Topics Justice

Question Is there really a Social contract? Many supreme court cases have upheld that the government is not liable to protect you. For example, if a police officer dawdles around while your house is burglarized, he isn't liable to you for not upholding his duty to protect you. How do we consent to government to govern us when it has a monopoly over our area?

Accepted:
September 4, 2008

Comments

In thinking about the existence of a social contract, or lack thereof, the first thing we need to do is separate questions about the possible terms of the contract from questions about its existence. You note that courts have denied that the members of the government can always be held liable to protect individuals; these rulings on their own, however, don’t give us reason to believe either for or against the existence of a social contract. For example, rather than suggesting the non-existence of a social contract, they could instead simply reflect the terms of the contract, and in particular, that absolute protection is not one of the terms. And this would be reasonable: we typically think that the terms of the contract should be limited, at the very least, by what is within each party’s capacities. Yet is not always within the government’s capacity to be both fully informed of possible threats and to be prepared to protect individuals from those threats.

Your overall concern about the very existence of a social contract is a pressing one. There is a real sense in which the government does have a monopoly over us. We cannot opt out of the government’s jurisdiction; even if we choose to move countries, there are still real ways in which we are subject to many aspects of that government’s policies. Traditionally, philosophers who are sympathetic to the idea of the social contract have tried to show that the contract exists in virtue of some sort of non-explicit form of consent that we give. So, for example, John Locke has argued in favor of the notion of tacit consent, whereby we (tacitly) consent to the rules of a particular government in light of residing in its territory or otherwise making use of its resources. Others have argued in favor of a hypothetical social contract, whereby consent is deemed to exist if we can establish, on hypothetical grounds, that agents would have consented to it.

Most philosophers believe that if a social contract does exist in contemporary society, it does so as a result of some non-explicit form of consent. However, many philosophers are skeptical about the viability and legitimacy of these forms of consent, and this skepticism leads them to argue that there is no social contract. They are thus left with the task of showing either that the government can be justified via other means, or that the government cannot be justified.