The theory of an implicit social contract states that by staying on the territory controlled by a society, which usually has a government, people consent to join that society and, if necessary, to be governed by its government. It is this approval that gives legitimacy to such a government. Epicurus seemed to have had a strong sense of the social contract in the fourth century BC. J.-C., with justice and law rooted in mutual agreement and benefit, as these lines prove, among others, from his main teachings (see also Epicurean Ethics): These views may seem contradictory at first glance: In the first dialogue, Socrates uses a social contract argument to show, why it is right for him to stay in prison, while in the latter he rejects the social contract as a source of justice. However, these two views are compatible. From Socrates` point of view, a righteous person is one who, among other things, recognizes his obligation to the state by obeying its laws. The state is the most morally and politically fundamental entity and, as such, deserves our utmost loyalty and respect. Only men know this and act accordingly. However, justice is not limited to obeying laws in exchange for others obeying them as well. Justice is the state of a well-regulated soul, and therefore the righteous man will necessarily also be the happy man. Justice is therefore more than just mutual obedience to the law, as Glaucon suggests, but it always includes obedience to the state and the laws that support it. Although Plato may be the first philosopher to offer a representation of the argument at the heart of social contract theory, Socrates ultimately rejects the idea that the social contract is the original source of justice. Contract theory encompasses implicit trust between different parties and studies the formation of contracts in the presence of asymmetric information that occurs when one party to an economic transaction has greater material knowledge than the other party.
This criticism has an analogy with theories (such as Gauthier`s) that individuals without a contract are stuck in a suboptimal social situation bad enough to motivate them to make concessions to each other for an agreement, but the reason for their inability to cooperate without the contract cannot continue to function after the contract is concluded. One possible solution to this problem is to argue that individuals will choose to send themselves as limited maximizers (self-interest) rather than simple maximizers (self-interest), that is, to retrain themselves, not to think first about their self-interest, but to self-determination, to conform to their agreements, provided that they are in an environment of like-minded people (Gauthier 1986, 160–166). But this solution has been considered dubious by many commentators (see Vallentyne 1991). Although contemporary social contract theorists sometimes still use the language of consent, the central idea of contemporary social contract theory is agreement. “The social contract looks at work from the intuitive idea of agreement” (Freeman 2007a, 17). Now you can support a principle or accept one without this act of approval in any way forcing you to obey. Social contract theorists as diverse as Samuel Freeman and Jan Narveson (1988, 148) see the act of agreement as an indication of the reasons we have. The agreement is a “test” or heuristic (see §5). The “role of the unanimous collective agreement” is to show “what we must do in our social and political relations” (Freeman 2007, p.
19). Understood in this way, the agreement itself is not a binding act – it is not a performative that somehow creates an obligation – but reveals the reason (Lessnoff 1986). When individuals are rational, what they agree with reflects the reasons they have. Contemporary contract theories such as those of Rawls focus on the problem of justification. Rawls` revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice therefore did not justify obligations on consent, although the apparatus of an “original agreement” persisted. Let us remember that for Rawls (1999, 16) it is “the question of justification […] by developing a problem of consideration. Contract theory is the study of how people and organizations build and develop legal agreements. It analyzes how parties with conflicting interests build formal and informal contracts, even leases. Contract theory is based on the principles of financial and economic behavior, as different parties have different incentives to perform or not perform certain actions. It is also useful for understanding futures and other legal contracts and their terms. It also includes an understanding of declarations of intent and declarations of intent. There is a reading of the hypothetical (first-order) question “Would the agreements be the subject of an agreement if___”, which, as stated, is still resolutely empirical in a certain sense.
This is the reading in which the theorist is required to try to determine what a real survey of real citizens would say about their real attitudes towards their system of social arrangements. (This, of course, is rarely done; the theorist does it in her imagination. See, however, Klosko 2000). But there is another interpretation that is more widely accepted in the contemporary context. In this reading, the question is no longer a hypothetical question of real reactions; rather, it is a hypothetical question about hypothetical reactions – it is, as I said, doubly hypothetical. The framework of the question is the first hypothetical element: “Would it be the subject of an agreement if they were questioned?” Framed by this question is the second hypothetical element that concerns citizens who are no longer treated empirically, i.e. taken for granted, but who are rather considered from a hypothetical point of view themselves – as they would be if they were (typically) better informed or impartial, etc. So the question for most contemporary contract theorists is: “If we were to examine the idealized substitutes of real citizens in this political system, what social agreements would be agreed upon between them?” The basic idea seems simple: in a way, the consent of all individuals subject to collectively imposed social arrangements shows that these arrangements have a certain normative characteristic (they are legitimate, just, binding, etc.).
But even this basic idea is anything but simple, and even this abstract reproduction is reprehensible in many ways. Virginia Held argued that “contemporary Western society is plagued by contractual thinking” (193). Contract models shape a variety of relationships and interactions between people, from students and their teachers to authors and their readers. Given this, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect that social contract theory has had both in philosophy and on culture at large. The theory of social contracts will undoubtedly accompany us in the foreseeable future. But also the critique of such a theory, which will continue to force us to think and rethink the nature of ourselves and our relationships with each other. Hobbes` political theory is best understood when it consists of two parts: his theory of human motivation, psychological egoism, and his theory of the social contract, which is based on the hypothetical state of nature. Hobbes mainly has a particular theory of human nature that leads to a particular view of morality and politics as developed in his philosophical masterpiece Leviathan of 1651. The scientific revolution, with its important new discoveries that the universe can be both described and predicted in accordance with the universal laws of nature, greatly influenced Hobbes.
He tried to provide a theory of human nature that would match the discoveries in the sciences of the inanimate universe. His psychological theory is thus shaped by the mechanism, the general opinion that everything in the universe is produced only by moving matter. According to Hobbes, this also extends to human behavior. Human macrobehavior can rightly be described as the effect of certain types of microhavior, even if some of these latter behaviors are invisible to us. Behaviors such as walking, talking and others are therefore themselves generated by other actions in us. And these other actions are themselves caused by the interaction of our body with other bodies, human or otherwise, which create in us certain chains of causes and effects and ultimately lead to human behavior that we can clearly observe. According to this view, we, including all our actions and decisions, can then be explained in relation to the universal laws of nature as well as the movements of celestial bodies. The gradual decay of memory can be explained, for example, by inertia. As we are presented with more and more sensory information, the residue of previous impressions “slows down” over time.
From Hobbes` point of view, we are essentially very complicated organic machines that respond mechanically and in accordance with the universal laws of human nature to the stimuli of the world. Some of the criticisms discussed above therefore focus on the following questions: who can be a party to the contract and how should persons excluded from the treaty be treated? From the normative contractile point of view, it is only rational to include all those who can both benefit and provide mutual benefits to others. .