A Consequentialist Model for Just Social Contracts

SSRN Electronic Journal

Drawing on the theoretical and experimental literature on distributive justice, we put some assumptions of the contractarian argument to an empirical test by means of an experiment which investigates the influence that explicit agreement under the veil of ignorance may have on individuals' conception of justice and its implementation in a context of the production and distribution of a common output. One crucial characteristic of our experiment is that subjects are assigned unequal endowments for which they are not responsible; the assignment is random. At the same time, their work naturally generates unequal levels of earnings. Do the subjects involved in this interaction distinguish between the two types of inequality? Do they try to reduce the arbitrary one, while accepting the one generated through effort? Do they elaborate other distributive criteria? Does their choice ex-ante, when they are behind the veil, differ from their choice ex-post once the veil has been lifted and they know the outcome of the production phase? The main result is that the agreement under a veil of ignorance induces subjects to accept a liberal egalitarian division rule not only in the ex-ante agreement, but also in the actual implementation of the pie division, even if this contradicts their self-interest and some common economic assumptions about reciprocal expectations of rationality. In addition, our results show that deliberating through open discussion increases the level of ex-post compliance.

2018

M an is, by nature, a social being. The experience that the human being tends to society and needs it to live humanly is so clear and permanent that it does not take a great speculative effort to capture the natural character of human sociability. This idea has seldom been denied throughout the History of Philosophy. In fact, as John Stuart Mill (2001) states: "The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body" 2 (p. 32). Social life is not, then, in man, a mere factual issue. When we say that man is social by nature we do not mean only that in fact he lives in association with others, for more or less pragmatic reasons, of subsistence or reciprocal convenience 3. Undoubtedly, human society has much of this, but the sense of the wellknown Aristotelian affirmation-man is a political animal-is much deeper. This means that man only comes to fully manifest his humanity, only to develop his moral personality, to the extent that his life is received in the bosom of a human society: the family in the first place and, through it, the political society. In fact, according to the classical approach, family and "polis" contribute, each in their own way, to realize the social nature of man and, to that extent, contribute to manifesting what it is to be human. Now, family and city contribute-better or worseto that end, to the extent that they promote or not human development, according to the goods that-following St. Thomas-are already targeted in the very nature of man. Therefore, when we speak of family and city as "human" societies we do not simply refer to the fact that they are made up of human beings, but rather to the fact that they realize and must realize a specifically human way of life, and therefore are inherently ethical. Precisely the latter explains that, when it comes to characterizing them, we cannot settle for factual explanations, since the human, insofar as it is ethical, is not purely factual: it includes-as Ana Marta González (2008) affirms-always an original tension towards the order of duty to be. Just as every man is human, but he can always realize his humanity with greater perfection, so every human society is intrinsically ethical. This, however, does not prevent him from realizing his ethical condition with greater perfection. To better appreciate the intrinsically ethical character of human society, as something that distinguishes, this society from other animal societies, we can use a valuable observation of Aristotle (2005), who saw a connection between the peculiar human sociability, language and communication about what fair and unjust: Just as every man is human, but he can always realize his humanity with greater perfection, so every human society is intrinsically ethical.

Constitutional Political Economy, 2007

This paper delivers a step toward a naturalistic foundation of the social contract. While mainstream social contract theory is based on an original position model that is defined in an aprioristic way, we endogenize its key elements, i.e., develop them out of the individuals' moral common sense. Therefore, the biological and social basis of moral intuitions are explored. In this context, a key adaptation during evolution was the one that enabled humans to understand conspecifics as intentional agents. Since these behavioral aspects are considered to be an exaptation, they are not amenable to direct genetic explanations or to rationalitybased approaches.

Since antiquity, in all ages, justice has been treated as a parameter to capture the social and political insight into a suitable boundary. However, acknowledging justice from a perspective of common good refresh the hidden objectives of justice that needs to be encapsulated. Both western and eastern philosophy, particularly the process of politicisation of justice, tries to accommodate the political sphere of justice into a bottle of common good. Of course, the nature of justice can only be defined as a matter of distributive concept, for instance distribution of primary goods lead to the realization of being a member of political community. Historically the manner of justice has been evolving to pursue a good society, not only for individuals rather the essence of justice enhances the complexity of global interdependence through divers conceptual and theoretical standards. This paper will be analysing the basic historical and philosophical interpretations with regard to justice, moreover the amalgamation of justice with Common Good will also be taken into consideration.

The revival of social contract theory in the 1970s -and especially the work of John Rawlsgenerated a renewal of interest in contractarianism in international political theory. 1 Of course the debate on the notion of a contract to regulate conflict between states was not new. Hobbes ruled it out as impossible in the absence of a global Leviathan, and Kant -arguably ironicallysaw such a contract as the path to perpetual peace. But the recent focus of recent liberal theories on issues of justice between all individuals represents a new development. Liberal universalist or "cosmopolitan" theorists have sought to apply the contract structure to problems in "normative" international theory. Rawls and his contemporary liberal contractarians -Scanlon, Barry, Charvet, Beitz, Pogge et al. -seem to offer a conceptual device for addressing the ethical problems of global injustice, such as economic inequality and human rights violations.

Journal of Social Ontology

Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are (relatively) aligned, not competition problems in which individual interests compete with group interests (and in which there are no group beneficial Nash equilibrium available). In response, I set out to build on those theories and provide a (more) comprehensive naturalistic account of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. My central claim is that social contracts have culturally evolved to solve cooperation problems, which include both coordination and competition problems. I argue that solutions to coordination problems (which I spell out) emerge from "within-group" dynamics , while solutions to competition problems (which I also spell out) result largely from "between-group" dynamics.

This chapter examines the relation between distributive doctrines and human evolution. It reviews responses to the assumption that evolutionary data has conservative implications that deny the accuracy of some alleged facts, their natural origin, their social or biomedical immutability, or their normative implications. It also offers an evolutionary account of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" for humans and other mammalian persons and discusses various ways in which human nature may have more than merely instrumental relevance to distributive justice. For example, human rights, flourishing and capabilities, as well as the principles of sufficiency, priority and equality, that may regulate their distribution, can be traced to facts about our species.

One of the central and most attractive features of contemporary social contract theory is the idea that principles of justice exist in order to divide up the "benefits and burdens of cooperation." There are many circumstances in which individuals are able to engage in mutually beneficial interaction, but on the condition that each exercise some restraint in the pursuit of his or her individual interest. Thus the situation calls for a measure of voluntary self-restraint, which each individual must (by and large and in general) be persuaded to undertake. The structure of the interaction, however, underdetermines the choice problem, in the sense that there are many different cooperative arrangements, each of which involves a different allocation of the burdens and benefits, but all of which are mutually beneficial.