Social Contracts

By Stephen Downes
Nov 17, 2021
Transcript of Social Contracts

Unedited Google Recorder transcription from audio

Hi everyone. I'm Steven Downs, welcome back to ethics analytics and the duty of care. We're in module five looking at approaches to ethics and as you can see on the screen and this talk will be talking about social contracts, and this is a huge area. And to some degree, it carries personal meaning for me because I've always lived in a world basically governed by social contracts or what people have called social contracts enough, I've often pushed back and against them.

I'm called to think of a case recently, where I had an interaction on Twitter, doesn't everything, start that way? Where somebody basically said, you know corporations stop commenting on my tweets and my response was a who died made you king? And so the exchange went back and forth, they disapproved of my language, I disapproved of their disapproval and said, basically, I am not governed by what you think are the social conventions.

But they said, you know, there is an agreement, that what happens on Twitter, at least in small discussion groups are private. And, you know, it raises the question of what these agreements consist in how they're created, what they're applicability is, and what the long-term impact of them is. And, you know, I'll come back to that discussion.

Maybe a bit later in the talk. But, you know, this sort of interaction has an effect on me. And I think it has an effect on a lot of people. And so, you know, although we think of social contracts as within the domain of political science or political philosophy, it's their influentation as an ethical principle.

I think that really strikes home to most most people. So, that's what I want to talk about today. And, you know, we're going to go through a wide range of theories too much content. This could be a whole theory, this could be a whole degree program so I'm going to miss some things but that can't be avoided but I hope this gives you a sense of some of the debates in some of the discussions in the field.

So what are social contracts? Well, the core idea of a social contract is the idea that ethics, whatever. We think it is somehow results from an agreement within a community, and every word of of that core idea, could be questioned. The major components at least to my mind of social contract ethics are.

First of all, the processor method by which agreement is reached, Secondly, the determination of what the actual contents are of the resulting agreement and then third what the motivation is to abide by the agreement And we can see that all three of these things are necessary. There needs to be some means of reaching an agreement, Whatever it is.

And we'll look at two major types. There needs to be some understanding of the contents of the agreement, but it wouldn't also be ethical unless individuals feel compelled to follow the principles. So we need all three On the diagram there. This is a diagram of the political dimensions of social contracts, but you know, these spill over into ethical dimensions as well.

And so we have dimensions of personal, liberty, and economic liberty, contrasted with economic security, and personal, or group security. We can draw the scale between left and right anarchist and totalitarian, and we could probably draw it along any number of other axes. And I sort of want to caution before we get too deep into this, that we need to keep the ethical domain and the political domain.

Separate, at least I think we do. I mean, not everybody would agree with that. Some people would say, you know, the, the ethic that our government that governs, our society should also be the law that governs our society. But, but I think that there are good reasons for keeping this discussion separate.

Well, we'll return to some of those, as well as we go through this talk. So, I'm gonna begin with the concept of more race now. Maurice aren't strictly speaking ethical principles, but they give us a sense of where social contractarian ethical principles arise and they're important to understand both in terms of their genesis and their content more ace are not deliberately invented or thought of or worked out by some people in society.

They're not created or constructed. We might say rather they emerge gradually or to the customary practices of the people largely without conscious choice or intention. And so in this way, there's similar to folks and there's similar to social norms but they carry a bit more of an edge to them, in the sense that if you violate a more a you will probably be subject to some sort of social sanction, social mores will cover conventional practices regarding relationships and sex.

Maybe things like treatment of animals, probably things like honesty, keeping your word, perhaps non-violence, or at least the appropriate use of violence. They tend to be fuzzy and unclear, their enforcement is not always even handed. And you know, it's all a very loose system, but it's also it's just that most of us understand.

I would not walk out naked in the community, not because it's against the law, actually. I'm not sure if it is, but because I be violating a moray, I'd be violating a community standard of decency. If I did that and that's how Maurice work. But over time we see a need for more of a formalization of these and a more of a reasoning you know to come up with the reasoning behind their development and their implementation.

And that's what leads us into social contract theory. We can think of it as a rising from situations. Where, you know, the things like Maurice don't really seem to help us. Classic examples is called the prisoners dilemma. And the way this works is each prisoners given the opportunity to betray the others.

So there are two prisoners, a and B, you can betray the other person or you can stay silent if you betray the other person. You get off Scott free, but the other person suffers, if you both be tray, each other, you both suffer, but if you both stay silent you both benefit.

Now the benefit isn't as much as you could get if you betray the other and the other does not betray you. So there's an incentive there to hold that. The other person is altruistic and you're not so that you can get off Scott free and let them pay the whole price.

