice is optimal fulfillment of the needs of all living systems within the constraint of scarce resources. The first question to be addressed is how justice is related to characteristics of living systems.
Living Systems
A living system is an open system composed primarily of organic matter. From the beginning of its existence it possesses a genetic or memetic template that establishes and maintains its structure and processes. The interaction of its subsystems and components is purposefully directed and controlled by its decider subsystem. Additional direction may be received from the templates or deciders of subsystems and suprasystems [3].
A living system strives to maintain a steady internal state of negentropy, as well as to actualize its potential and to propagate parts of itself. Its behavior is directed by purposes and goals. It seeks to fulfill needs for matter, energy and information resources. It requires environmental conditions within certain parameters in order to thrive, and may seek to control its environment in order to obtain or maintain such conditions [3, 5].
Miller [3] identified seven different levels of systems having these characteristics: cells, organs, organisms, groups, organizations, societies, and supranational systems. Systems such as an amoeba, a heart, a gazelle, a family, General Motors, France and the United Nations are alive in the sense that they possess the common systems characteristics of life, including those specified above. Note that Miller did not say an organization is analagous to a living organism; he said that they both possess the essential characteristics of life.
Standards of Justice
Why do living systems deserve justice? Justice is commonly regarded as a birthright. That which is born has a right to live, and life requires resources. Thus, each living entity is born with a right to its fair portion of the goods of this universe. But “birth” and “resources” are living systems concepts. All living systems are born in the sense that there is a moment when their own template and decider subsystem assume primary control of their destiny. As open systems they require resources--inputs of matter, energy, and information to fulfill their needs [4]. To deny resources is to deny life. Justice, therefore, revolves around the right to life itself and to the resources and environmental conditions necessary to sustain life.
Three forms of justice may be identified from these rights. The right to life leads to questions of existential justice. The right to resources involves distributional justice. Finally, the right to a proper environment raises questions of environmental justice.
Living systems theory suggests certain standards of justice. First, since the theory makes no value distinctions between levels of living systems but treats all forms of life as equivalent, we may postulate that justice should treat all living systems equally. Of course, that is no simple prescription. Determining what constitutes equal treatment of earthworms and nations requires a great deal of judgment. Nevertheless, we may assume at least that they have an equal right to exist. Thus the first postulate of justice is:
Postulate 1. All living systems have a right to exist and deserve equal treatment under rules of existential justice.
This postulate does not deny or ignore the evident fact that some living systems naturally threaten the existence of others. For example, certain bacteria threaten the lives of human beings and vice versa. The rules of existential justice, whatever they may be, must cope with the problem of balancing the rights of such antagonistic systems.
In American society the "right to life" is a matter of considerable controversy. As Postulate 1 suggests, the debate about abortion and the rights of a human fetus centers on the question of whether the fetus is a living system. This controversy obscures the true scope of the right to life, however, because it focusses only on human life.
Maintenance
Living systems theory emphasizes the distinction between living and nonliving systems. The concept of justice is itself a creation of living systems; we may assume that it would assert the precedence of life. Indeed, the first imperative of living systems is maintenance of the system [5]. This generally requires that resource inputs be at least equal to losses incurred through output, consumption, decay and obsolescence.
A few resources, such as the air we breathe, may be readily available and relatively unlimited in supply. Most resources, however, are in limited supply and there is competition for them among living systems. Pure water was once freely available to everyone on Earth, and may still be so in some places, but generally the supply has decreased as demand has increased and pure water is now a scarce resource. Furthermore, it is a resource required by living systems at several levels: cells, organs, organisms, family groups, business organizations, and nations all require pure water. The resource is rationed through mechanisms such as fences, fees, contracts, and legislation (e.g., laws and treaties controlling the distribution of water from the Colorado River). Nevertheless, the shortage of pure water and many other scarce resources often leads to open hostilities such as lawsuits, range wars and border disputes. Distributional justice becomes an issue.
If all living systems have an equal right to exist (Postulate 1) and all require resources in order to survive, then distributional justice demands equal access to the necessary resources. This argument leads to a second postulate:
Postulate 2. A minimum standard for distributive justice is that all living systems must have access to resources sufficient to replace their losses.
The rights of the poor to sustenance and shelter, international fishing rights, and protection of the food chain are examples of justice issues related to Postulate 2.
