Truth Reconciled

Introduction

In a previous post, I presented the moral purpose of government. I showed that the best government is the one that best promotes the success of morality in the long term. This purpose was derived from morality itself, which defines good and bad, and is founded in absolute truth.

During the formation of any society, a government is created to unify them. Two different wills arise: the Will of the People and the Will of the Government. These wills are variable and can disagree with each other and with morality. In this post, we will determine how to best organize the government so that it fulfills its purpose of promoting morality, by aligning its own will and the Will of the People with the Will of Morality over the long term.

Law and Justice

The government’s principal tool for carrying out its mission, apart from the people, is the ability to define laws. Laws are rules that are authorized and enforced by the government, which in turn was authorized by the people. In other words, laws are rules that a society makes for itself. The law determines what actions are considered correct and incorrect. Presumably, the law should help the society to accomplish its principal goal of becoming perfectly moral.

The law has no potency if it is not obeyed. A good set of laws must therefore have mechanisms that incentivize obedience to them no matter the moral state of the society, whether they are generally good or evil. Justice is a concept that comes into existence with the creation of laws. We can define Justice as follows:

Definition: Justice is the moral concept that demands that the law be faithfully followed, usually by requiring that each action have a corresponding consequence.

The perfect, natural Justice that derives from morality itself demands that all imperfect societies be completely eliminated (preferably by conversion) as discussed in my paper on morality. Natural justice receives its authority from morality, which is derived from truth itself, making it absolutely inescapable. The next type of law and justice comes from the authority of God, who is perfectly moral and unchanging, which means that his justice is as binding and inescapable as natural justice. Going lower, we come to the laws of man. The level of justice derived from the laws of societies on Earth is often escapable because the societies themselves are imperfect and do not execute the law faithfully of their own free will.

Among human laws, there will be different levels of lawful authority. A small group of people can agree on a common law among themselves, and they can establish their own form of justice to enforce the law, but their laws will be limited to their little society that authorized it, and cannot be assumed to have any authority outside of that small group. Every set of laws applies only to the society that authorized them or consented to them. The most powerful laws are those established by the largest unit of society.

The government of a nation should be established by a powerful set of laws authorized by the entire nation. This doesn’t mean that every individual in the nation must support every aspect of this set of laws, but only that it must have been accepted by the Will of the People, in whatever way the society has collectively agreed to measure that will. This supreme set of laws that defines and gives foundation to the political structure of the society is called the Constitution.

Definition: A constitution is the supreme set of laws that defines and gives foundation to the political structure of the society.

A good constitution must be prepared for the unjust tendency of humanity to deviate from the law, otherwise it will not last and the government will fail in its purpose. It is vital that the constitution be built up in such a way that Justice is effectively established. The Will of the People, the Will of the Government, and the wills of subsets of each, must be properly managed and brought back into alignment with morality continuously by wisely crafted political mechanisms.

A Prepared Constitution

The constitution should contain the political mechanisms which I have referred to that incentivize a realignment of the variable wills with morality. The constitution must also guarantee that these mechanisms are not easily eliminated, and therefore any changes to the constitution should require widespread, near-unanimous support. The constitution must not be superseded by other laws, thus rendering it impotent, but must be considered the Supreme Law of the Land. The methods of calculating the Will of the People and the Will of the Government should be defined in the constitution.

It is inevitable in our imperfect world that there will arise occasions in which the Will of the People disagrees with the Will of the Government, and either or both of these may disagree with Morality. There are four scenarios which the constitution must be prepared for: (1) The people and the government are good, (2) The people are good and the government is evil, (3) The people are evil and the government is good, (4) The people and the government are evil. An analysis of these four possible situations will tell us much about what should be written in a good constitution.

Scenario #1: The people and the government are good. In this scenario, justice will be automatically satisfied as the whole society will obey the law without much need for incentives. There will be no threat to the constitution from within, but there could be threats from the outside. The constitution must therefore provide the government with power to defend the society against foreign evils. The constitution must not limit the ability of these good people to efficiently progress and excel, so that they are not out-paced and overcome by other societies.

The constitution ought to be adaptable when there is widespread near-unanimous support for it. Typically, only good ideas can obtain such a high level of agreement, which would be the case in this good society. A high standard of agreement for amendments will allow the constitution to adapt without sacrificing its moral quality.

Scenario #2: The people are good and the government is evil. Many laws are necessary to prepare for this situation. The constitution must provide a way for the Will of the Government to be brought back into alignment with Morality. This is accomplished most efficiently by having a changeable government, chosen by the Will of the People via elections. When the people are good, elections will quickly pull the Will of the Government toward the Will of the People, which is already moral. This election process should be difficult for the government to change, otherwise its purpose is destroyed.

In the meantime, the people should be able to communicate with the government through petitions and peaceful protests without fear of retribution. In the worst-case scenario, the people must be able to defend themselves against their own government, which may seek to destroy those whom they deem rebellious so as to bring the Will of the People into alignment with their own evil will. This means that the government must not have a monopoly on military expertise and weaponry, and the people deserve the right to keep and bear arms and use them in their defense.

