Michael Huemer’s book The problem of the political authority Investigates various arguments that are given for determining the existence of political authority, which he defines as a property with two aspects:
(i) Political: The right, of a government, to make certain types of laws and to maintain them by coercion against the members of its society – in short the right to rule.
(ii) Political obligation: The obligation of the citizens to obey their government, even in circumstances in which one would not be obliged to obey similar orders issued by a non -governmental agency.
Huemer spends various chapters to investigate the most popular arguments to establish political authority and finds them all lacking. He ensures that this in itself does not automatically lead to a conclusion that governments must be abolished:
If there is no authority, does it follow that we have to abolish all governments? No. The absence of authority means roughly that individuals are not obliged to obey the law only because it is the law and/or that agents of the state are not entitled to others just because they are agents of the state. There can still be good reasons to obey most laws, and agents of the state can still have sufficient reasons to take sufficient compelling action to maintain a state.
Huemer spends two chapters on investigating social contract theory as an argument for political authority – the first about traditional social contract theory as proposed by John Locke, and the second on more modern social contract theories based on the idea that a government could have hypothetical are regulated as a result of a social contract and that real authority and obligations are created from this hypothetical agreement.
Huemer refers quite convincingly both forms of social contract theory. One of his arguments is that all forms of the social contract argument (historical, implicit or hypothetically) miss none of the functions that are necessary for a contract to generate a valid agreement or obligations. For example, some people claim that people by accepting government services, show people that they have implicitly agreed to pay taxes as part of the social contract. Huemer argues that it does not work, because taking an action only indicates permission for a schedule if you could reasonably believe that you had that not That action taken, the schedule would not be imposed on you. Suppose I force you to buy cookies that I bake hundred dollars for half a dozen cookies every month. Let’s say that I will find out later that you ate a few cookies. It would be clearly absurd to say that you eat the cookies, it appears that you had implicitly agreed to the transaction, and it was therefore a valid agreement. You would still be forced to give me the hundred dollars, regardless of.
There is another problem that I have with the social contract theory that Huemer does not describe. To bind a contract, it must be clear what the contract contains. But even with social contract theorists there is surprisingly little agreement here. They all agree that there is a social contract, but very disagree about what that contract actually entails. People on the left and the right will both object that a law or institution “violates the social contract”, but disagree about which laws or institutions do this, and what the violated conditions are.
Please note, this cannot be resolved by something similar to the existing set of laws (or the constitution perhaps) and explains that those laws represent the social contract. First, if the social contract simply means “which laws are currently on the books”, no social contract theorist would have any field to claim that an existing legislation or institutional regulation is violating the social contract. Given how often social contract theorists submit this claim, it is clear that the social contract is not the same as the existing set of legislation or legal institutions. Secondly, and more fundamentally, the social contract itself is supposed to be what a explanation offers why the government has the authority to create legislation in the first place. The use of existing legislation or legal institutions to try to try to demonstrate the existence or content of the social contract is questions. If existing legislation or state institutions are ‘the social contract’, it is useless to say that the social contract is what is justice existing legislation or state institutions.
In practice, a lot of social contract theory -discourse seems to be little more than different people who are ambiguous about the term “social contract” as “which regulations I personally give for preference”. Now, maybe I’m wrong, but there is a way to test. If theoreticians of Social Contract would try to find out what the content of this unwritten social contract is (instead of using it as a Trojan horse to smuggle in their own policy views), we often have to expect that social contract theorists emphasize aspects of what the social contract may not like. Jason Brennan made A similar criticism of a large part of the constitutional legal theory, with the argument that it tends to follow this process:
1. Start with a political philosophy – a look at what you want the government to do and what you want to be forbidden to be forbidden to do.
2. Take the constitution as a given.
3. Reverse Engineer a theory of constitutional interpretation so that it turns out – Happily! – that the Constitution prohibits what you want it to prohibit and allows what you want it to allow.
When I read academic writing through constitutional legal theorists, it seems that everyone (conservatives, liberals, libertarians) does this. Isn’t that bizarre? For example, why no longer libertarian legal theoreticians say: “Yes, the Constitution allows X, although X should be forbidden, and so to that extent the constitution is poor.” Why do we no longer see left-liberals say: “A just society would allow X, but unfortunately we prohibit our Constitution X and is a bad constitution to that extent.” We do sometimes See this, but for the most part, people of every ideology claim that the Constitution allows or forbids what they would like to allow or prohibit it.
In the same way I cannot remember any social contract theorists who claim: “Unfortunately, the social contract allows X that it must be prohibited and it prohibits the scheme that must be permitted.” It always seems that the conditions of this social contract are too, it It just happens like that The exact conditions contain most conducive to the political ideology of the person who argues about the importance of maintaining the social contract. Any Real-World contract with content, so hopelessly indefinite would never be valid. I see no reason why a hypothetical social contract would also be.