One can use many different metaphors to speak of any given Society. It could be seen as one big happy family or as an army fighting for a sacred cause or as a bunch of businessmen bound together by contractual relationships. However, if we take a metaphor for concrete reality and proceed to build another metaphor on that metaphor which we take to itself be concrete, then we are likely to end up talking nonsense. A metaphor is merely a manner of speaking which may be useful enough for some specific purpose. A meta-metaphor is an attempt to displace reality so every utterance loses all meaning.
Consider the following entry from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy-
The Role of the Social Contract
1.1 Distinctiveness of the Social Contract Approach
The aim of a social contract theory is to show that members of some society have reason to endorse and comply with the fundamental social rules, laws, institutions, and/or principles of that society.
Members of a Society may have a reason to run the fuck away from it. The reason they have to comply with its rules, is because the fear the consequences of defiance. But there is no compulsion on anyone to endorse anything- save hypocritically or in pro forma manner.
It is a different matter to say there might be some Society whose members would have reason to endorse its fundamental rules. Thus I might willingly endorse the rules of the Society of Angels in Heaven coz they don't die, get old, or suffer from excessive flatulence. The trouble is, I have no way to join that Society without actually dying- which is precisely what I'm trying to avoid.
Meanwhile, I may comply with some rules of the Society I live in but I'd be a fool to endorse those rules. After all, I can always imagine a better version of even those rules I like- viz. the version where I am paid lots of money for complying with them.
There is another problem- one to do with the intensional fallacy- in the quotation given above. This has to do with the notion of 'fundamental' rules. We don't know which rules are fundamental. The thing is 'epistemic'. As our knowledge and experience increases, the extension of 'fundamental' changes. There is a 'masked man' fallacy here.
Put simply, it is concerned with public justification, i.e., “of determining whether or not a given regime is legitimate and therefore worthy of loyalty” (D’Agostino 1996, 23).
Why do 'Public Justification'- i.e. Propaganda- unless you get paid for it? As for 'loyalty'- why mention it unless there is an actual Dictator and a Secret Police who might kick down your door in the wee hours of the morning.
The fact is, any 'Social Contract' is either necessarily 'incomplete' because of Knightian Uncertainty or else is a contract of adhesion simply. This does not mean 'Entry, Exit & Voice' play no role whatsoever. But it does mean that to speak of legitimacy or allegiance is foolish. You buy and sell in the market place. You don't pretend it is a fucking Church or the Court of King sodding Arthur . This means there is bound to be 'fundamental' changes in control rights and Hohfeldian incidents over the course of the contract.
The ultimate goal of state-focused social contract theories is to show that some political system can meet the challenge Alexander Hamilton raised in Federalist no. 1 of whether “men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force”
This is foolish. We know men can establish a government on the basis of reflection and choice but we can't know, before the fact, if that government is good relative to the fitness landscape or rival regimes which seek its overthrow.
Going further, David Gauthier argues that any system of moral constraints must be justified to those to whom it is meant to apply.
Not if violating those constraints will get your head kicked in or cause you material loss of a kind it is rational to avoid. In any case, there is an obvious infinite regress here. Once you start justifying stuff- unless, that is what you are paid to do- you find you have to justify justification and justify justifying justification and so forth.
“What theory of morals,” Gauthier asks, “can ever serve any useful purpose unless it can show that all the duties it recommends are truly endorsed in each individual’s reason?” (1986, 1).
Theories of morality may be a by-product of a useful activity. There is 'Granger causality' or correlation with something useful. But, Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitation of the superior or more successful- doesn't pick and chose between what is causal and what is merely correlated. Indeed, it may be impossible to distinguish between the two. Thus, you may try to wear the same type of clothes as the person you are trying to imitate though you understand that the quality of theirs you seek to appropriate is not causally related to choice of apparel.
Furthermore, endorsement is too demanding a criteria. It is enough if individuals have some incentive to comply if only on a temporary or ad hoc basis.
The ultimate goal, then, of social contract theories is to show, in the most general sense, that social (moral, political, legal, etc.) rules can be rationally justified.
Anything at all can be rationally justified. It is a different matter that for certain justiciable or political or economic questions, there may exist a protocol bound, 'buck stopped', procedure of approval or rejection involving 'rational justification' for behaviour other than such as for which a Hohfeldian immunity exists. But that has nothing to do with 'Social Choice theory'.