We also know that certain environmental conditions must be maintained in order to support life. Although a living system's environment by definition cannot be totally controlled by the system, human beings and institutions have become increasingly adept at influencing and moderating their surroundings. This may lead to conflict over environmental conditions. The problem is that many systems share the same environment but hold different values with respect to it. Some like it hot, some like it cold; who controls the thermostat? Some wish to develop the land, some (including the native animal and plant life) may wish to maintain it in its natural state.
When environmental groups seek to halt development in order to protect a vanishing species, they are raising the question of who has the right to change the environment and by how much. A similar question arises in an organization or society with respect to which members have rights to control the system and distribute its resources. In this case the organization or society is the environment; all of the members are subject to the conditions of that environment. The source of conflict is the different values, interests and goals held by the members.
Whatever the source of environmental conflict may be, the central point is that different living systems must share the same environment. At a minimum, each system deserves an environment in which it can survive. Thus:
Postulate 3. A minimum standard for environmental justice is that the environment of each living system may not be deliberately altered beyond the parameters that permit the continued existence of that system.
Actualization
Living systems seek more than simple survival and maintenance of steady states; they also tend to grow in size and to become more elaborate in structure. The potential for growth and development of a living system lies in its template and in the characteristics of the system itself. According to Tracy [5], actualization of this potential is an imperative or metapurpose of all living systems. The genetic template of human individuals, as well as the suprasystems of family and state, direct the growth and development of the mental and physical potential of young human organisms. The template and decider subsystem of a new business firm directs it to grow and gain new markets.
Growth presents a problem when resources are limited. Growth and development of a system require a greater amount and variety of inputs than does maintenance of the system. If resources were just sufficient to maintain steady states of all living systems, then actualization of any system would entail violation of Postulate 2. Some other system would not receive inputs sufficient to maintain itself. Although actualization is an imperative of living systems, there appears to be no reason to assert that the growth of one system should outweigh the survival of another. This reasoning leads to the following postulate:
Postulate 4. Distributive justice requires that all living systems have access to resources sufficient to actualize their potential, provided that Postulate 2 is not violated.
The rights of individuals and groups to an education, as well as access of poor nations to development capital, are questions of justice related to Postulate 4.
Propagation
A third imperative of living systems, according to Tracy [5], is propagation. Living systems seek to reproduce themselves in part or whole and to disseminate their products and ideas. Living systems are mortal and their life spans are finite, but their templates are nearly immortal. Living systems serve as “survival machines" for their genetic and memetic templates [2]. Through processes of reproduction and dissemination the template, the essence of the system, can be passed from one living system to another, thereby assuring its survival beyond the lifespan of any particular system.
The position of propagation in the hierarchy of imperatives poses a difficult question. From one perspective the template is the most central and essential part of a living system, and its survival should take precedence over the survival of the system. From this perspective the survival of the species is more important than an individual life. Yet the living system is the mechanism for survival and propagation of the template. Organisms are not ready to reproduce until they mature.
Organizations likewise become better able to disseminate their products, ideas, and structure as they grow and develop, In a developmental sense, therefore, maintenance and actualization must take precedence over propagation. I will take that position here, while recognizing that a living system may in some circumstances put survival of the species or dissemination of an idea ahead of personal safety.
Propagation differs from maintenance and actualization with respect to its requirements. Not only does it require inputs to replace consumed and exported resources, but also it requires a receptive environment. It would not be just to require one living system to mate with another or to accept another's ideas and products; this would put one system's rights above another's. Yet every system should have the right to try to find a mate, a customer, a believer -- in other words, a willing recipient. Thus we have the following postulates:
Postulate 5. Distributive justice requires that all living systems have access to resources sufficient to propagate their template, products and ideas, provided that Postulates 2 and 4 are not violated.
Postulate 6. Environmental justice requires that all living systems be allowed to try to propagate their template, products, and ideas.
The rights recognized in Postulate 6 are codified in American law as rights of free speech, free press, and free trade. Limitations on these rights are noted in the laws of libel, copyright, patents, trademarks, and so forth.
Justice as Conflict Management
Justice is inextricably linked to conflict. If resources were not scarce, justice in the distribution of them would automatically prevail. If living systems did not have to share the same environment, any amount or kind of control over that environment would be just. The rules of justice are established to provide standards for the resolution of existential, environmental and distributional conflicts.
Benne [1] recognized two distinct types of human conflict. Some conflicts occur because members hold different values for the same organizational (environmental) conditions. Other conflicts occur because members hold the same values for scarce resources that must be distributed. These two types of conflict lead, respectively, to problems of environmental and distributional justice.
