Friday, July 21, 2017

In a philosophy essay of 3 paragraphs, describe your perfect society.

For your essay you can draw on a lot of different ideas from the history of philosophy. This topic is explicitly focused on the concept of a utopia. The interesting thing about utopias is that despite discussing them throughout history, the word was coined to show the fact that there will never be a perfect society run by humans—utopia literally means no-place from Greek, and the term was coined by Sir Thomas More in the early 1500s.
The reason a utopia is impossible is that all desires would have to be satisfied. Therefore I think you should focus on making the perfect society in the sense that it is the best for every person in it—perhaps even talking about who is allowed in and if there is even a very large group of people living together.
You should focus on four main points when talking about how you would structure your society: politics, economics, social connections, and religion. Generally, if your society was going to be perfect, you should have systems in place that are going to help everyone. For instance, politically some people think direct democracy is the best political system, while others would argue for monarchy or even anarchy—you need to decide what works best in your opinion based on pros/cons. I think there is a lot to be said of a government run by a positive and moral artificial intelligence.
Economically, you have a few systems to choose from, but whether you argue for communism, socialism, capitalism, mixed-market, or something in-between—you need to be sure that what your saying makes sense and can be argued persuasively. For example, Marx presents communism as a perfected system where people are equal and there is no ruling class. That is not how reality works out for the system, but because it's your perfect society, you could come up with a way in which communism or any other theoretical system would work correctly.
For social and religious systems, you should look at the pros and cons of how societies work. Do you want to have a mixed culture, or do you think there needs to be a single monoculture? Will there be racial or ethnic strife? How can you work to correct the social and religious issues that exist in our societies today? Maybe, going full speculation, humans cannot be human if they are to have a perfect community, but instead need to be controlled like in The Giver or 1984. We generally see those societies as dystopias, but there is an argument that could be made for the society where people don’t suffer as being “perfect.”

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