This alone does not, however, distinguish the social contract from other approaches in moral and political philosophy, all of which attempt to show that moral and political rules are rationally justifiable in some sense.
i.e. nonsense of some stripe or the other.
The true distinctiveness of the social contract approach is that justification does not rely, for its foundation, on some exogenous reason or truth.
Unlike matters which are protocol bound, buck stopped, and therefore justiciable or which come under the purview of a political, administrative, or professional tribunal or other decision making body.
Justification is generated endogenously by rational agreement (or lack of rejection in T. M. Scanlon’s version).
No it isn't. Otherwise it would also be endogenously generated over every proper subset of Society- e.g. two people having sex in a public toilet would endogenously be generating rational agreement or lack of rejection in the porn version of TM Scanlon's oeuvre.
That is, the fact that everyone in a society, given their individual reasoning, would agree to a certain rule or principle is the critical justification for that rule or principle.
No. It is a reason not to articulate that rule or principle. Everybody in my society agrees that cats are not dogs. This is a critical justification for omitting the statement 'we hold this truth self-evident that bow-wows don't say miaow' from the Preamble to our Constitution.
Although contract theorists differ in their account of the reasons of individuals,
they are all stupid and useless
with some being attracted to more objectivist accounts (Scanlon 2013), most follow Hobbes in modeling individual reasons as subjective, motivationally internal, or at least agent-relative.
In which case, like Hobbes, they must reject the notion that this shite is 'endogenous' rather than stuff for which a small market may exist for wholly contingent and deeply boring reasons.
1.2 The Social Contract as a Model
The social contract is a model of rational justification
Not necessarily. The thing may be imputed. Furthermore, if 'uncorrelated asymmetries' obtain, there are arbitrary, not rational, factors which would therefore be outside the scope of such a model.
that transforms the problem of justification (what reasons individuals have) into a problem of deliberation (what rules they will agree to).
None. The first thing you learn, as a Law student, is that there is no contract without the passing of consideration. Why agree to a thing for free when you can hold out for compensation of some kind?
As Rawls argues:
[T]he question of justification is settled by working out a problem of deliberation: we have to ascertain which principles it would be rational to adopt given the contractual situation.
Yet, deliberation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the creation of a contract or its imputation for some specific purpose. Deliberation may be a wholly social- non-economic- activity. The rules governing it may be of the form 'pass the port to your left' or 'don't masturbate while speaking'.
This connects the theory of justice with the theory of rational choice (Rawls 1999, 16).
It is not rational to choose to accept a fool's theory of justice. Rawls didn't get that under Knightian Uncertainty
1) There will be risk pooling and a market for insurance.
2) Rewards would be distributed according to 'Shapley Values' in a repeated game.
Justification is not a “mere proof” (Rawls 1999a 508), nor is it reasoning from given or generally accepted premises to conclusions about political legitimacy or morality (Rawls 1980, p. 518). Rather, the contractual model makes explicit the reasoning that connects our standpoint as persons with determinate interests and goals to our standpoint as citizens.
No it doesn't. Poetry might do so because it is concerned with 'reasons of the heart'. The language of solicitors has no such capacity.
At the simplest level, models take something complex and make it simpler. Along these lines, both the economist Ariel Rubinstein (2012) and the philosopher Nancy Cartwright (1991) compare models to fables. Fables are stories that communicate some important lesson in a simple, easy-to-understand fashion. Fables, like models, communicate important general rules through particular, though fictional, cases.
A Structural Causal Model doesn't just make predictions or provide admonishment. It allows us to tinker with certain parameters so as to positively impact outcomes. Fables have no such power.
Models involve abstraction and idealization,
They may do. What matters is if they yield a quantifiable Structural Causal Model so that we can alter outcomes.
but they do more than that: they help us see what our key assumptions are,
No they don't. If they had any such power, Arrow, Rawls, Sen &c wouldn't have written so much nonsense.
identify the factors that we see as relevant (Gaus 2016, xv-xvii). Models, as techniques of idealization, do more than abstract (Weisberg 2007a, 2013). Consider the periodic table of the elements. It is an abstraction, but not a model according to Michael Weisberg.
It can be a Structural Causal Model.
