3 The Hypothetical Social Contract Theory - The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer - analogiadelpazienteincosciente contentdependent isolaedatoredilavoro unacasadaimbiancare batteriadeipolli analogiadellautousata intuizioneointeressi? diamantiingiardino correttezzaecoercizione doppiostandardrivendicato
Hypothetical social contract theorists turn instead to the claim that individuals would consent to the state under certain hypothetical conditions.Read more at location 1491
The fact that we would have agreed to a given arrangement in a particular hypothetical scenario is thought to legitimize that arrangement and generate obligations to support it. This approach has the dialectical advantage of avoiding the sort of dependence on empirical facts about the actual worldRead more at location 1494
they must show that people would accept the social contract in their hypothetical scenario; second, they must show that this hypothetical consent is morally efficacious,Read more at location 1497
Suppose that an unconscious patient has been brought to a hospital, in need of surgery to save his life. Under ordinary circumstances, physicians must obtain the patient’s informed consentRead more at location 1506
The most natural explanation appeals to the reasonable belief that the patient would consent to the lifesaving procedure if he were able to do so.Read more at location 1509
when we appeal to hypothetical consent, the parties’ hypothetical consent must be consistent with their relevant actual values and philosophical beliefs.Read more at location 1518
in this case the attending physician, due to his familiarity with this particular patient, is aware that the patient has strong religiously based objections to the practice of surgery, even when needed to save life.Read more at location 1520
In light of these conditions, the hypothetical social contract cannot be accepted as valid. To begin with, the citizens of a given country, by and large, are neither unconscious nor mentally incompetentRead more at location 1531
3.3 Hypothetical consent and reasonableness 3.3.1 Hypothetical agreement as evidence of reasonablenessRead more at location 1543
when a strictly voluntary system is unfeasible, an acceptable approximation may be a system about which no one has any reasonable complaint.Read more at location 1545
For instance, we may assume that the parties to the agreement are better informed and better at reasoning than most actual people. We may assume them to be both rational and reasonable, where ‘reasonable’ persons are understood as being concerned to make a fair agreementRead more at location 1549
Nevertheless, we must not imagine the parties to the hypothetical agreement as being too different from actual human beings, lest the hypothetical agreement lose its justificatory force. For example, we should take no interest in a hypothetical agreement that could be reached only after all have converted to the one true religion.Read more at location 1553
Advocates of the sort of contract theory just described have offered no evidence or reasoning to show that some particular political system would be agreed upon by all reasonable persons.Read more at location 1559
they make no serious effort to show that any political system satisfies those conditions. One possible explanation for this omission is that, in fact, no government satisfies the conditions for legitimacy.Read more at location 1562
Nagel proceeds to the question of how much the well-off members of society should be expected to giveRead more at location 1564
Rawls’s optimism, however, is without justification.7 He describes at length how it is conceivable that his own theory of justice should be the focus for a consensus among individuals with differing religious, moral, and philosophical views.Read more at location 1571
What is needed is an argument that all reasonable persons would agree to all the major tenets of Rawls’s system; what Rawls provides is an explanation of a way in which a follower of one religion could reasonably support one of Rawls’s principles of justice.Read more at location 1583
he suggests that utilitarians might consider his theory of justice to achieve an acceptable approximation to utility maximization.Read more at location 1586
no argument is presented to show that Rawls’s theory of justice in fact provides an acceptable approximationRead more at location 1588
Nagel and Rawls both addressed themselves chiefly to principles of distributive justice, a highly contentious area.11 Perhaps we will have more success in defending hypothetical consent if we limit ourselves to the general agreement to have a government.Read more at location 1592
If an individual agrees that there should be government but believes that it should be of a fundamentally different kind from the government he in fact finds himself subject to, it is doubtful that that government can adequately justify itselfRead more at location 1595
An analogous case is one in which an individual wishes to have his house painted white, and a painter arrives and, without the consent of the homeowner, paints the house green.Read more at location 1598
There is no reason to think that all reasonable people will achieve agreement on the basic principles of government any sooner than they reach agreement on the correct religion, the correct moral theory, and so on.Read more at location 1606