The rules of justice for managing conflict between living systems of the same level, and especially of the same kind, are relatively easy to formulate. When the requirements for maintenance, actualization, and propagation of each system are similar, it is not difficult to approximate an equal distribution of resources or an equally acceptable set of environmental conditions. The laws of nations are often adequate to produce justice under these conditions.
Two factors may complicate the legal picture, however. The first is the introduction of additional standards beyond the requirements of maintenance, actualization and propagation. If the law requires equal happiness, for instance, or if it recognizes rights of ownership of one system over another (e.g. slavery), then equality of treatment may be difficult to define. In the first instance we have no reliable way to measure equality of happiness; in the case of ownership the law itself establishes an inequality between living systems.
The second complicating factor is that the law must apply to different levels of living systems. A major problem we face in treating the seven levels equitably is that the guardians of justice are human individuals. Legislators, judges, lawyers and jury members represent the society and are part of its decider subsystem, but they are also individual organisms. As such, they may be inclined to accord more weight to individual human rights than to the rights of animals, plants, or corporations. It appears to be difficult, for instance, for juries to refrain from million dollar judgments against corporations for acts which, if committed by an individual, might incur no penalty at all.
On the other hand, some organizational deciders are so zealous in the performance of their duties that they seem to ignore individual rights. For example, judges, as deciders for the state, may show more concern for maintaining the integrity of the legal system than for meting out justice to individual defendants and victims. As a result, rapists and murderers are freed to prey again because of procedural discrepancies in their arrest or trial. This may represent justice for the state, but past and future victims usually do not regard it as just.
How can individual justice be reconciled with what is just for the state, other nations and their people, corporations, families, fetuses, whales and forests, to name just a few of the living systems that deserve justice? The first step is to be aware of all of the systems for whom justice is a valid concept, and to accept the idea that a system of justice must recognize their rights and needs. Second is to assure that they are all legally recognized and represented. We cannot circumvent the fact that the legal system is staffed by human individuals, but the law can define the rights of other entities and the fiduciary duties of their legal representatives. It already does so with respect to corporations and minors, for instance.
The truly thorny question is how to compare and weight the rights and needs of systems at different levels. How do we balance the health and life expectancy of individual victims of asbestos poisoning against the health and life expectancy of a corporation that manufactured or installed asbestos materials? The two parties differ not only in kind, but also in size, wealth, and presumed expertise and foreknowledge of the dangers of asbestos. Should we regard the corporation as a single living system balanced against the claims of thousands of litigants, or should justice recognize that the corporation also represents the livelihood of thousands of employees and stockholders? How can the duty of individual consumers to choose and use goods wisely be equated with the duty of the corporation, with its much greater scientific expertise, to be wise in its production and marketing decisions?
A similar set of questions arises with regard to feeding the hungry peoples of the world. Governments of the rich nations could conceivably make decisions about the distribution of food that would result in an adequate diet for all people. But those governments must also consider what is just compensation for farmers, transporters, merchants who may lose sales, workers who may face stiffer competition from low-paid (but well-fed) labor in other countries, and even other governments whose power may depend on control of food supplies. Given the complexity of the problem, it is little wonder that most governments settle for inaction or woefully inadequate relief measures.
These complications can be alleviated by sticking strictly to standards based on the requirements of living systems. Concepts such as “pursuit of happiness" or “pain and suffering" may have meaning for human individuals, for instance, but they have no place in a set of laws meant to apply equally to all living systems. The imperatives of maintenance, actualization and propagation have meaning for all living systems, however, as do the requirements for resources and a healthful environment. Any law that clearly derives from the postulates I have stated should be applicable across system levels.
There remain sufficient difficulties to keep us occupied in the pursuit of justice. The "minimum daily requirements" for maintenance of most living systems are not yet established, let alone the requirements for actualization and propagation. Also, given that justice is a peculiarly human concern, there is a tendency to establish priorities among living systems. Are these priorities just? Is the life of a person more important than the life of the nation? Of a laboratory animal? How does the picture change if the death of one system can save the lives of many? Questions such as these are not resolved by living systems theory.
[1] K. D. Benne, "The significance of human conflict." In The Reading Book of Human Relations Training, L. Porter, ed., 1979. Alexandria, VA: NTL Institute, pp. 41-46.
[2] R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 21, 25, 201-215.
[3] J. G. Miller, Living Systems, 1978. New York: McGraw-Hill, p- 18.
[4] L. Tracy, "Toward an improved need theory." Behavioral Science vol. 31 (1986): 205-218.
[5] L. Tracy, The Living Organization: Systems of Behavior, 1989. New York: Praeger, pp. 8-11.