He calls abstractions like the periodic table abstract direct representations to distinguish them from models (2007b). Modeling seeks to isolate the important features of the target phenomena, allowing the modeler to understand and manipulate important elements of the phenomena in simulations. John Rawls’s representatives to the original position, for instance, are not only abstractions of real persons. They are idealizations that isolate particular aspects of persons that are relevant to justification as a choice, specifically their thin theory of rationality, and their values (in the form of primary goods). Isolating these features is important for modeling the agreement procedure in Rawls’s theory.
Nope. It is sufficient to point out that people will insure themselves against various contingencies. They may stipulate for collective insurance with moral hazard provision. But then again they may not. What matters is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' of a historicist kind. If people in a particular society have experience of Institutions working properly, they may endorse collective insurance. But if these guys have never seen any sort of Institution which didn't quickly turn into a corrupt Ponzi scheme, they won't touch the thing with a bargepole.
Given this, we can think of social contract theories as having a general schematic form.
That schematic form is stupid shit.
Critically, there are two sets of relevant individuals (N and N*). The first set is the representative choosers (N) constructed in the “device of representation” such as the original position (Rawls 1996, 27). The second set (N*) is composed of real individuals whose terms of interaction are to be guided by the contract/agreement.
I think everybody should love me and give me all their money and cool shiny stuff. I try to explain this to the other kids in the playground. They kick my head in. Sad.
If the deliberations of the contractors (N) are to be relevant to the actual participants (N*), the reasoning of the former must, in some way, be shared by the latter.
If the other kids really love me and want to give me all their cool shiny stuff, they would have done so already. There is little point in my imagining the 'deliberations of contractors' such that Andrew says 'Vivek is so lovely. I'm going to give him all my money' and then Belinda says 'Vivek is more than lovely. He is super-duper sexy and I'm going to him my entire collection of Barbie dolls which he will enjoy penetrating with his needle dick'. Charlie says 'All us boys are super jelly of Vivek's needle dick. I want to give him my entire collection of Spiderman comics'. This process goes on till we reach Zack who says 'Vivek is God. Let us all worship him and build gigantic Temples to him and his needle dick!'
There is, however, considerable debate about what it means for reasons to be shared in this sense (see Public Reason and Public Justification).
Very true. The other kids are constantly debating as to what it means to share my reason for thinking my needle dick makes me beloved of all.
The other main parameter in the model is the deliberative setting (M),
I stipulate that it should be the birthday party thrown for me by the Galactic Federation.
in which the model choosers (N) endorse some rules, principles, or norms (R).
The norm should be that needle-dicks are considered the greatest adornment a man can have.
Given all of this, we can identify a general model of social contract theories:
General Model of the Social Contract: N chooses R in M and this gives N* reason to endorse and comply with R in the real world insofar as the reasons N has for choosing R in M can be shared by N*.
But, in that case N* would already be complying with R. There is no need for any fucking deliberation or justification of shared reasons. Everybody who is alive breathes in and out. We don't need a Social Contract which mentions this 'norm'.
Each of these parameters (N,M,R,N*) can be specified in any number of ways.
By people who have nothing better to do and who have shit for brains.
How contract theorists model the representative choosers (N) is determined by our (actual) justificatory problem and what is relevant to solving it.
Justificatory problems only arise where a matter is justiciable or otherwise protocol bound. But, even in those circumstances, 'transferable utility'- i.e. bribes or threats- can remove the problem from that venue.
A major divide among contemporary social contract theories thus involves defining the justificatory problem.
It is a Tarskian primitive. It has no definition.
A distinction is often drawn between the Hobbesian/Lockean (“contractarian”) and Rousseavian/Kantian (“contractualist”) interpretations of the justificatory problem. These categories are imprecise, and there is often as much difference within these two approaches as between them, yet, nevertheless, the distinction can be useful for isolating some key disputes in contemporary social contract theory.
Not really. The plain fact is the Social Contract is 'incomplete'. No doubt, one could take a mystical or pietistic view of it but the Anglo-Saxon tradition is allergic to such moonshine.