But you can see how that breaks down because if you look at the overall benefit, if you're both silent, you both pay a little bit but not very much. And certainly nothing compared to the result. For either one of you or both of you, if you betray the other, we see the diagram of, of the calculation here, right?

So here we have the indicating with the most here. We have the stay silent calculation here. We'd have the betrays calculation and here we have one or the other. So the idea of the prisoners dilemma is that the rational behavior here is governed. Not only by what happens to you, but also what happens to your friend and in that calculation, the rational behavior here is to stay silent, but typical ethics.

Traditional ethics, doesn't seem to work that way. Certainly, something like this would be dramatically under determined by a system of social morays, although I might add, you know, there are unwritten spoken social codes that say, you know, like you do not betray the other. So, you know, in a sense, a lot of social mores and social customs have addressed, this prisoner dilemma.

But how do they do it? What is the thinking behind it? Well, what we find is that overall, in the wider scheme of things, though we haven't solved it. Look at pollution, right? Suppose you live in a society that has highly polluting cars, right? You can put a catalytic converter on your cards gonna cost you money, but although you'll reduce pollution a little bit, it really won't change the overall scheme of things for it to work.

Everybody has to do it. Which means everybody has to pay a cost but if nobody wants to pay the cost, nobody would do it. We end up with really bad pollution, so we need some mechanism of reaching some kind of agreement. We're seeing the similar sort of dilemma playing out on the global stage.

We just had some recent climate talks, which once again, ended up in futility and he argued, it is often advanced. Well why should we do anything to address climate change because, you know, probably China and India aren't going to do anything. And so, we're paying a cost, but we're not getting any result.

And the idea of the solution to the prisoners dilemma, is you have to take that leap of faith, but it's really hard to reach that leap of faith. You know, without some sort of formal structure, which is why they have these talks. Similarly, with the current pandemic, you know, everybody benefits.

If each of us wears a mask, wearing a mask is a bit of an inconvenience for each of us and a really only works of everybody wears a mask, but not everybody wears a mask. So again, we have this same sort of dilemma. So what we need do? This argued is some kind of system of morality by agreement and and typically, this expresses itself as an explicit agreement, social moral race will take you a certain distance.

But at some point we've got to come to an agreement. Specifically, you know, to quote James Rachels from his well-known book, the elements of moral philosophy, morality consists in the set of rules, governing. How people are to treat each other. That rational, people will agree to accept for their mutual benefit on the condition that others follow those rules as well.

And so you see the different elements here of the solution to the prisoners dilemma, we're going to agree with rules. It's for our mutual benefit and the condition is, everybody has to follow the rules. See this come up all the time in society, you know? Unionism, you know, a unionized workplace is basically this kind of thing we will benefit.

If we bargain collectively in the workplace, but the thing is, everybody has to agree to be bound by the bargaining, one way or another. You can't have some people bargaining and others as they say acting as free riders, okay? So what's the justification for all of that? Well, we go back to Thomas Hobbes who didn't actually write in 1986, he wrote.

I think it's the 15 or 16 hundreds and that's a time in Britain where there was significant debate about the role of the monarchy and the role of the barrens about who should basically control the state. And the argument advanced by Thomas Hobbes is that we. And by we he means people who have their own armies should willingly see power to the monarch In order to escape the state of nature and which no rules exist and where he says, where as he says, there are quote, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worse of all continual fear, and danger of violent death.

And the life of man solitary, poor nasty brutish and a short. You see the appeal here, right? The consequences to ourselves, not seeding, power to a monarch or significant, you know, if we're all worrying among ourselves, if we all take justice into our own hands, then we're in a state of perpetual conflict.

And here argues, this is the natural state, right? This is how things would be. If we did not reach this agreement so we agree to seed the right of executing punishments, enforcing the law to the monarch. We don't take it into our own hands and that's what keeps everybody safe.

So the appeal here is safety and security, Another approach to creating a social contract was advanced by John Locke, writing around the same time. A little after Thomas Hobbes and again, lock, depicts the contract as a mechanism of people working together but instead of protecting us from each other as hobs, describes it in the case of lock, it's a mechanism to defend the rights of citizens against the sovereign, the king, and in particular to protect their right to property.

Oh, lock, had a locks philosophy, political philosophy is based to a large degree in property and and his view of property. Is that anything that we find in nature and that we add our own labor to? By that very fact becomes our property and we have a right over it, we get to keep it to sell it to do what we want with it.

And this fundamental right needs to be defended again, against monarchs who, despite not actually having done any labor themselves would attempt to seize our property. You can see this reflected in a lot of political discussion today where people say, you know my property, my land is mine government, stay away, government stay out of it.

