Modern Social Contract Theory

摘要

Social contract theory is one of the mainstream methodological approaches taken in modern moral and political philosophy. Its central claim is that the basic justification of moral and political principles with which we judge the Tightness/ wrongness or justness/unjustness of individual acts and social institutions stems from what rational individuals, given their state of knowledge, would agree to in a suitably defined hypothetical social contract. Different social contract theories emerge depending on how the social contract theorist characterizes the contracting parties' rationality and available knowledge. With respect to rationality, some social contract theories characterize the rationality of the contracting parties in terms of modern utility theory standardly employed in economics (e.g., John C. Harsanyi, James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, David Gauthier, etc.); others ascribe to the contracting parties a more rich form of (what Weale calls) "deliberative rationality" in which the parties weigh various reasons for or against various principles with some prior moral motivation-such as being motivated by the principle of reciprocity or the desire to justify one's actions to others (e.g. John Rawls. Brian Barry, Russell Grice, and T. M. Scanlon). With respect to the available knowledge, some social contract theories assume that the contracting parties are behind a "veil of ignorance" that blocks the contracting parties from knowing their own individual traits and/or social circumstances (e.g., Harsanyi, Buchanan, Tullock, Rawls, etc.); while others allow the contracting parties to contract with each other under full knowledge of their own individual and social circumstances (e.g., Gauthier, Barry, Grice, Scanlon, etc.). Based on such characterizations, Weale takes seven prominent modern social contract theories and classifies them into four different logically possible categories that are summarized in table 1.1 (p. 17).