It might be thought that I am imposing excessively strict standards for the justification of social arrangements. Surely the mere fact that someone, even a reasonable person, disagrees with a particular practice or institution does not suffice to show that the practice or institution is unjustified. The dissenter may simply be mistaken.Read more at location 1615
what I have been applying is a constraint, not on the justification of social theories in general, but on the justification of social theories through an appeal to hypothetical consent, and this constraint derives not from my own philosophical views but from those of my opponents,Read more at location 1618
It is these theorists who have laid down as a condition of legitimacy that all reasonable people agree on a given social arrangement. It is, therefore, not I but such hypothetical contract theorists as Rawls, Scanlon, and NagelRead more at location 1620
Imagine that an employer approaches a prospective employee with an entirely fair, reasonable, and attractive job offer, including generous pay, reasonable hours, pleasant working conditions, and so on. If the worker were fully informed, rational, and reasonable, he would accept the employment offer. Nevertheless, the employer is not ethically entitled to coerce the employeeRead more at location 1629
Note: ANALOGIA CON L OFFERTA DI LAVORO: ANCHE SE RAGIONEVOLE NN ESISTE UN DIRITTO A COARTARE NESSUNO Edit
it is not permissible for a physician to coercively impose a medical procedure on a patient,Read more at location 1635
Contrasting intuitions may be drawn from another analogy. A shipwreck has stranded a number of people on a hitherto uninhabited island. The island has a limited supply of wild game, which may be hunted for food but must be conserved against extinction. Assume that the only reasonable plan is for the shipwrecked passengers to carefully limit the number of animals harvested each week. Despite these facts, one passenger refuses to accept any such limit. It seems plausible to hold that the other passengers may coercively restrainRead more at location 1640
The most important difference is that the employment contract case involves the seizure of a resource, the employee’s labor, to which the victim of coercion has a moral right; whereas the island case involves the protection of a resource, the wild game, over which it is plausible to ascribe a collective right,Read more at location 1646
If we accept this account of the cases, the hypothetical social contract is more like the rejected employment contract,Read more at location 1650
the state lays claim to a portion of all persons’ earnings, whatever the source.Read more at location 1652
What the hypothetical contract theory gives, then, is another example of the particularly lenient moral attitudes applied to government rather than a justification of those attitudes.Read more at location 1660
3.4 Hypothetical consent and ethical constraints 3.4.1 Rawls’s contract theory as an account of authorityRead more at location 1663
Rawls devises a hypothetical scenario, the ‘original position’, in which individuals form an agreement on the basic principles to govern their society.15 These individuals are assumed to be motivated solely by self-interest, but they have temporarily been deprived of all knowledge of their positionRead more at location 1669
Rawls goes on to argue that people in this original position would choose two particular principles of justice to govern their society.Read more at location 1674
It might be said that the parties in the original position would prefer to establish some form of government rather than accept anarchy.Read more at location 1679
But how is the hypothetical contract thought to justify principles of justice? Rawls offers the following remarks:Read more at location 1682
Since all are similarly situated [in the original position] and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreementRead more at location 1683
principles of justice should be fair to all members of society, treating all members as equals. Second, principles of justice should ‘leave aside’ or, more strongly, compensate for aspects of the social world that are arbitrary from a moral point of view,Read more at location 1703
Why does Rawls believe that the parties in the original position could reach agreement rather than persistently disagreeing, as people do in the actual world?Read more at location 1715
Rawls’s conclusion does not follow from his stated premises. Rawls assumes that, once all particular inclinations and all individual characteristics (or knowledge thereof) are excised, all reasonable and rational people will be convinced by the same arguments.Read more at location 1718
disagreement is due entirely to such factors as ignorance, irrationality, and biases created by knowledge of one’s individual characteristics.Read more at location 1720
Outside political philosophy, philosophers carry on persistent debates in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, some of which are millennia old.Read more at location 1726
A more plausible diagnosis of widespread and persistent philosophical disagreements is that human beings experience differing intuitions and other intellectual appearances.Read more at location 1732