Among those “contractarians” who—very roughly—can be called followers of Hobbes and/or Locke, the crucial justificatory task is, as Gauthier (1991, 16) puts it, to resolve the “foundational crisis” of morality:
From the standpoint of the agent, moral considerations present themselves as constraining his choices and action,
just as material considerations do. I want to give Zelensky ten billion dollars. Sadly, I don't got a pot to piss in. Sad.
in ways independent of his desires, aims, and interests…. And so we ask, what reason can a person have for recognizing and accepting a constraint that is independent of his desires and interests? … [W]hat justifies paying attention to morality, rather than dismissing it as an appendage of outworn beliefs?'
People feel shitty when they do stuff they feel is immoral. Their morale collapses. They don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning. They take to drink or drugs.
If our justificatory problem is not simply to understand what morality requires, but whether morality ought to be paid attention to, or instead dismissed as a superstition based on outmoded metaphysical theories, then obviously the parties to the agreement must not employ moral judgments in their reasoning.
Also they should not employ scientific judgments in their reasoning- stuff like 'if we all decapitate ourselves and shove our heads up our poopers so as to express disapprobation of Narendra Modi, then we will fucking die'. This is clearly a metaphysical argument coz it assumes that we die when our body starts rotting.
Another version of this concern is Gregory Kavka’s (1984) description of the project to reconcile morality with prudence.
Kavka's toxin is a thought experiment which shows that it can be prudent to have bizarre ideas about what is moral- or, indeed, material.
On both these accounts, the aim of the contract is to show that commitment to morality is an effective way to further one’s non-moral aims and interests, answering the question “why be moral?”
If we evolved through natural selection on an uncertain fitness landscape, morality may have survival value. But the same is true of hypocrisy not to mention farting loudly when Professors of worthless subjects start virtue signalling like crazy.
The political version of this project, is similar, though the target of justification is a set of political rules or constitution rather than morality generally (Buchanan 2000[1975], Coleman 1985, Kavka 1986, Sugden 2018). This “contractarian” project is reductionist in a pretty straightforward sense: it derives moral or political reasons from non-moral ones. Or, to use Rawls’s terminology, it attempts to generate the reasonable out of the rational (1996, 53).
Rawlsian shite looked like the after-life of the Warren Court. Its purpose was to turn kids in Ivy League Law Skools into fucking Federalists. But Sowell and Clarence Thomas got there first.
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2.2 Idealization and Identification
The core idea of social contract theories, we have been stressing, is that the deliberation of the parties is supposed to model the justificatory problem of ordinary moral agents and citizens.
In which case a concrete model would already exist- or, rather, there are concrete models with associated data-sets. But we already have a large class of specialists in constitutional law and Poli Sci and so forth.
Now this pulls social contract theories in two opposing directions. On the one hand, if the deliberations of the hypothetical parties are to model our problem and their conclusions are to be of relevance to us, the parties must be similar to us. The closer the parties are to “you and me” the better their deliberations will model you and me, and be of relevance to us. On the other hand, the point of contract theories is to make headway on our justificatory problem by constructing parties that are models of you and me, suggesting that some idealization is necessary and salutary in constructing a model of justification. To recognize that some forms of idealization are problematic does not imply that we should embrace what Gaus has called “justificatory populism” that every person in society must actually assent to the social and moral institutions in question (Gaus 1996, 130–131). Such a standard would take us back to the older social contract tradition based on direct consent and modern contract theories are concerned with appeals to our reason, not our self-binding power of consent.
The trouble is these guys are stupid. They can't appeal to our reason anymore than I can sexually appeal to any female not an actual anopheles mosquito.
2.4 Doxastic vs. Evaluative
Any representation of the reasoning of the parties will have two elements that need to be specified: 1) doxastic and 2) evaluative. These elements, when combined, create a complete model that will specify how and why representatives in the contractual model choose or agree to some set of social rules. The first (doxastic) is the specification of everything the representatives in the original position know or at least believe. Choice in the contractual model in the broadest sense, is an attempt by the parties to choose a set of rules that they expect will be better than in some baseline condition, such as “generalized egoism” (Rawls, 1999: 127) a “state of nature” (Hobbes 1651) or the rules that they currently have (Binmore, 2005; Buchanan 2000 [1975]). To do this, they need representations of the baseline and of state of the world under candidate set of rules). Without either of these doxastic representations, the choice problem would be indeterminate.
If it is determinate then it comes under the rubric of observed behaviour, not choice theory.
Rawls famously imposes severe doxastic constraints on his parties to the social contract by imposing a thick veil of ignorance that eliminates information about the specific details of each individual and the world they live in.