That's the lock key and sort of you. And the way this is enforced is by the creation of the social contract whereby people work together in order to protect this right to property. And locks as basically, if the sovereign violates that if the state becomes too repressive, then there are two means of remedy, the one means is to move away and in John Locke's time, a lot of people did exactly that.

And so we have the migration, for example, of, of the Quakers to North America, or even the exile of criminals to Australia of the other way, is to take up arms and overthrow them on earth. And and here we have the idea of that the right to well, take up arms and overthrow them on our is based on this social contract.

We are giving ourselves an agreement that if it comes to that, that's what we'll do again. You know, there's this presumption here, not so much of the, the inherent badness of humans but the inherent badness of monarchs or power structures or the state generally and it's the state that we most want to protect ourselves from.

And it's interesting to see how much of that is reflected in some societies today. Sometimes legitimately, I mean, sometimes there are certainly legitimate reasons to fear the state other times. Maybe not so much. So so in the 1700s and we reach the enlightenment and I'm more rationally, conceived structure of morality and civilization.

We got Josh Russo, the writing a number of years before the French Revolution, but no doubt influential on it. And he writes, and I've said this before, man was born, free yet everywhere. He is in change and here, the oppressor is not each other, and it's not the monarch specifically, but it's society as a whole.

And then that effect of society is to constrain the natural freedom of people. And instead to enslave them, to serve the will of the master whoever that is. And that wasn't, you know, an exaggeration in Russo's time, people didn't have individual freedom. And and in places like for example Russia the idea of freeing the surfs was a real question.

And what Russo also thought was that the contract. Although it's a social contract, the objective isn't simply to protect us from harm from each other or to protect our property. But rather to ascertain, what could be called, the general will, which would be expressed by the unanimity of citizens.

That's a hard concept to put a finger on. Although, you know, this concept of a social will or a general, will is going to echo through philosophy since the days Russo and, and you see it in haggle in the phenomenology of right with a world's spirit we're moving through history or even marks is dialectical materialism.

And again thinking of the will of humanity, moving through history. And that's where we get the expression of being on the right side of history. And so on and Russo is very careful to caution against putting important functions like say education into the hands of individuals or into the hands of interest groups.

Because he says, inevitably, they will turn there's power around to work to their own advantage rather than to the advantage of the will of the entire people. So this is a representation of Russos theory about, you know, it contains elements of all theories. And for those of you listening on audio, what I've got up here is a diagram that I grabbed from Pinterest, but in this, in the center, we have state and sovereign linked together by loss.

And the laws are executed by government, which may be democracy, maybe in aristocracy, maybe a monarchy. But the idea here is, it's the executive branch if you will. And these laws are basically declarations of a general will, and that general real will results from a social contact social contract that people agree to support and obey.

So we've got government state, which is the subjects laws sovereign, which might be citizens, a will, and then individuals. And then these individuals express their general will through a combination of civil freedom and natural freedom. And we'll come back to the subject of freedom. But, you know, without freedom, it's not possible for individuals to express and see implemented their will in the general will.

So, these tend to be the major components of the social contract model of ethics and, you know, the players can change. But you're going to get the same sort of idea, no matter what you're going to have the will early on the overall values, you're gonna have the laws or the principles, you're gonna have an enforcement mechanism, you're going to have a deliberation mechanism and then, you know, the social conditions that make all of this possible.

It's pretty sophisticated and elegant theory of ethics. I mean, there's a lot to recommend it but there are problems. Oh yes, there are problems. One of the most significant problems is enforcement. And I would even say that, you know enforcement sometimes feeds back in on itself. So you know if we're looking at political philosophy, you know we jump right into the question of police powers.

We jump into forms of sanction or punishment and social contract theory. It may be criticized gives government too much power. And I'm quoting here to make laws under the guy's of protecting the public specifically governments. May use the cloak of the social contract to invoke the fear of a state of nature to warrant laws that are intrusive.

And that's from an open text BC, text on social contract theory, and we've seen this play out, haven't played and and we've seen more than one politician raise the sector of anarchy, if we don't give the police or the army or whatever enough power to protect us but problem is who protects us from the police and even even more to the point, the idea of what the protectors want feeds back into what should become law?

Feeds back into our idea of what is morally, right? You know, whatever is good for the police. Whatever is good for the mental military, that's good for society supporting these things. Therefore becomes ethically good or at least the social good on which other ethics may be based, but it can go to extremes.

