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That is what makes the “social contract” a contract: A’s adherence is contingent on B’s and vice versa. That is to say, we will forbid only aggression (counting, for present purposes, fraud as a type of aggression – something that not all will accept and which present limitations of time forbid getting into.) In short, we will not accept that others may intervene to worsen our lives, so long as that is avoidable, and of course on the understanding that we will likewise refrain from worsening others’ lives. We will restrict all to peaceable behavior. The question is: which ones? To this, I think the libertarian has the only good answer. He of course can have no complaint to anything we can do to him, since he refuses to accept anything at all in the way of moral restrictions on is behavior.īut the rest of us do, for the very good reason that life is very much better if we live in a community in which everyone abides by certain restrictions.

And that’s fine: he’s welcome to say this, as we put him in the electric chair. The murderer might then claim that he doesn’t care about that – he just isn’t into the contract game. His victim obviously does not consent, and so it looks as though murder isn’t going to be legitimate, on contract theory. And we cannot simply agree to be coerced for just any old reason, obviously.Ĭan we agree to be coerced for any reason whatever, and if we could, would that justify it? Here we have to consider what the murderer, say, has to say on this subject. Indeed, the reason why the state looks so difficult to justify is that it is all but impossible for states not to proceed by coercing persons who have done nothing to merit this. And as such, it is not wedded to statism at all.

But modern contract theory is a theory of morals, not of the state. The first thing to do is to agree with him that if we take the social contract view as it was stated in Hobbes (and nobody does better), as an argument for the state, it is a failure. Jan Narveson - Response to Crispin Sartwell (2008 Molinari Society Symposium)Īs a proponent of the contractarian idea in moral philosophy, I should say a thing or two about Crispin’s rather caustic remarks about the social contract.