Today we're going to start talking about modern social contract theory, and this is really a, a living branch of political philosophy, you'll see that has many active contributors to it. But we're going to start with what I left you with last time, when I said there were two long identified problems with this classical social contract theory, and that we needed to pay some attention to them to see how modern theories would deal with them. So what were the problems? What was the, what would I leave you with there? >> Well, one is that they sort of revolve around natural laws, and the problem with that is, people either don't believe in them or don't agree with them. >> Right, so nobody agrees upon natural law, and so this idea that we have certain natural rights that are grounded in natural law, that we come together in order to protect through a social contract, sort of trips up on the idea that nobody really agrees on what those natural rights are and what the natural law origins of them might be. And so one of the most important innovations that, that shapes the whole of the modern social contract theory is to solve that problem of secularizing natural law with a version of, of Immanuel Kant's ethics, the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. And, and when I say Immanuel Kant, what comes to mind? Does anything come to mind? >> yes. He's moral ethics and categorical imperative. >> Okay so that's, those are long words. Categorical imperative. So we need to just get a little we need to translate them into words of one syllable that'll make sense to everybody. So before he talks about categorical imperatives, he talks about hypothetical imperatives. What do you think a hypothetical imperative might be? >> I know what a hypothetical is. >> What's a hypothetical? >> A hypothetical is sort of bringing up a scenario or some sort of dynamic for a particular kind of consideration. >> Okay. So that's a very good answer. And we're going to talk later about hypothetical contract theory, which is exactly that meaning of the term hypothetical, but it's not actually what Kant had in mind. So we're going to have two different senses of hypothetical going today, and it's going to be important to keep them separate. Yours is coming up later, so just sit on it for right now. What else comes to mind when we say hypothetical? >> Conditional? >> Conditional. Yes, in many ways, it would've been better if, instead of hypotheci, thetical imperatives, Kant had talked about conditional imperatives. It would've been less confusing. But so the idea of a hypothetical imperative is exactly that, an if-then statement. If you want to be happy, then obey the utilitarian calculus. If you want to have economic growth, don't have too much regulation. If something, then something else. This is the notion of a hypothetical imperative. And the, the imperative is always conditional on your wanting to achieve the particular goal that you're taking about. Right? So that's the notion of a hypothetical imperative. And it's, it's sort of like a, a conditional judgment, a prudential judgment if you want to get to some place you want to go, then you need to do this. Kant didn't think that that rose to the level of a moral law, because by definition, we think that laws are true regardless of particular context. Right? Laws must be true. That's just the notion, right? So when he talks about categorical imperatives, what do you think he might have in mind? >> It, basically, is a must that we should act mm, in the same way regardless of the circumstances. >> So it's an, it's like an unconditional must. Right? You act only according to the maxim, as he put it, if that at the same time, you would will that it becomes a universal law. And the, the way to translate this into, into common sense language that we can all understand, it's, it's if you were to affirm some principle in every conceivable circumstance, then it rises to the level of a law, a rational law. Can you think of something that might be an example of that? That you would affirm regardless of the, of the circumstances. >> Don't kill. >> Don't kill. >> Mm-hm. >> But it's, it's nar, it's nearing the the, the religious law, right? >> Yeah, and I, I don't think Kant would affirm that because he would think Kant believed in, in a version of, of just war. So you would think there's some circumstances in which it might be legitimate to kill. But it's a good guess. And he certainly wouldn't want to reach for any religious maxim for its being, because of its being religious. Right? He might think that that some maxims like the Golden Rule which is, you know, treat others as you want them to treat you, that's an arguable candidate. In fact, the, the, the candidate that Kant himself gave was, was the idea that we should never use people exclusively. So he, people use one another all the time. He understood that, but he said, never treat people exclusively as means to your own ends. Always remember that they are ends in themselves. So this was a kind of statement that he thought rose to the level of a law that met his categorical imperative test. Another way of putting it, it's a long word, but it's less opaque, that, that Kantian moral philosophers sometimes use, is the notion of universalizability. Universalizability. That if you can universalize, that is, affirm it in every conceivable circumstance, then it has this feature of being a law. And so what the modern social contracts theorists did was instead of reaching to Hobbes and Locke and the