And yeah, I go back to that original Twitter, debate that I had, which was just a Twitter today. So it doesn't mean anything. But the idea that was being expressed here by the other person, was that a, there is this expectation of privacy and B, this expectation needed to be addressed in tweets addressed to companies in order for it to be enforced.

But also, in order for it to be created in the first place, like there wouldn't be this violation of ethics unless people enforced it. So it feeds back into itself, but you know, it comes back down to mine. First question, who died made them? King, you know, we have the idea here that the enforcement mechanism creates the ethics.

And that's not really what we had in mind. When we came up with a social contract, second question is to do with, has to do with consent, generally, and David Hume in some withering critiques of Hobbs and Locke addresses. This head on human is a contemporary of Russo and they knew each other and they were actually friends for a while and then they were friend and he's for a while but Hume has two questions.

First of all, human questions, the adequacy of social contract theory, as a historical account. He says almost all the governments which exist at present or of which there remains any record in story have been founded originally either on usurpion or conquest or both Without any pretense of a fair consent or volat of voluntary subjection of the people.

Now, since then, there have been some exceptions to that but not very many and they haven't always worked out. Well, The second thing he says is he does is question the validity of consent claimed by these theories because let's face it, right? People can say yeah, there's a social contract but none of us signed anything.

And if you look at the remedies offered by lock, those aren't really remedies. Are they especially the one you leave the country. You know, usually leaving the country is not an easy proposition and Hume says, we may as well. Assert that a man by remaining in a vessel freely consensus to the Dominion of the Master though.

He was carried on board while asleep and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment. He leaves her now. If the only way to escape a social contract, is to jump into the sea and die bets, not really consent. And these are pretty important considerations. I mean add since any actual mechanism of creating a social contractor consenting to it, the whole idea of a social contract, as a basis for either government or ethics is a bit of a force.

And you know, it's based on historical circumstance and not one, which usually benefits either URI. So time goes by the world. Looks at other grounds of ethics. Can't comes along. Not after human gives us the concept of deity and that's influential for many years. But in the 1970s liberalism rises again in the voice of John, Rawls who comes up in his monumental book.

A theory of justice with a social contract that results in a theory of justice as fairness and therefore we can infer of ethics as fairness. So how do we arrive at this? Well, what roles does is he sets up a mechanism whereby we can negotiate what we want in society, but it's a hypothetical, it isn't really happening and it's a historical.

So we're not saying society was actually founded this way, but had we been in that position we would have founded it this way. So, what he does is he puts everybody into what he calls an original position. So puts us in a hypothetical room. We're all going to sit down and negotiate.

What government will be. But we need to abstract ourselves from who we actually are because you know, otherwise wealthy people will argue for the interests of the wealthy powerful people will argue for the interests of the powerful etc. So, what we do, you can see it in the diagram there, You set up a veil of ignorance.

So in this hypothetical situation, we are all arguing from the same stance. We don't know who we will end up being in society. So presumably what that means is we gotta take into accounts all possibilities. We might be the rich person but we might be the poor person. And so what role says, is that what we would come up with in such a contract is a set of rules that treats us all is equal, and then as well a range of basic rights and freedoms for everyone and then finally mechanisms to ensure prosperity so that there's enough for everyone.

Well.

It's not clear to me that that's what we would choose because there's not clear to me that everybody in the original position is going to be super rational about what they're going to argue for. Because if we look at actual politics and actual opinion, polls people tend to to vote and therefore to argue in terms of their aspirations and and not their actual situation.

So, they vote, as if they were a millionaire, hoping to be a millionaire someday rather than against the interests of the millionaire. Now, that that critique is a bit different from the critique that originally surfaced after rolls. But I think it's an important critique Danielle. The other thing about roles is position is the discussion of fairness.

Again, it's a principle of justice as fairness. So in both the original position, where we have a presumption of it and in the actual society, where we have an implementation of it, fairness is fundamental. And for fairness. And I'm gonna quote a couple of things from field, the fairness principle was defined as equitable and treated and impartial treatment of data subjects, by AI systems.

We're going back to the ethical codes because fairness is brought up a lot in these codes. And, similarly, the principle of equality stands for the idea that people, whether properly or sinless, whether similarly situated or not deserve the same opportunities and protections. And I kind of gets at our intuitive, understanding a fairness, right?

Something like equality, something like equity something like, you know, it's based on what we do, not who we are. That's sort of thing, but some questions. And at the bottom of the slide, I have three two in text form. One in cartoon form. One question is, is fairness something that can be addressed algorithmically.

In other words, just fairness and actual and real measure of anything. And it's not clear to me that it is also we're still faced with, you know, a different kind of version of the prisoners to lemma. Will we see this our argument expressed a lot in the article. The problem with too much fairness.

