Social Contract Theory Should Be Abandoned

Danny Frederick ()

Rationality, Markets and Morals, 2013, vol. 4, issue 77

Abstract: I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of moral rules. I note the weakness of the appeal to implicit agreement, the conflation of legitimacy with stability, the undesirability of ‘public justification’ and the apparent blindness to the evolutionary critical-rationalist approach of Hayek and Popper. I employ that approach to sketch answers to the theoretical, historical and practical questions about the legitimacy of government or of systems of moral rules.

Keywords: critical rationality; disagreement; evolution; legitimacy; social contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 D7 H2 H4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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