If an evil government cannot easily fight against its own people, it still has two other options: the law and its executive authority. Since the government creates the laws, it could potentially use its legislative powers to outlaw unfavorable opinions or people. The opinions and speech of the people must therefore be protected by the supreme law, the constitution. New laws that violate the constitution must be struck down by the judicial power of the government, which must therefore be separate from the legislative powers. The executive power must also be separate from the legislative power, otherwise the legislature could both create and execute their illegal laws, ignoring the judiciary. The executive branch should also be separate from the judiciary, so that people are not wrongfully judged and then wrongfully punished by the same officials who judged them. A good constitution therefore requires at least three branches of government with separated powers: the Legislative Branch, the Judicial Branch, and the Executive Branch, which serve to create the laws, judge the laws, and enforce the laws, respectively.

Checks and Balances are necessary to ensure that all three branches of government behave correctly. Each branch should be checked by another, and no branch should have power over the branch that checks them. Since the judiciary checks the legislature, it follows that the judiciary must be checked by the executive branch or the people. The executive branch has the duty to ensure that the rights of the people are not abused by bad judges. The executive branch must in turn be checked by the legislature or the people, and must be removed if they do not effectively enforce the law.

Scenario #3: The people are evil and the government is good. We’ve already determined that the constitution must establish an election process, but what good are elections when the Will of the People is evil in comparison with the government? In that case, the election process will drive the government away from morality towards the evil will of the people. This is not good, and therefore there ought to be a delay between elections so that the government does not immediately become evil. How long should the delay be? It is hard to say, but it ought to be sufficiently long so that transient fads or popular foolish opinions can be filtered out through free argument amongst the people. This delay is not without danger, given the possibility of scenario #2, but we’ve already established policies to deal with that.

The delay between elections is only useful if the people are free to express and debate ideas. Censorship of ideas is therefore discouraged, and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience ought to be protected by the constitution. In the free and fair battle of ideas the truth will always prevail, and the effect will be a change of opinions which drives the will of the people towards truth and morality. It is possible that the evil majority of the people might seek to eliminate or suppress a good minority rather than debate them, in which case the good government should have the duty and power to protect the good people and their rights from those who try to suppress them. The government must not allow any person or entity among the people to become too powerful, such that the battle of ideas becomes slanted in their favor through censorship, intimidation, etc.

In order for the battle to be truly free and fair, the government can give no advantage or disadvantage to any political ideology, philosophy, or religion. The government ought to have no say in what is true and what isn’t; it is up to the people to decide for themselves. This means that there ought to be no state religion or state doctrine. The state must not write its own history, its own news, or decide what is to be taught in the schools. In other words, there ought to be a separation of church and state, separation of press and state, and a separation of school and state. The government should not be allowed to limit the scope of the debate by prohibiting assemblies and gatherings in which these discussions can take place.

Scenario #4: The people and the government are evil. Many injustices are probably inevitable in this scenario, but still, a well-designed constitution should be capable of surviving these evil times, and capable of reducing the injustices as much as possible. In preparation for the first scenario, we made the constitution adaptable with widespread support. This adaptability might make it vulnerable to corruption from an evil society. However, evil is based on lies, and lies tend to disagree with each other, so even if everyone is evil it is unlikely that they will all agree on anything. The requirement of a supermajority for amendments to the constitution therefore makes it resistant to corruption. The separation of powers mentioned earlier also limits the ability of the government to corrupt the laws, since the different branches of government may have different intentions and will fight against one another if they are mostly evil. Thus evil is its own demise.

The greatest danger to the society during these times would be that a large portion of the society decides to abandon the constitution. We should try to ensure that the checks and balances established in the constitution are sufficient that opposing parties would rather stunt the progress of their enemies through constitutional means rather than abandoning the law and starting a civil war.

Federalism

The policies described in the previous section are derived from logic and goodness and ought to be implemented in the political structure of every society, large or small. Apart from these fundamental principles, proper legislation in most cases will depend heavily on the specific circumstances, make-up, and culture of each society. Legislators should do their best to figure out what policies will best incentivize the moral progress of the people they serve.

This means that for any large society encompassing many cities, there must necessarily be a hierarchy of governments. Each subgroup of the population will need its own laws specific to their group, which would be written and enforced by their own local government. A higher government is necessary to unify the society as a whole.

There will be many different opinions about what is right, and just choosing one path for the entire nation is not the best way to proceed. What if the path turns out to be very bad? If there are no other societies around, then there will be no one to help, and the people will have no place to seek refuge. The government will have failed in its mission and must be rebuilt from scratch.

It is safer to have several similar societies to which people can flee or that can assist in times of trouble. It is also extremely difficult to determine how effective policies are if there is not another similar society with a slightly different set of policies with which we can compare results. Therefore, it is beneficial to have the society divided into a set of smaller societies that are free to create their own laws.