We already suffer under that veil. I don't know whether I'll be hit by a bus or whether my Pension Fund will fail or if nuclear war might break out. That's why I invest in 'hedges'- some of an ontologically dysphoric kind.
In addition to specifying what the representatives believe to be the case about the world and the results of their agreement, there must also be some standard by which the representative parties can evaluate different contractual possibilities.
The point about Knightian Uncertainty is that it makes you less willing to invest time and money in 'deliberation'. The 'regret minimizing' course is to invest in hedges and to remain on the que vive to exit venues which are less robust and thus more likely to turn to shit.
They must be able to rank the options on the basis of their values,
Why? It is a complete waste of time. Admittedly, I may enjoy ranking Super-Model on the basis of how good they were in bed with me- in my imagination- but that's because imagining such sexual encounters can be quite satisfying if- like me- you are poor and ugly and have a fucking horrible personality.
whatever those may be. Rawls models parties to the contractual situation as, at least initially, having only one metric of value: primary goods.
Rawls only became a Professor so as to get his greedy little mitts on some 'primary goods'. He wasn't concerned with secondary goods- like being famous and getting paid lots of money for books he shat out.
They choose the conception of justice they do insofar as they believe it will likely generate the most primary goods for them and their descendants.
No. They choose the mode of production which does so. Economics isn't Jurisprudence. Why not say 'people choose their conception of Flatulence on the basis of what they believe will generate the most primary goods.' That's why they deny having farted in the board meeting though cheerfully admitting to have done so when attending my last poetry reading.
3. Modeling Agreement
Social contract theories fundamentally differ in whether the parties reason differently or the same. As we have seen (§2.3) in Rawls’s Original Position, everyone reasons the same: the collective choice problem is reduced to the choice of one individual. Any one person’s decision is a proxy for everyone else. In social contracts of this sort, the description of the parties (their motivation, the conditions under which they choose) does all the work: once we have fully specified the reasoning of one party, the contract has been identified.
The fly in this ointment is 'uncorrelated asymmetries' some of which no 'veil of ignorance' can hide. For a start, being dead may be totes cool coz you'd be like Caspar the friendly ghost who gets up to all sorts of adventures. However, if you aint dead, there is no means of knowing this is the case.
What is true of being dead is also true of being behind the 'veil of ignorance'. Rawls may say, 'trust me, it will be fine.' but Caspar might make a similar claim about jumping out of the window so as to have a great time as a friendly ghost.
It is prudent and 'regret-minimizing' to tell both Rawls and Caspar to fuck off. But if nobody will get behind the 'veil of ignorance' save for a bundle of cash here and now, then this gedanken fails immediately.
The alternative view is that, even after we have specified the parties (including their rationality, values and information), they continue to disagree in their rankings of possible social contracts. On this view, the contract only has a determinate result if there is some way to commensurate the different rankings of each individual to yield an agreement (D’Agostino 2003).
Contracts don't have 'determinate results' because unexpected things happen or people make mistakes. Agreement too doesn't greatly matter if there are local substitutes for the Contract- e.g. an informal arrangement of a type it would be too much trouble to make justiciable.
We can distinguish four basic agreement mechanisms of doing this.
3.1 Consent
Consent does not necessarily mean agreement nor does agreement always result in consent.
The traditional social contract views of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau crucially relied on the idea of consent.
No. They relied on prevalent ideas about the origin of various customary practices. But this reliance was not 'crucial' at all. What mattered to Hobbes, Locke and other such scribblers was whether there was a market for their shite. These guys weren't doing mathematics. They were merely indulging in a fashionable type of polemics or propaganda.
For Locke only “consent of Free-men” could make them members of the government (Locke 1689, §117).
Because Locke lived in a country where eunuch slaves did not become Viziers.
In the hands of these theorists—and in much ordinary discourse—the idea of “consent” implies a normative power to bind oneself.
Nonsense. A person may consent to a medical procedure but can't bind herself to stay still as the surgeon chops off her leg. Somebody else must apply suitable restraints. As for 'normative power', that is a justiciable matter. Some people may be found to lack capacity to consent while others may not.
When one reaches “the age of consent” one is empowered to make certain sorts of binding agreements—contracts.
This is a justiciable matter. A person of legal age may yet lack capacity to consent to certain things.
