Both constrained and unconstrained visions are ultimately concerned with social results. The constrained vision considers it beyond the capability of any manageable set of decision-makers to marshal the requisite knowledge, and dangerous to concentrate sufficient poser, to carry out their decisions, even if it were possible. Given the unconstrained vision, which permits results to be directly prescribed, its basic concepts are expressed in terms of results. The degree of freedom is thus the degree to which one's desires can be realized, without regard to whether the obstacles to full realization bed the deliberately imposed restrictions of government or the lack of circumstantial prerequisites. Justice is likewise a question of outcomes, and the justice or injustice of a society can therefore be determined directly by hose outcomes, whether they be the result of conscious decisions, social attitudes, or circumstances inherited form the past.
Equality too is a result, the degree of equality or inequality being a direct observable fact.
All these basic terms are defined in profoundly different ways under the assumptions of the constrained vision. One consequence of this is that those with different visions often argue past each other, even when they accept the same rules of logic and utilize the same data, for the terms of discourse signify very different things. In the constrained vision, where man cannot directly create social results but only social processes, it is characteristics of those processes that freedom, justice, power, and equality have significance. A social process has freedom to the extent that it refrains from interfering with the choices of individuals-whether or not the circumstances of those individuals provide them with many options or few. A social process has justice to the extent that its rules are just, regardless of the variety of outcomes resulting from the application of those rules.