A nation can be divided into states, a state into counties, and a county into cities. Societies with good laws will do well and progress more, while societies with bad laws will falter. A federal government will serve to unify the states and guarantee that the foundational rights and political structure described in the previous section are present and protected in every state. A well-established federal constitution will define the federal government and provide incentives that push the Will of the Federal Government, the Will of the United States, the Will of the State Governments, and the Will of the People towards morality.

With all these interacting wills, there are many scenarios for which the federal constitution should be prepared, most of which will lead us to the same conclusions that we found previously. However, there are a few new additions to our constitutional policies that must be put in place in preparation for a few special scenarios.

Both the state and federal governments are made up of representatives who are elected from time to time. Each state will have a constitution which describes how they will calculate the will of the people of the state as some kind of average over the individual wills. But who should elect federal officials? How should we calculate the Will of the United States? Should it be an average over the wills of the state governments or an average over the wills of the collective people of the United States? Should it give equal weight to every person, or equal weight to every state, or something in between? In the scenarios where all the wills are mostly good, none of these details will matter; it is in the scenarios where some of the wills are evil that the structure of elections and federal decision-making becomes important.

If all federal officials are elected by just one kind of will, and then that will becomes evil, then there will be nothing to stop it from contaminating the federal government, so some kind of combination of wills is preferable. It is good to require agreement among the several wills for all important decisions, since good wills tend to agree with each other and bad wills tend not to. For this reason, the legislative power of the federal government should be divided between a group of officials chosen by the people and another group of officials chosen by the states who cannot pass any laws without substantial agreement between the two groups. Precedent requires that we call these two groups the House of Representatives and the Senate, and together they are called the Congress. It is the duty of the Congress to debate and come to widespread agreement on what is right before making new legislation.

In the case of federal elections, however, a decision must be made even if there is not significant agreement between the different types of wills. Somebody has to fill the position in question. Since the members of congress are elected in small local elections, this dilemma only applies to the executive or judicial branches of the federal government. Federal nation-wide elections must have some way of calculating an average will of the people and the states that will not give one a significant advantage over the other.

Perhaps we could divide the executive and judicial branches just as we did with the legislative branch, but that would be unwise. The purpose of the executive branch is to execute the law, and a division of power in that branch would severely limit its effectiveness and diminish the potency of well-established law, no to mention the enormous potential for violent conflict. Unity and efficiency are valuable for this branch. We cannot have the people and the states electing two different, divided sets of executive officials.

A division of power in the judicial branch may be arguable, but this branch ought to be resistant to fads and public opinions that constantly change. It should interpret the law based on the understanding of those who originally wrote the law and follow long-standing precedent. It should consist of legal experts who don’t need to satisfy an ignorant mob to keep their position, and therefore they should not be elected by the people directly, but should instead be appointed by government officials who represent the people but also have knowledge of law and awareness of who the experts are. This power of judicial appointment cannot be given to just one of the other two branches; it must be effected through the mutual agreement of the executive and legislative branches.

It follows that nation-wide federal elections ought to apply only to the executive branch. Executives should be chosen by some combination of the will of the people and the will of the states that gives each approximately equal weight. In the United States of America, this is implemented via the Electoral College.

The principles we have just derived—the Bicameral Legislature, long-term judicial appointments, and the Electoral College—are set in place to make the federal government resistant to evil intentions on the part of the states or the people. Other policies must be put in place to protect the people and the states in the scenario of an evil federal government. In addition to the gauranteed rights and principles derived in previous sections, the people and the states should have the power to check the federal government and amend the federal constitution through a nation-wide vote or a convention of state legislatures without the need to involve the federal government.

Conclusion

In summary, the best form of government should be defined by a well-established constitution whose primary purpose is the formation and preservation of the perfectly moral and unified society, and which contains all of the following measures to establish Justice:

• Guaranteed rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
• Military power to defend against foreign threats.
• Adaptable when there is widespread support for a change.
• Representatives chosen by the people through a well-established election process, with delays between elections.
• Guaranteed right to petition the government and peacefully protest.
• Guaranteed right of the people to keep and bear arms.
• Separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers, with checks and balances.
• Guaranteed rights in court to prevent injustices against innocent people.
• Guaranteed freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, and the press.
• Guaranteed freedom of religion and beliefs with a separation of Church and State and a separation of School and State.
• Guaranteed protection of the rights of those in the minority.
• Federalism, which denotes a collection of mostly independent States united under one federal government.
• Bicameral federal legislature
• Joint judicial appointment by the executive and legislature. 
• The Electoral College.

The Constitution of the United States of America, ratified in 1791, contains every one of these requirements, except perhaps the separation of School and State, which was not really an issue at the time of its formation. The wisdom of the Founding Fathers of this country is evident in the quality of the government they created. I am convinced that the Constitution of the United States of America is the most perfect constitution ever written, and it may be the best political structure that can possibly exist in a society of imperfect mortals.