IX - THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Summary

THE STATE OF NATURE AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

In the previous chapter, I proposed an account of the deontological foundations of our value systems. The right to natural liberty, extended to include a presumption against paternalistic interference, and the right to a system of private property are among the moral principles presupposed by the value systems of the self-directed moral persons that characterize our Western societies. I have not argued, of course, that all such self-directed agents will in fact acknowledge these moral principles, but it is indeed part of my thesis that any fully rational moral agent of the sort I have been describing would do so. Once again, it is important to grasp that philosophical ethics is only practical in this limited sense: it provides reasons for action, but it is neither necessarily persuasive nor does it aim to produce actual consensus (§16.2).

In this section, I explore three implications of this description of the state of nature for contractual justification. In section 28, I present the core of the contractual argument. I close in §29 with some general concluding remarks concerning the theory of justification and liberal political philosophy.

Irrational values

The analysis of the state of nature allows us to at least begin to identify the set of values that enter into the constrained teleological argument that constitutes the contractual justification (§20.1).