people who talked about natural law, they reached instead for a version of this Kantian idea to, to have Kant, a version of Kant's ethics, do the same heavy lifting in their theories that natural law had done in the classical theories. And it's a way, as I, as I said earlier, of trying to secularize the, the basis of natural law and detach it from all the theological disputes and considerations that had preoccupied the earlier theorists. And virtually all of the modern social contract theorists at some level or other are Kantians. At some level or other they affirm this idea of categorical imperatives. We'll see that when we get into the John Rawls' theory later today, he talks about it by reference to the idea that he calls it procedural expression of the categorical imperative, but we'll get into that later. It's worth adding a footnote here that Kant, the historical Kant himself, was very skeptical that this enterprise could be pursued in politics. And the reason was that he thought politics always depends on empirical things, which are never going to rise to the level of universal law. The way he put it, he said, welfare, which is sort of the good of society, welfare does not have any ruling principle, because it depends on the will's material aspect, that's sort of like human psychology, which is empirical, and thus incapable of becoming a universal rule. So that's a very, fairly convoluted way of saying that Kant didn't really believe we were going to ever be able to come up with principles for politics that met this test, that people could affirm in every conceivable circumstance. And in that sense, Kant would have been as skeptical of the modern social contract theories as Marx would have been as skeptical of the communism that was established in his name in the 20th century. So Kant would not have been a partisan of this effort. Okay, what was the other problem with social contract theories? I mentioned that one was this problem of natural law. What was the other one? >> Well the second one is that you just mentioned is basically the social contract. >> Yeah. >> Never, never happened, actually. >> There were, there never has been a social contract. >> [LAUGH]. >> At the, at the, in the first slide today I had a picture of the we the people, referring to the American- >> Yeah. >> The American Declaration of Independence but what, what, what does it matter that there never was a social contract? So what? >> Well, in, in a legal sense, you know, if, if only in a legal sense, a contract is only valid if it's really, it's signed by two parties, and all of the involved parties. >> Okay. >> The Constitution was signed by a bunch of powerful men in a room that represented the people, but weren't all the people themselves. >> Okay, who did it exclude? >> Everyone that wasn't in the room. >> Okay. You could say that their interests were represented. There were some people whose interests weren't represented, right? Who might they have been? >> when, when you look at the mail, Mayflower ship- >> Yeah. >> They signed a contract among themselves, right? >> Yeah. >> But then they didn't sign with the Indians. >> Indians for example, weren't represented at all. Yeah what we now refer to as Native Americans, but were, they were called Indians in those days. Yeah, so that, even in, even in the creation of the United States of America, which arguably comes as close as any nation has ever come to founding it on that basis of an explicit contract we didn't. And in fact, just to make, to go back to your legalistic point at that time there were, were prevailing the Articles of Confederation, one of which required that any change to the Articles of Confederation be unanimous. And they didn't have unanimity, so they said never mind. [LAUGH] Okay. So even in that case, it's problematic. There never has been a social contract. And so but for, for political philosophy, the problem that flows from that is that, if you then get political principles that assume there was a social contract aren't they in going to in some way be systematically misleading about the human condition? Because if Aristotle was closer to the, the heart of the matter when he said human beings are naturally political, they're always political ins, arrangements. It's just a question of what sort. That's a very different way of thinking about politics than imagining a pre-social condition about what life could be like without political institutions of any sort. So the answer to that, and this is where John Rawls, who we're going to spend the rest of today talking about enters, is the notion of a hypothetical contract. And this, as I said earlier, is a different sense of hypothetical than Kant used when he was talking about hypothetical imperatives or conditional imperatives. Here, Rawls is talking about exactly what you said earlier. A hypothetical is something it's, it's a, it's a thought experiment, it's an imaginary exercise you go through in order to understand something about an actual circumstance. But he never wants to say there was a social contract or there could have been even a social contract. Rather he's going to say, knowing that there is no such thing as a social contract, and knowing people have always existed in political institutions of some sort, we can still ask the question, if we could renegotiate the terms of our association, not, not pre-political people or primitive peoples or anything like that. Us, people like us. What would we choose? Okay, and he's, that's what Rawls is going to do.
