The Social Contract and Moral Obligations

Thanks, Kasmic! Onto my case...CON's CASEOverviewThis goes un-refuted. Extend that I can successfully negate in one of two ways: (1) To show that governments are not subject to moral obligations (thus the social contract cannot impose those kinds of obligations on them), and/or (2) to argue that the social contract theory is flawed and an invalid source of moral authority. Please note that either one of these lines of reasoning are sufficient grounds to negate the topic; therefore, it is not essential that I win both of these points in order to negate.C1. The Social Contract Is Seriously FlawedP1. No True ConsentPro asks what I mean by true consent. "True" consent is simply valid consent, meaning that one is (a) that an agent has options to choose from, (b) that the agent was truthfully informed about the options, (c) that the agent voluntarily chooses (without duress) one option over another, and (d) that the agent gave his consent while of sound mind. I would also add (e) that consensual choices ought to be respected. (a) Consent cannot be Implied Pro spends a great deal of his time talking about minors and the mentally handicapped. But this is not what my argument was about. Social contract theorists, such as Locke, argue that a social contract gains its legitimacy from the tacit or implied consent of rational adults. That by accepting services from the state or by remaining withing a state's jurisdiction, individuals consent to that government. It was this idea that was under critique. At no point does Pro actually defend implied consent (except in the cases of minors and the mentally handicapped), and so my arguments here are dropped. Please extend that implied consent--even for rational adults--cannot be construed as valid. As the dropped Hume evidence explained: "Can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country-when he knows no foreign language...and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master, though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves her." Consequently, implied consent violates the (a) and (b) criteria for valid consent. Again, this all went totally un-refuted by Pro, who seemed to misunderstand how this was being applied. The social contract cannot derive it's legitimacy from the implied consent of rational adults.Pro then asserts: "It is worth noting that the social contract is a contract between the government and the governed as a whole. A contract to society...It is utterly absurd to expect each person to have a separate and distinct personalized contract with government." This line of reasoning poses several problems (though I am not calling for a "personalize contract;" just for one that everyone in the society has consented to). Firstly, it means that the contract devolves into mere majoritarianism. Whatever rules the majority decides apply to everyone no matter how unjust those rules are. The whole purpose of the social contract was to create rules to check the powerful from unjustly infringing on the minority. But, using Pro's logic, a majority of society could create a contract that called for enslaving the minority, and this contract would still be valid because "society" consented to it. Pro's logic justifies majoritarianism, which is antithetical to what the social contract was meant to be. Secondly, how can society justifiably consent on my behalf. If we are in a state of nature, with each person totally free, there are no formal, agreed upon mechanisms by which community consent can be exercised (e.g. a government with checks and balances). While exercising community consent through a government might be justified, because there are checks in place to shield minorities, before government (and thus before the social contract), societal consent cannot be construed as valid, because minorities have no way of protecting their rights and interests in the process. For a social contract to be valid, then, EVERYONE must agree to it; and only then can there be a valid framework for community consent, and that framework is valid because everyone, including the minorities, have okay'd it and have ways of exercising their voices within it. (b/c) Implied Consent Justifies Immoral Govs + The SC Justifies a Parade of Horribles Pro writes: "It is not my burden to show that Social Contract applied spawns only 'moral' governments, or that governments formed under a social contract do not or could not act immorally." Actually, it is Pro's job to show that the social contract is moral. If you refer back to my overview, one of the ways I can negate the resolution is: "to argue that the social contract theory is flawed and an invalid source of moral authority." If the social contract is immoral or unethical, it is not a valid source of moral authority, and thus cannot be the source of valid moral obligations. Pro must prove that the social contract is a valid source of moral authority before he can claim that it is a justifiable means of deriving moral obligations.Since the rest of these two points are entirely dropped, you can extend that: (1) the social contract justifies immoral governments and (2) the social contract justifies the exploitation and maltreatment of non-citizens. The impacts of each of these points are fairly straightforward. In order for the social contract to be morally significant enough to ground obligations, it cannot justify or promote immorality. If the social contract is a source of moral obligation, then I, as a citizen, would've had a moral obligation to obey soviet officials or to steal native peoples' lands, both of which are immoral things to do. That creates a paradox: I would have a moral obligations (from the social contract) to do immoral things, which invalidates the social contract's validity as a source of such obligations. We cannot be morally obliged to commit or abide by immoral acts. (d) Consent is not Hereditary Pro writes: "It is more reasonable for your forefathers or parents to consent on your behalf than to argue that an unborn person or even an infant could consent. This is the case in a social contract."Pro strawmans what I am saying. I am not suggesting that infants should or could consent. But, once I am an adult, my ability to consent is my own, not my forefathers'. So, while it may be "more reasonable for [my] forefathers...to consent...than an unborn person...could consent," once I am born and grown, my consent is, by right, my own. Pro then talks of the ability to amend the contract, but there are more pressing concerns to be made here. If I do not consent to a social contract, but am unable to leave a jurisdiction for reasons outside of my control, is that government "my" government, and do its laws apply to me despite my lack of consent. To apply those laws to me would be to exercise the tyranny of the majority, "in which decisions made by a majority place its interests above those of an individual or minority group, constituting active oppression." [1] It is not oppression to have to obey laws made by a system I consented to; it is oppression to be bound to follow laws made by a system to which I never consented. Only I can consent for myself, and so if I do not consent to the Constitution, to apply any of it to me would be against the notion of consent (goes against (e) and (c) of the standard for consent). I would add that amendments are all well and good, but they only are valid if everyone has agreed to the process by which they are ratified, for reasons noted earlier. And, having the ability to change a contract doesn't mean that one will change it--amendments are hard to get through. Given this, I may never consent to the contract because I may never get the changes I want.P2. The Feminist CritiquePro writes: "My burden is not to show the morality or functionality of a social contact itself, but to argue that if there is a social contract is the moral obligation increased."Pro is wrong. To show that moral obligations are "due to the social contract" Pro must first show that the social contract is moral. Pro is begging the question here--he assumes it is moral to prove that it can create moral obligations, but that assumption is entirely unwarranted.Pro then suggest that it women and children have secured more rights overtime, but this misunderstands the critique. The critique is against the idea of volition itself--that the social contract goes about deriving its moral legitimacy in the wrong way. That moral legitimacy better comes from dependency than agreement. Pro says that the social contract does not conflict with this notion, when, in fact, it does conflict.Note that the social contract does not derive it's legitimacy from the closeness of relationships, but from consent. As I said last round: "Pro is grounding moral obligations in a theory that legitimizes the existence non-voluntary, non-agreed obligations. That is NOT the social contract." Pro cannot justify the social contract through relational thinking; he can only do so through voluntary thinking. Relationships can be non-agreed, and thus are not valid grounds to justify a system based totally on agreement.C2. Moral ObligationsPro drops that an unaware being cannot have moral obligations. Extend this.Pro then says that the social contract sees the government as a "living entity." This is incorrect. The government is created by an agreement among the people, not an accord between the people and the state. The government is a tool made by the people to achieve a specific end. As for crimes against the state, the victims are the people, as their end has been disrupted. The government isn't the victim. Besides, Pro agreed to the definition; he's stuck with it. SOURCE1 - http://tinyurl.com...