Reynolds and Rawls?

I've been rereading Al Reynolds' novel The Prefect and, with foreknowledge of where the plot was headed, I enjoyed even more on a second read through. In particular I enjoyed the parallels between Aurora and the Wolves in Revelation Space, which probably should have noticed earlier, and the sheer sinister joy of the gradual revelation of the Clockmaker — there's something genuinely creepy about the Clockmaker's mechanical timepieces that, while marking the passage of time, may at the same time be counting off the seconds until they kill the person nearest to them.

But what also struck me, given my current (largely involuntary) immersion in Rawlsianism, was the process of demarchy as practiced by the people in the Aubusson habitat:

'All of us take our issues seriously. That's what citizenship in Aubusson entails. You don't get to live here unless you can hold a weighted voting average above one point two five. That means we're all required to think very seriously about the issues we vote on. Not just from a personal perspective, not just from the the perspective of House Aubusson, but from the standpoint of the greater good of thentire Glitter Band. And it pays off for us, of course. It's how we make our living — by trading on our prior shrewdness. Because our votes are disproportionately effective, we are very attractive to lobbyiests from other communities. On marginal issues, they pay us to listen to what they have to sasy, knowing that a block vote from Aubusson may swing the result by a critical factor. That's where the money comes from.'

'Political bribes?'

'Hardly. They buy our attention, our willingness to listen. That doesn't guarantee that we will vote according to their wishes. If all we did was follow the money, our collective indices would ramp down to one before you could blink. Then we'd be of no use to anyone. '

'It's a balancing act,' put in Caillebot. 'To remain useful to the lobbyists, we must maintain a degree of independence from them. This is the central paradox of our existence. But it is the paradox that allows me to spend my time designing gardens, and Paula to breed her butterflies.'

The Aubusson approach strikes me as very similar to the original position. They choose to put aside their own interests and make the best decision — where "best" is determined by a post-hoc between the eventual democratic result and its effectiveness — for the entirety of society — but only because doing so is to their own advantage. But the idea of lobbyists lobbying people who, if they accept a case that turns out to be wrong, will effectively have destroyed themselves as a commodity? Truly, wonderfully bizarre.