A good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collectivity to insure individuals against individually suffered misfortune; and that the quality of society is measured by the quality of life of its weakest, just like the carrying power of a bridge is measured by its weakest pillar.

This is the essence of a good society: that people are able to feel goodness in themselves and each other as much as possible; that even when things are difficult or life is painful, people have the support of others; that the ways we get things done are also the ways we carve out spaces to fully see and appreciate each other. And have fun.

If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays. I can now add a slight variation on this; you cannot have a good society unless virtue pays. But here we get very close to the whole subject of metaneeds, and also of the ideal conditions where dichotomies are resolved and transcended.

In a perfect society, each citizen would understand the universality of truth and honor the rights and needs of others. A good society must be based on democratic principles, and yet when a democracy loses sight of the rights of its minority members and allows the wishes of the majority to control everything, there will always be problems. The rights of those who voted for the losing side of an election are fully as important as those who voted on the winning side. Objective standards of law and behavior must be respected at all times, and all members of any given society must be equal within those standards. When one group seizes power from another and flouts the basic rule of law, chaos inevitably follows. A good thing cannot come from a bad intention.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

Any system that is built on a false understanding of human nature is doomed to fail. Building a society where the primary objective is to protect one’s fragile self-esteem from the dangers of competition will only lead to a society of weakness, entitlement, and apathy. Life is necessarily competitive; society is necessarily hierarchical. It does no one any favors to pursue a utopian vision of society where no one’s feelings are hurt.

We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called socialism.

The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.

A society is a cooperative venture for the mutual advantage of its members.

But <span style="color:green" title="that we live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other, and that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life">what such a philosophy overlooks is that, despite all the competition at the surface, there is a huge substratum of cooperation taken for granted that keeps the world going. [...] We may indeed as individuals compete for jobs, but our function in the job, once we get it, is to contribute at the right time and place to that innumerable series of cooperative acts that eventually result in automobiles being manufactured, in cakes appearing in pastry shops, in department stores being able to serve their customers, in the trains and airlines running as scheduled. And what is important for our purposes here is that all this coordination of effort necessary for the functioning of society is of necessity achieved by language or else it is not achieved at all. </SPAN>

We want to build a new society, a free society where all men are equal, a society where industry, thrift, integrity and uprightness prevail hence we must wipe out all bad habits of the old society.

To enumerate the particular details—the sufficient conditions—of a good society is effectively to prohibit individuality and social change. A planned society, a society in which sufficient conditions are politically determined and coercively imposed, is ‘closed’ to the spontaneous innovations of free association. We see this in the utopian writings of Plato and his many admirers. A utopian society is a perfect society, one that has been carefully designed by a wise and beneficent lawgiver. Any deviation from perfection must necessarily be for the worse, so social change—which in this scheme is but another name for social degeneration—must be arrested at all costs. And this, in turn, requires the suppression of individuality. The individual’s pursuit of happiness—that powerful and unpredictable agent of social change—must be subordinated for the sake of a good society, as specified in the utopian blueprint of sufficient conditions.

What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?... So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.

Every society is a moral society. In certain respects, this character is even more pronounced in organised societies. Because the individual is not sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives everything necessary to him, as it is for society that he works.