By putting consent at the center of their contracts
where it already was.
these early modern contract theorists (1) were clearly supposing that individuals had basic normative powers over themselves (e.g. self-ownership) before they entered into the social contract (a point that Hume (1748) stressed), and (2) brought the question of political obligation to the fore.
No. They may have made such additional stipulations but then again may have considered them to be otiose. Nothing is added to the notion of capacity to contract by speaking of 'self-ownership' or 'normative power' or 'moral autonomy' or a soul shriven in Christ.
If the parties have the power to bind themselves by exercising this normative power, then the upshot of the social contract was obligation.
This is a justiciable matter. Obligations may arise whether or not 'normative power' is exercised. The law of Torts makes this clear.
As Hobbes (1651, 81 [chap xiv,¶7) insisted, covenants bind; that is why they are “artificial chains” (1651, 138 [chap. xxi, ¶5).
But law itself is 'artificial reason'.
Both of these considerations have come under attack in contemporary social contract theories, especially the second. According to Buchanan, the key development of recent social contract theory has been to distinguish the question of what generates political obligation (the key concern of the consent tradition in social contract thought) from the question of what constitutional orders or social institutions are mutually beneficial and stable over time (1965).
Obligation and Entitlement are best understood as Hohfeldian incidents. Social Contract theory ignored this fact and thus ended up shitting higher than its arsehole.
The stability of Constitutional orders and Social Institutions is a function of exogenous factors- e.g. whether balance of power considerations militate against invasion or insurrection.
The nature of a person’s duty to abide by the law or social rules is a matter of morality as it pertains to individuals (Rawls 1999, 293ff),
It may be or it may not be. Morality may confine itself to the sphere of what is not justiciable. On the other hand, laws and contracts may have 'moral clauses'. But what satisfies a 'moral clause' may have nothing to do with what most people consider to be Morality.
while the design and justification of political and social institutions is a question of public or social morality. Thus, in Buchanan’s view, a crucial feature of more recent contractual thought has been to refocus political philosophy on public or social morality rather than individual obligation. In most modern social contract theories, including Rawls’s, consent and obligation play almost no role whatsoever.
But those theories play no role whatsoever in actual politics or jurisprudence. On the other hand, Quantum Physicists are constantly hectoring elementary particles to get behind a fucking veil of ignorance already.
Although contemporary social contract theorists still sometimes employ the language of consent, the core idea of contemporary social contract theory is agreement. “Social contract views work from the intuitive idea of agreement” (Freeman 2007a, 17). One can endorse or agree to a principle without that act of endorsement in any way binding one to obey. Social contract theorists as diverse as Samuel Freeman and Jan Narveson (1988, 148) see the act of agreement as indicating what reasons we have; agreement is a “test” or a heuristic (see §5).
Or a way to curb a nuisance. I agree that Neo-liberalism is the fucking pits if you will stop going on about it and just let me finish my dinner in peace.
The “role of unanimous collective agreement” is in showing “what we have reasons to do in our social and political relations” (Freeman 2007, 19).
But, no 'unanimous collective agreements' exist. We could say the same thing about flying unicorns.
Thus understood, the agreement is not itself a binding act—it is not a performative that somehow creates obligation—but is reason-revealing (Lessnoff 1986).
Only in so far as flying unicorns are 'reason-revealing'.
If individuals are rational, what they agree to reflects the reasons they have.
Not if it is rational to agree that flying unicorns shat on your head if that is what gets you out of having to do the washing-up.
In contemporary contract theories such as Rawls’s, the problem of justification takes center stage.
But our justifications are different depending on who we are answering to.
Rawls’s revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice thus did not base obligations on consent, though the apparatus of an “original agreement” persisted. Recall that for Rawls (1999, 16) the aim is to settle “the question of justification … by working out a problem of deliberation.”
Deliberation is costly. Why do it save for tangible reward? Moreover, we must consider its opportunity cost. If one polity focuses on 'deliberating' about the Social Contract, while its rivals focus on Science and Technology, there is a good chance that the latter will prevail in a conflict and thus those 'deliberations' will prove to have been counterproductive.
Given that the problem of justification has taken center stage, the second aspect of contemporary social contract thinking appears to fall into place: its reliance on models of counterfactual agreement.
It relies on imputing stupid ideas to people.
