Social contract

Alternative theories of state

Hume's conventionalism

Hume's own political theory held that human beings are morally sensible by nature—possessing ‘natural virtues’, benevolence, and a sensitivity to the needs of others—despite being guided by instrumental rationality and self-interest. Hume, nonetheless, observes that such sensitivity alone is insufficient for establishing a well-functioning society, and that ‘artificial virtues’ must manifest themselves to regulate social interaction. Unlike Hobbes, Hume believes that conventions evolve over time from a combination of self-interest and the understanding that, under moderate scarcity of resources and rough natural equality, reciprocal behavior is likely to be mutually beneficial. According to Hume:

Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other.

Thus, Hume's historical and political conception of the modern state and legal system allows agents to gradually leave the state of nature to the extent that they learn to trust each other and develop mutual expectations. The emergence of trust among agents rebuts Hobbes’s view that an absolute sovereign is required for establishing social order and political authority.

In order to explain obedience to the law, Hume explains the continued adherence of agents to existing conventions by stressing that agents typically will realize that their private good is intimately linked with the public good, especially expressed in the form of a functioning social order. Moreover, he maintains that agents’ “sympathy” with each other motivates compliance with established conventions. He also argues that over time, agents will start to value the existing conventions intrinsically. They will follow the conventions not merely for instrumental reasons but will internalize their demands by developing a moral sense that corresponds to and approves of the conventions.

For Hume, convention is “a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility”.

Formal models

Game-theoretic approaches to justice and the social contract have been increasingly popular in contemporary moral and political philosophy.

Presocial position

Ken Binmore models the problem to be solved by the social contract as that of selecting a Pareto optimal equilibrium in a Nash demand game. From behind a veil of ignorance, just choices are to be selected disinterestedly. Following Harsanyi, the expected utility maximizing choice would be the utilitarian solution to the game. Binmore's strict Nash equilibrium involves a Pareto frontier, such that if a player were to demand less, he would get less; but if he were to demand more, demands would be incompatible and no one would get anything.

As an alternative to the state of nature concept, Vanderschraaf proposes an alternative called the “Generic Circumstances of Justice,” which set formal constraints on the possible conventions that can make up the substance of justice, and which determine that:

parties have the right background conditions for justice when (i) they have available to them a variety of conventions over which their preferences differ to some extent, (ii) they can by working together generate a cooperative surplus characterized by some of these conventions, but (iii) each is also vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others who aim for outcomes better for themselves that result in their fellow parties suffering relative losses.

Within the "state of nature" bargaining process, Vanderschraaf further establishes norms of justice. Vanderschraaf considers fair division in a bargaining problem as a canonical equilibrium selection problem and model of justice, further including both evolutionary and learning dynamics in his bargaining model. He is thus able to reach the conclusion that the egalitarian bargaining solution is the most likely to emerge. This, however, is predicated on an account of the possibility of interpersonal utility comparisons and the acceptance of the “Baseline Consistency criterion” that, according to Vanderschraaf, allows agents to make “seamless” transitions if the cooperative surplus contracts or expands over time. Nonetheless, accepting these assumptions, Vanderschraaf synthesises his theory as such:

Rejecting positive offers perceived as too lopsided in Ultimatum games and punishing defectors at a personal cost in public good games are explainable as products of an evolved tendency in our species to treat others fairly and to punish those who fail to do far beyond laboratory settings. A general requirement to “play fair” is deeply rooted in the natural law tradition from antiquity. A number of the great figures in both the classical and the modern natural law traditions maintain that requirements of the natural law follow from some version of the Golden Rule. These natural law requirements correspond to the principle “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” since they require one to act for the benefit of others, possibly at some personal cost.

Social conventions as equilibria

The American philosopher David Lewis defined a social convention within the context of a game theoretic model of social interactions, particularly of coordination games. According to Lewis, conventions are game-theoretic strategies that solve coordination problems (i.e. problems that arise when individuals need to coordinate their actions to complete a task or to make a decision, but neither is prior communication possible nor is there an external force or central authority to impose order). For Lewis, a convention is arbitrary (in that there could be some other convention that would work equally well to solve the problem) and self-reinforcing (in that the fact that other individuals obey it gives one a rational reason to follow suit without any prior agreement or external enforcement). Formally, Lewis regards a convention as a kind of strict Nash equilibrium, such that in a given game, although there are multiple potential conventions that could comprise equilibria, a convention is nonetheless maintained because any unilateral deviation would make the player strictly worse off. Lewis's model rests on the assumption that conventions are the product of a one-shot coordination game in which players independently arrive at a solution.

