engleski

On The Social Contract Theory of Morals

Proponents of the social contract theory of morality often claim that social contract is tacit or implicit. However, the question is what does it exactly mean? In my opinion, we should understand it in the sense that social contract theory is true of individuals a, b, c, ... and norm Φ iff: (1) a, b, c, ... behave according to Φ , (2) each one of them does so because he/she believes that each one of them will be better off if all of them behave according to Φ , (3) each one of them expects others will behave according to Φ for the same reason. When these three conditions are satisfied, we have to say that a, b, c, ... behave as if they agreed to do Φ (in the relevant sense), even if no explicit deal has been made. This definition is useful for several further purposes ; it enables us to (a) delineate morality - moral norms are exactly those norms which satisfy these conditions ; (b) define prejudices as norms which are falsely believed to make us better off, that is, falsely believed to satisfy condition (2) ; (c) define moral erosion as a proces of weakening conditions (1) and (3), often in spite of true belief that we would be better off if we all accept Φ , (d) testing the truth of the social contract theory ; if all of our basic moral intuitions (or at least great majority) satisfy these conditions, we should regard it as a true theory.

Morality; Contract; Tacit; Agreement

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