Justice and the Social Contract (SACE Stage 2 Philosophy)

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain social contract theory, set out rival theories of distributive justice, and assess their strengths and objections.

The social contract tradition

Social contract theory grounds political authority in the consent of the governed. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, imagined a state of nature without government as a war of all against all, where life is poor, nasty, brutish and short. To escape it, rational individuals agree to surrender their freedom to an absolute sovereign who keeps the peace. John Locke offered a gentler picture: in the state of nature people have natural rights to life, liberty and property, and they form government to protect those rights, retaining a right of revolution if the government betrays its trust. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that legitimate authority expresses the general will, the collective interest of a free people, so that we obey only ourselves.

The strength of contract theory is that it makes authority answerable to the governed rather than to tradition or force. The main objection, pressed by David Hume, is that the contract is a fiction, since no one actually signed it, and tacit consent through residence is weak, given that most people cannot realistically leave.

Rawls and justice as fairness

John Rawls revived the contract idea as a device for testing principles of justice. He asks what principles people would choose behind a veil of ignorance, in an original position where they do not know their place in society, their talents or their wealth. Reasoning impartially, he argues, they would choose two principles: first, equal basic liberties for all; second, the difference principle, allowing inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged. The appeal is that it models fairness by stripping away self-interested bias. Critics object that rational agents might not be so risk-averse, and that the veil produces an unrealistically abstract chooser.

Nozick and the entitlement theory

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, challenged Rawls from a libertarian direction. Justice, he argued, is about how holdings are acquired and transferred, not about their final pattern. If property is justly acquired and justly transferred, the resulting distribution is just however unequal. His Wilt Chamberlain example argues that any preferred pattern of distribution will be upset by free voluntary exchanges, so enforcing a pattern requires continual interference with liberty. Nozick therefore defends only a minimal night-watchman state. The objection is that initial acquisitions are often historically unjust, and that the view tolerates extreme inequality and offers little to those born into disadvantage.

Communitarian critique

Communitarians such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre question the abstract, unencumbered individual that both Rawls and Nozick presuppose. Real people, they argue, are constituted by communities, traditions and shared goods, and justice cannot be derived from individuals imagined apart from these attachments. This restores attention to community and the common good, but critics worry it can slide into relativism or endorse oppressive traditions.

Evaluating

A strong answer weighs the trade-off between liberty and equality that runs through the debate. Contract theory powerfully grounds authority in consent yet rests on a fiction. Rawls secures fairness for the worst off but at some cost to liberty and realism. Nozick protects liberty but tolerates harsh inequality. Communitarians correct the abstraction of both but risk endorsing the status quo. The most defensible position is likely a reflective balance that takes both liberty and the claims of the disadvantaged seriously.