SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY

Social contract theory and conventionalism
Social contract tradition
State of nature
Agreement in the state of nature
John Rawls’s contemporary social contract theory
Main features of a social contract theory: an evaluation Return to contents

Social contract theory and conventionalism

Conventionalism is the doctrine that moral beliefs are neither objective nor necessarily universal but are adopted by social choice or by historical custom. A convention, such as driving on the right side of the road or keeping a promise, may be serious and well-established. It may be based on human needs or on basic human desires. Regardless, it depends on agreement among people, either explicit or implicit, based on actions if not on words. Or, like many laws, it is based on an initial agreement or consensus followed by social enforcement. Conventionalism in ethics claims that all moral views are nothing but conventional and that their basic support depends upon the social agreement that originally produced them.
Moral relvativism is a form of conventionalism. In relativism, different groups of people may establish different moral views. Relativism points to the conventional feature of moral views and argues that, indeed, people do have fundamentally different points of view. However, conventionalism is not bound to the view that there are a plurality of moral views. It is consistent with the view that only one moral view exists. This is the position taken in the social contract tradition. Top

Social contract tradition

In the social contract tradition, morality is viewed as properly flowing from an initial unanimous agreement. Social contractarians oppose any moral authority imposed by the state, God, the family, and so forth. We are, together, at least in principle, to unanimously establish our moral base.
Contractarians must squarely face the problem that what looks like consent to a government or to a moral position may in fact involve social or individual coercion. One may be propagandized to accept a moral rule, or we may accept it because those we love have unduly influenced us, especially when we were children. People often accept their own nation's, group's, or family's way of doing things because that is how they are accustomed to acting. One does not really accept those traditions in any philosophically pure sense. We might not know or fully appreciate other ways of acting. Since social contractarians demand a philosophically pure acceptance of a moral position, they speculate on what people might accept if they were not dominated by current institutional practice, with its current power structures and socialized habits. They propose that we consider not what people actually accept, but what they would accept if they deliberated from a privileged vantage point. Top

State of nature

The original position or the state of nature is presented by social contractarians as the privileged or philosophically pure vantage point from which we can decide what moral principles people would accept if they were not influenced by social conditions. This vantage point must not contain those aspects of life that make us wonder whether a decision is autonomously made. So contractarians insist that the original position is a place of freedom and equality, without social structures, social roles, and social power relations. Top

Agreement in the state of nature

Contractarians usually insist that the original position must be free from any source of prejudice. A prejudiced decision does not provide an acceptable base for morality. When prejudices are allowed, decisions are not fully considered, but are, at least to a degree, idiosyncratic. By using a privileged decision-making position, social contract theory moves away from the notion that we must internalize a moral view, or accept it as our own. We do not need to actually accept the view; it is enough to claim that unprejudiced people in a properly defined original position would accept certain moral obligations. This means that agreement in social contract theory is not actual agreement but a philosophically purified agreement, usually among hypothetical people. Social contract theorists want to use the original position as a way to determine an uncontaminated morality, one that is not influenced by anything that would give us reason to doubt that a moral position is fully acceptable from the vantage point of unbiased and uncoerced people. Top

John Rawls’s contemporary social contract theory

    John Rawls presents his social contract theory of justice as a kind of game, although a very serious one. He presents a model of made-up or hypothetical people in an original position designed to help us decide on proper principles of justice. These hypothetical people are constructed in a way that frees them from all prejudice and special interest. Thus, decisions made by them may be considered philosophically pure. Since the people in Rawls’s original position are hypothetical, we must decide what they would believe. If the people in the original position are well defined, we can, so to speak, think through them in order to derive morally acceptable principles. This means that the description of the imaginary people must be rich enough so that we can figure out what they would decide, and, for their decisions to be good moral decisions, all their defining features must be morally acceptable traits representing basic moral requirements for a fair, unbiased selection of moral principles.
    Rawls defines his hypothetical people in the original position as free, equal, and ignorant of their own special traits, including their race, sex, and IQ. They are self-interested in that they want as much as possible for themselves but disinterested in that they don't care what others have as long as they themselves have the most they can. Furthermore, they are not willing to take risks because the stakes are high in defining basic principles of justice. These principles will be used to organize social life, on which depend our goods, our freedoms, and even our self-images.
    Based on these defining traits, Rawls claims that we can reason as if we are among the hypothetical people. We know they would not be racists, because they don't know their own race and want more for themselves. We know that they would protect their ability to gain the goods they want, because they are self-interested. Even though they are self-interested, they must protect all, because they don't know which social position they will occupy.
    Rawls argues that no matter what principles such people accept, those principles are the proper principles of justice. When we put ourselves into the position of these hypothetical people, Rawls believes that we, in effect, accept moral principles as free, equal, and rational people. This is a philosophically purified consent to moral principles, and so defends the principles as those we are morally obligated to accept.    Top

Main features of a social contract theory: an evaluation

A social contract theory has two main features:

A description of the original position or the state of nature.
Reasoning supporting the decisions about moral principles made by the occupants of the original position.

Disagreements among contractarians occur on both fronts. Many descriptions of the original position can be developed. Why not make the people in the original position altruistic? Why not allow them some jealousy? Rawls claims that the people in the original position do not take risks, but we may believe that some risk taking is reasonable. Thomas Hobbes, the initiator of the British contractarian tradition, argued that people in the state of nature are fearful and greedy. John Locke, whose writings influenced the American Declaration of Independence, claimed that people in the state of nature are self-sufficient and relatively peaceful. Our problem is to decide which characterization of the state of nature gives us the best vantage point, the best sense of a philosophically pure consent.
The second feature of a contract theory concerns the principles people accept, assuming that the original position is well defined. This is a genuine problem. We may define the people in the original position so well that we know they would accept one set of principles over all other principles. For this to be the case, the definition of these people must implicitly contain the principles. But this begs the question -- it surreptitiously assumes what we want to discover -- the proper principles of justice. We want to know what principles would be accepted by rational, free, and equal people. But to get the answer it seems improper to load the principles we accept into the description of the people.
We might define the occupants of the original position loosely and debate the principles such unbiased people would accept, but then they might not come to agreement. If they did, we might believe that we reasoned incorrectly by allowing people in the original position to support what we believe instead of what such unbiased hypothetical people would believe. This is the case because bias and prejudice are difficult to detect. The whole point of the original position is to purify decisions about principles of judgment so that bias is not a factor. Either way, by defining people in the original position too narrowly or by allowing too many of our initial beliefs to enter, the original position allows our current, perhaps biased, beliefs to unduly influence decisions about proper moral principles. In defining the original position, we cannot easily avoid what we actually believe, whether or not our beliefs are justified. The initial positions developed by social contractarians may help to make our views clearer or to show better what they entail, but the mere fact that people in some original position would accept some principle does not say we should as well. Top