Constitutional change has been on the government’s agenda since they acceded to office in August 2020 but with elections 2025 in sight it’s unclear how far they will be able to unfurl their agenda. We agree with them that we need to engender broad acceptance for the changes across the political, ethnic and other divisions in the people and especially amongst the politicians. While we may sometimes falter, Guyanese are attuned to the British contractual tradition of Liberalism, which envisages individuals bargaining rationally to produce a “contract” that would protect their interests. It was assumed that the actual principles, resting on the moral foundation of the contract, and centred on liberty and equality, which were the central values that Liberalism attempted to implement and balance. This tradition ranged from Hobbes to Locke (who postulated an actual original contract entered into by rational agents who would act in accordance with the requirements of liberal justice) to Kant who accepted that the contract does not have to exist in fact but should still bargain as if one existed.
Kant proposed that the solution to the inevitable conflicts in organised human societies, lay in the design of appropriate institutions. He proposed that institutions, as with all normative behaviour, would have to satisfy the “categorical imperative”: “act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world”. Most commentators who followed him agreed with his stricture that institutions constituting a state must be organised in accordance with the principle of justice, but there have been interminable discussions as to whether particular proposals satisfied or did not satisfy, the categorical imperative. John Rawls, the most influential of modern liberal political philosophers, came up with another formulation to guide the formation of social institutions nearly two centuries later, in 1971. It had the great virtue of simplicity.
In the opening line of his first section in his magnum opus A Theory of Justice, Rawls boldly declared that the principle of “justice” is the standard that would generate the broad acceptability for the establishment of any institution necessary to implement any initiative for enduring stability: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” His definition of “justice” is very pertinent to our effort to construct a democratic state in Guyana: “…a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.” Most avoid talking about “dties”.
More importantly, Rawls introduced a methodology for arriving at substantive principles for making decisions in divisive situations such as we have in Guyana, where it is vital that the decisions are seen as not favouring any one constituency. Procedurally, Rawls proposed that we make our suggestions about the fundamental principles that will structure and govern society, from behind a metaphorical “veil of ignorance” that precludes us from taking into consideration our personal position, class, gender, race, religion, even intelligence or interests in the matter under consideration. This “justice as fairness” would provide the requisite objectivity and impartiality in judgment necessary to engender the requisite trust “since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favour his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain.” With such principles we would not formulate, for instance, rules that would put minorities at a disadvantage since we could possibly be members of a minority group.
Rawls derived two substantive principles of justice that have been very influential since then in liberal political thought. However, he himself accepted they were most applicable to the developed democracies with strong economic foundations. In Guyana we would have to derive our substantive principles of justice along lines of equity because of our particular development trajectory. Based on our history, justice for Guyanese institutions – especially our Constitution, would have to ensure that the values of liberty and equity are on the top of or agenda.
