This House Believes that the Social Contract is a viable political theory

Awkward as this may be, it is at this point necessary to highlight the basic errors Stephen's refutation of my previous round. I did not say that political theory "cannot" rest on empirical facts, for indeed it can. Rather, I distinguished normative theory from empirical theory. Normative theory may very well be drawn from observations of the material world, and indeed it is -as would (loosely) be the case with Hobbes' social contract. But, normative theory is not ONLY drawn from empirical fact -as is demonstrated by John Rawls' original position which, insofar as it, the veil of ignorance, etc. are all hypothetical, illustrates that normative theory may be drawn from both. (1) In both cases, however, social contract theory -and normative theory generally- do not occupy the same intellectual space as scientific theory. That is not to devalue or elevate either normative or empirical theory, however. It is only to draw the epistemological difference between them. So, Stephen's refutation at once misrepresents my argument (albeit probably unintentionally), and similarly conflates the distention between normative and empirical theory. Most basically, he's trying to test normative theory with science's rules which, to draw an analogy to board games, is like trying to play chess by the rules of checkers. It's also important to note, here, that for lack of character space I was not able to specifically 'mention' Stephen's third point -even though I negated it by implication. Let's return to that, now. Donning Filmer's -normative- critique of Locke, Stephen claims that Locke's social contract doesn't quite 'work' because it doesn't account for familial structure's being prior to society and it overlooks consent. Like Filmer, Stephen erroneously assumes that consent in SCT works the same sort of way that consent to a legal contract or to sexual relations might work among individuals. And yet, even if the family were prior to society, that is not to say that SCT is not viable as a political theory because SCT distinguishes between the family and general society. Likewise, as I mentioned in Rd. 1, consent may be either tacit or explicit -and in that as the our own social order is always prior to ourselves (meaning it existed before we were born), our consent is assumed in our not choosing to leave it. Like Filmer, Stephen is muddying between two distinct 'kinds' of consent, and his argument is insufficient to indicate that SCT is not 'viable' as political theory because even if you bought his/Filmer's criticism, it only impact's "Locke's" social contract. It says nothing of Hobbes, Rawls, Rousseau, etc. After all, SCT is far more than Locke. Regretfully, I'm quite low on character space -but equally regretfully, Stephen's argument against my framework for viability still falls by the same token as his first point in the third round. I didn't say that "empirics" were irrelevant to political theory. I said that empirics weren't all that was relevant. His rebuttal presupposes that if the empirics on which some SCT writers based their postulations on could be shown to be not the case, that SCT falls. That's simply not the case, because while Locke may draw on observations of the world, even Locke didn't base his SCT only on empirical observations of the world. And indeed, some SCTs originate not from the physical world, but from hypotheticals of how the world should be to decide what's just -Rawls, for example. Stephen's final point in the last round takes issue with what he perceives my limited BOP to be. Indeed, I've got an easier time here than he does -but that's because of the way he (the instigator) articulated the resolution and not because of any choice I made. I've framed what viability means for normative theory, and shown that SCT is, in fact, viable. He has not even remotely demonstrated that SCT is not viable. I've met my burden, he has not. Do vote PRO. Many thanks. (1) http://plato.stanford.edu...