Building on this view, Peter Vanderschraaf's conception of game theoretic conventionalism can be broken into three parts: Firstly, an equilibrium is a convention if it is a correlated equilibrium of the game; secondly, there is more than one such correlated equilibrium, which correlates to what he terms "discretionary sense arbitrariness"; thirdly, both of these characteristics are common knowledge to the agents. On the first part, Vanderschraaf links conventions to the notion of Robert Aumann's correlated equilibrium (i.e. in correlated equilibria, players may condition their behavior on some external random feature of their environment), arguing that conventions are not merely the Nash equilibria of the underlying games but are best understood in the context of a super-game of the original base game wherein agents coordinate their strategies based on some external mechanism.

Vanderschraaf also applies the equilibrium-in-conjectures approach to understanding why agents might employ mixed strategies. Instead of regarding each agent’s Nash mixed strategies as probabilistically independent of one another and drawn solely from their common knowledge of the game structure and payoffs, Vanderschraaf suggests that, in the context of justice, a wider conception of conventions is required that relies on correlated, prospective, and retrospective assessments by the players, as justice relies not only on predictions of future behavior but also on evidence from past behavior (e.g., involving reciprocity). With “this definition, it is possible for a convention to be characterized by equilibria of indefinitely repeated games even where the profile of actions this convention prescribes in a given interaction period is not an equilibrium of the base game.”

Exit options

Binmore provides room in the model for ex post opting out of the solution by introducing the possibility of any individual at any time calling to renegotiate the social contract. In this extended game, a utilitarian solution may not be a Nash equilibrium.

Justice as convention

In other words, fairness in terms of roughly equal division is the baseline norm of justice that is most likely to develop and survive over time. Vanderschraaf agrees with Hume and Hobbes that a government is needed to establish and secure justice, even though he believes that (at least some of) the norms of justice are what one might call “natural conventions”. His specific view is that that a Humean governing convention between the rulers and the ruled can be stable over time and that there is good reason (though not decisive) for the ruled to select a democratic over a non-democratic sovereign.

To Vanderschraaf, justice is a convention characterized by fairness and amenable to stabilization by a conventional government, a theory of “justice as mutual advantage” theory, where the content of justice is defined by “[c]onventions that share out the benefits and the burdens of life in society,” and agents are motivated to follow those conventions because doing so serves their “own interests” on condition that they expect “others to obey as well.”

History

Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.

In Western philosophy, the concept of the social contract was described by Plato in The Republic, Book II:

When men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist.

Epicurus, in the fourth century BC, also notes, in his Principal Doctrines:

31. Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.

32. Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.

33. There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.

Renaissance developments

The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in his Leviathan (1651). Later, John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that individuals in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract, outlined a different version of social-contract theory, as the foundations of society based on the sovereignty of the "general will".

Prominent 17th- and 18th-century theorists of the social contract and natural rights included Hugo de Groot (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder. There would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government (whether monarchical or parliamentary).

Quentin Skinner has also argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England.

Contemporary applications

The social contract can be used as a theoretical object to analyse the capacity for a population to accept change, upon which the change exerts 'pressure'. In an analysis of the consequences of the Gulf Cooperation Council states changing energy prices, the social contract defines the capacity for change. Higher energy prices for resident households can have an adverse impact, meaning that the consent of the participants in the contract needs to be maintained, because before energy price increases, prices for residents were kept low by charging higher prices for exported oil.

Criticism

Natural law and constitutionalism

The legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued that, while presence in the territory of a society may be necessary for consent, this does not constitute consent to all rules the society might make regardless of their content. A second condition of consent is that the rules be consistent with underlying principles of justice and the protection of natural and social rights, and have procedures for effective protection of those rights (or liberties). This has also been discussed by O. A. Brownson, who argued that, in a sense, three "constitutions" are involved: first, the constitution of nature that includes all of what the Founders called "natural law"; second, the constitution of society, an unwritten and commonly understood set of rules for the society formed by a social contract before it establishes a government, by which it does establish the third, a constitution of government. To consent, a necessary condition is that the rules be constitutional in that sense.

Tacit consent

The theory of a tacit social contract holds that by remaining in the territory controlled by some society, which usually has a government, people give consent to join that society and be governed by its government if any. This consent is what gives legitimacy to such a government. Other writers have argued that consent to join the society is not necessarily consent to its government. For that, the government must be set up according to a constitution of government that is consistent with the superior unwritten constitutions of nature and society.

Contracts must be consensual

According to the will theory of contract, a contract is not presumed valid unless all parties voluntarily agree to it, either tacitly or explicitly, without coercion. Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court of the United States and a staunch supporter of a right of contract between individuals, argued in his essay No Treason that a supposed social contract cannot be used to justify governmental actions such as taxation because government will initiate force against anyone who does not wish to enter into such a contract. As a result, he maintains that such an agreement is not voluntary and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate contract at all. As an abolitionist, he made similar arguments about the unconstitutionality of slavery in the US.

Individuals are not better off under states

In their book Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, the philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant McCall criticise social contract theory on the grounds that not all individuals are better off than they could reasonably expect to be in the state of nature, thereby removing the justification for giving up liberty in exchange for welfare.