The aim is to model the reasons of citizens, and so we ask what they would agree to under conditions in which their agreements would be expected to track their reasons.
Never agree to anything save for tangible reward.
Contemporary contract theory is, characteristically, doubly counterfactual. Certainly, no prominent theorist thinks that questions of justification are settled by an actual survey of attitudes towards existing social arrangements, and are not settled until such a survey has been carried out. The question, then, is not “Are these arrangements presently the object of an actual agreement among citizens?” (If this were the question, the answer would typically be “No”.) The question, rather, is “Would these arrangements be the object of an agreement if citizens were surveyed?”
Surely, everybody is aware that, firstly, surveys can be rigged to yield any outcome and, in any case, people soon get bored and fill them out at random.
What matters is opportunity cost. Are smart people exiting or entering the jurisdiction? Polities have to do different things dependent on exogenous circumstances.
There is a reading of the (first-order) counterfactual question, “Would R be the object of agreement if___” which, as indicated, is still resolutely empirical in some sense.
Not if the relevant state of the world is not fully knowable. In that case what is 'empirical' is beliefs about that state of the world. But that is dependent on the agents epistemic state. There is an intensional fallacy here.
This is the reading where what is required of the theorist is that she try to determine what an actual survey of actual citizens would reveal about their actual attitudes towards their system of social arrangements. (This is seldom done, of course; the theorist does it in her imagination. See, though, Klosko 2000). But there is another interpretation that is more widely accepted in the contemporary context. On this reading, the question is no longer a counterfactual question about actual reactions; it is, rather, a counterfactual question about counterfactual reactions—it is, as we have said, doubly counterfactual. Framing the question is the first counterfactual element: “Would R be the object of agreement if they were surveyed?” Framed by this question is the second counterfactual element, one which involves the citizens, who are no longer treated empirically, i.e. taken as given, but are, instead, themselves considered from a counterfactual point of view—as they would be if (typically) they were better informed or more impartial, etc. The question for most contemporary contract theorists, then, is, roughly: “If we surveyed the idealized surrogates of the actual citizens in this polity, what social arrangements would be the object of an agreement among them?”
The answer is the same if we survey flying unicorns. They can be quite chatty you know.
Famously, Ronald Dworkin (1975) has objected that a (doubly) hypothetical agreement cannot bind any actual person.
Nor can flying unicorns sodomize them.
For the hypothetical analysis to make sense,
flying unicorns must leave your asshole alone.
it must be shown that hypothetical persons in the contract can agree to endorse and comply with some principle regulating social arrangements. Suppose that it could be shown that your surrogate (a better informed, more impartial version of you) would agree to a principle.
For this to be shown, the surrogate must be able to give you information which can immediately improve your life. It is reasonable to exchange access to that information for agreement to some meaningless shite.
What has that to do with you? Where this second-stage hypothetical analysis is employed, it seems to be proposed that you can be bound by agreements that others, different from you, would have made. While it might (though it needn’t) be reasonable to suppose that you can be bound by agreements that you would yourself have entered into if, given the opportunity, it seems crazy to think that you can be bound by agreements that, demonstrably, you wouldn’t have made even if you had been asked.
I'd be willing to be bound by agreements made on my behalf by a guy whose guidance and advise can turn me into a billionaire super-stud. But, if such a person existed, who the fuck would bother with Social Choice theory?
This criticism is decisive, however, only if the hypothetical social contract is supposed to invoke your normative power to self-bind via consent. That your surrogate employs her power to self-bind would not mean that you had employed your power. Again, though, the power to obligate oneself is not typically invoked in the contemporary social contract: the problem of deliberation is supposed to help us make headway on the problem of justification. So the question for contemporary hypothetical contract theories is whether the hypothetical agreement of your surrogate tracks your reasons to accept social arrangements, a very different issue (Stark 2000).
Why track the reasoning of a guy who aint a billionaire super-stud? It is a different matter that you may want a superior surrogate to tack your 'values'. But their reasoning and 'reasons' should be different and superior from our own. Also, they should ride flying unicorns while farting melodiously. Should their first name be Bo- like Bo Derek? You don't come across a lot of people named Bo nowadays, do you? I wonder why that is. Perhaps some fucking Social Choice Theorists are tracking those reasons. They truly are a waste of space.