Individuals with differing philosophical intuitions and plausibility judgments will, understandably and rationally, reach differing philosophical positions.Read more at location 1734
Consider now one disagreement of particular interest, the disagreement between anarchists and statistsRead more at location 1739
There is no reason for thinking that this disagreement would evaporate behind the veil of ignorance,Read more at location 1740
Anarchists do not disagree with statists because anarchists have some peculiar social positionRead more at location 1742
Whatever explains this particular disagreement, it is not that someone is tailoring moral or political principles to his own advantage.Read more at location 1745
3.4.3 The validity of hypothetical consent, part 1: the appeal to fair outcomesRead more at location 1750
Imagine that Sue makes an offer to buy Joe’s car. Given the facts about the car’s condition, Sue’s and Joe’s respective situations, and so on, Sue’s offer is entirely fairRead more at location 1754
Nevertheless, Joe refuses to sell. Is it plausible that Joe has acted wrongly?Read more at location 1757
Imagine next that by pure chance, Joe has discovered a diamond in his backyard, which confers on him a material advantage of which Sue, through no fault of her own, is deprived.Read more at location 1758
As these examples show, the fact that some hypothetical agreement is fair or rectifies moral arbitrariness does not in general create an obligation to act according to the hypothetical agreement, nor does it create an ethical entitlement to coerceRead more at location 1761
Perhaps Rawls would respond to my examples, as he once replied to another critic,28 by observing that his principles of justice were meant to apply only to the basic structure of society rather than to small-scale interactionsRead more at location 1763
preceding paragraphs each involve only two individuals rather than an entire society. This difference, however, has no ethical relevance.Read more at location 1766
the corporation’s sheer size will not entitle it to force individuals to accept its offersRead more at location 1767
The other distinction is political: my examples involve private actors, whereas Rawls’s principles prescribe action by the state.Read more at location 1769
This distinction, however, cannot be employed in Rawls’s defense without begging the question, since the reply simply presupposes that the state possesses some special moral statusRead more at location 1770
3.4.4 The validity of hypothetical consent, part 2: sufficient conditions for reliable moral reasoningRead more at location 1780
Rawls’s defense of hypothetical contract theory appeals to constraints on reasoning about moral principles: in moral reasoning, one must avoid being influenced by self-interest, particular inclinations, or any other ethically irrelevant individual traits.Read more at location 1781
1. J can be arrived at by reasoning that satisfies C. 2. If a moral principle can be arrived at by reasoning that satisfies C, then it is correct. 3. Therefore, J is correct.Read more at location 1788
Premise (1) is true by stipulation. It is unclear, however, why one ought to embrace premise (2).Read more at location 1793
one’s chances of arriving at acceptable moral conclusions depend in part upon the substantive correctness and completeness of one’s initial values.Read more at location 1807
If a person has misguided ultimate values, such as a belief that pain is intrinsically good, or if his basic values are correct but incomplete, as in the case of one who mistakenly takes pleasure to be the sole intrinsic good, then this person will most likely arrive at incorrect normative conclusions,Read more at location 1808
I have read the Rawlsian argument as claiming that some principle J is correct or ought to be adopted. Suppose that this is weakened to the claim that it is permissible to adopt JRead more at location 1822
the original position embodies only certain necessary conditions for the reliability of normative reasoning rather than sufficient conditions for the correctness of normative conclusions.Read more at location 1831
3.4.5 The validity of hypothetical consent, part 3: necessary conditions for reliable moral reasoningRead more at location 1834
On this interpretation, the conjunctive constraint C represented by the original position is held to be necessary but not sufficientRead more at location 1836
1. J is uniquely coherent with C. 2. C is correct. 3. Therefore, J is correct.Read more at location 1838
Premise (1) is exposed to widespread and powerful counterevidence. There are many philosophers who appear to have reached alternative conclusions by reasoning that satisfies C. The various thinkers who embrace utilitarianism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, or anarchism do not in general appear to have violated any widely accepted constraints on moral reasoning, nor does Rawls anywhere endeavor to show that they have.Read more at location 1846
Note: LE ALTERNATIVE ALLA SPECIFICA VISIONE DI RAWLS SONO... INFINITE. QUALSIASI TEORIA È COMPATIBILE Edit
they may show that there is an example of reasoning satisfying C – namely, the reasoning of the parties in the original position – that leads to J. But it would be fallacious to infer that there is no other possible train of reasoning satisfying C
