Why is Contractualism a Thing?
By: Stephen Casper
Tags: Utilitarianism, Ethics, Morality, Politics, Enlightenment

John Locke is a Sophist

Euconoclastic blog series

Stephen Casper, thestephencasper@gmail.com

Most students who go through public education in the US end up in some Gov, American History, or Euro history class which takes a unit to talk about the Enlightenment or something similar. There, they are presented the thoughts of Enlightenment thinkers on liberal society, usually with much reference to the philosophy of the American or French revolutions.

It seems to me that these Enlightenment ideas are usually presented without a serious foil, almost as if they were settled matters. Of course, education and popular thought in a society will reflect some of the values that define it, but it’s a shame that (at least by my impression) public education teaches certain enlightenment ideas almost as facts instead of frameworks.

The old progressive is today’s conservative. Isn’t it likely that someone has come up with better political ideas than 200+ year-old Enlightenment ones? But the last times that truly revolutionary philosophies and systems of government were established in the world were arguably during the American and Russian revolutions.

Remember the days spent in school talking about Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Wollstonecraft, etc.? They helped to lay the foundation of currently-popular ideas in the US about human nature, individual rights, freedoms, and democracy. In particular, I want to touch on some of the things they said about social contract theory/contractualism/contractarianism?

Quick review: contractualist moral/political theory says that freely and fairly-entered contracts are morally binding and that they form a framework for morally legitimate social structures. As it’s commonly described, all humans, absent government, live in a state of nature, in which, people violate each other all the time and life is “nasty, brutish, and short”. But when governments and social structures are established, it allows groups of people to reap the benefits of cooperation and non-antagonism by cohering around a common set of stable rules and norms. And because these rules and norms are the keystone of society itself — with all its benefits, following them is morally required, and disobeying them is punishable.

Sound plausible? I agree that contractualism is an interesting framework for understanding states. I don’t think it’s a particularly useful one — it doesn’t lead to a functional understanding — but it’s at least interesting. Politically though, it might seem that without contractualism, we can’t have a society (which is presumably very bad). But not so fast. We don’t need a social contract for a state unless we outright define all states as being inherently based on some sort of contract. But that’s tautology-mongering.

I think it’s actually pretty audacious to say that there’s some contract making up the fabric of every state (or at least every legitimate one). Contractualists typically hold the belief that for a contract to be binding, it needs to be freely and informedly agreed to by all parties. That’s not the case at all with any social contract in any state. When people benefit from state services or securities, it’s seen as an agreement to a state’s social contract, but what choice do people have? Taking advantage of these things is passive, it can be done by infants, and one doesn’t need to know anything about the contact to benefit from them. Certainly, we couldn’t say that a social contract is freely and fairly agreed to. So even by a contractualist’s logic, social contracts in the real world seem dubious.

I think a careful contractualist could maybe contrive their theory into reconciliation with these problems. But the problems don’t stop there. I think it can be pretty easily shown that it’s fundamentally the wrong set of principles to rally behind. Let’s say that I have a really good friend with whom I make a microsocial contract with. Let’s say this contract obliges us to never kill each other. This seems like a sort of weird thing to do, but to any contractualist, this is perfectly fine. Now let’s say that, for some reason, I’m placed into a situation in which I’m in shown two buttons to press. The first of which will kill my friend, and the second will kill a billion other people in another place whom I have no contracts with. Contractualism would tell us to kill the billion to honor the contract and save my friend. But could we really be so bold as to say that this is morally obligatory?

Quick note — please don’t give me flack for how this argument seems invalid because the example is “unrealistic.” If needed, one could come up with some analogous situation that could more plausibly happen, but that’s far from the point. I’m testing principles here, and if it’s not fair game to extrapolate as a way of testing principles, then morality isn’t very useful. That would be like saying that a scientific theory can’t be proven false by disproving testable predictions that it makes.

Of course, we shouldn’t see contractualism as an argument that killing the billion is fine — we should see this example instead as an illustration of how off-base contractualism is. The former would make us appeal to some arbitrary sanctity of agreements, and the latter would have us appeal to actual life, something that we probably are much more justified to value. The bottom line is that, all else equal (and from a point of view that attributes fundamental value to people’s welfare), it would be better to live in a world where I killed one person instead of a billion, so contractualism can’t be the right moral framework.

Now let me take this down one level of abstraction. Just as it would be wrong to push the button that kills a billion people because of a contract, it’s wrong to use social contract theory to justify bad laws or deny the moral status of people in an outgroup. But this happens all the time. Ever heard cries for the “Rule of Law” or chants for “America First?” The policies and attitudes that follow are cause immoral law, denied aid, inhumane migration policy, and nationalism. Herein lies another repugnancy of contractualism: that is doesn’t care about anyone’s welfare, just notions of contractually-constructed rules. It’s also starkly conservative — preserving existing power structures.

Doesn’t it seem kind of strange that anyone has an urge to codify contracts into moral theory? But does it seem less strange if we consider that contractualism conveniently supports existing power structures and capitalism?

None of this is to say that contracts don’t matter — they can be instrumentally useful, and violating them can often cause harm. But it’s not the contracts themselves we should be caring about.

Contractualism is just another sophistical, conservative distraction from actual welfare-based morality.