We read we care so much about fairness that we are willing to sacrifice economic well-being to enforce it. So it's almost like reverse prisoners, dilemma right? If we were all self-interested that what actually earned us more money than if we try to be fair. It's not clear that that's an empirical position that can be sustained with the evidence, but it certainly clear that that's an argument that people raise and then the cartoon freedom says, one person isn't as important as fairness and the other person replies, who decides what's fair first person?

Says me. And yeah, that's my definition of fairness. I decide what's fair. Okay, that's not my definition of fairness but you see the issue, right? Who decides, what's fair? How do we decide? What's fair? And how far do we take fairness? If it turns out that fairness doesn't optimize for say consequences.

The other major elements of rolls theory of justice and indeed of a lot of discussions of ethics and political science over the years is right? And the assertion here is to quote from BC Human Rights simply by existing in the world. You are entitled to certain basic rights, Your human rights.

So the first question that comes up, what are these rights? And the diagrams suggests if you but show up fairly commonly assembly, association movement, religion, speech information. Freedom of the press thought education. But, you know, none of these rights is absolute. And, you know, especially if we look at them on a global basis, they don't always really exist at all movement, for example.

Well, you can't just pack up and leave the country just, not an option education, you know, so many hundreds of millions of people in the world are run educated. I could go on and these definitions of rights show up differently depending on who's doing the defining. We have the US bill of rights based on a concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which we now know is a utilitarian objective.

We have the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms based on peace order and good government which makes us think more of a hobsian approach. And then the universal declaration of human rights by the United Nations, which I would argue is very aspirational ever, all of these different definitions of rights.

And I would argue that, you know, if we can't down to it, these rights can be extended. In numerous ways people often talk about freedom to and freedom from. So here we have action of freedom, too, freedom to associate, freedom of the of the press freedom of speech, etc.

But it's been often pointed out that these freedoms aren't very useful if you're living in poverty. And so there is a corresponding concept of freedom from right, freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom from poverty, freedom from exploitation. And then some, you know, these rights are changing to just in our sense over time privacy, which was the focus of the Twitter debate.

You notice if this doesn't appear appear in the standard definition of rights and it's not clear that privacy is a right. Similarly, you know, the right to bear arms is a right that exists in one country, but not in most others. And I like to sometimes think of, right?

As you know, as defining a share not only of you know the political aspirations. But economic aspirations, I would argue for example that simply by existing in the world you are entitled to a share and he calls share of the wealth of the world. How does that fly though?

I mean, is that bounded by region? There's my share of the wealth of the world include a share of the wealth of the world as produced in Russia. And how does that respect? Say indigenous rights. Do some people have more of a share of the wealth of certain areas, do indigenous people have more of a share of the wealth of North America or and does that mean that my share of the wealth of the world has to come from Ireland?

Where there are currently Irish people? And we get into these debates, once we start trading debates about rights. It's hard to know where to stop.

So what do we do? Well there's an alternative set of discussions that parallels to the discussions of rights and we can look to the work of people like Michael Polanya, or Friedrich Hayek to distinguish between and will be rough and loose here between constructed orders and naturally occurring or emergent orders or, you know, kayak distinguishes between self-generating order and directed social order.

Or you can talk about system of mutual adjustment versus and established corporate order, those of you who have followed my career over the years, well know that the sort of distinction that we're drawing here is the distinction between a rules-based kind of mechanism and a connectionist kind of mechanism.

But without all the technical details. And so we can approach the question of how we generate the social contract in the same way. And all the examples that we've looked at so far are deliberately established corporate orders, where the ideas people sit down and draft, some kind of contract or agreement.

But, you know, we started this talk looking at social mores and that's not how social mores work at all. So social mores just kind of happened by all, you know, all the little attitude adjustments that we undergo in our interactions with each other. And that's what I think was the problem with the, the Twitter comment, right?

The the idea that by trying to enforce some kind of moral order through Twitter comments, you were trying to set up some kind of deliberately established corporate order. But if there's any ethics of Twitter use, it's going to be one of these self-generating orders. So it's not going to be created by a person saying this is the rule it's going to occur without any such specification.

And indeed, we're just waiting for the train to go by. Because why not? Speaking of imposed social herders, you know, there's a contrast between the two between the, the corporate order and the soft generating order name and let's explore that a bit. The soft generating order theory will call it.

That at least in some contexts has its origin and the economic thought of the Scottish enlightenment, and especially Adam Smith who's writing around the same time as Russo and Hume. All part of that same group. And basically, the argument here and we'll go back to Buchanan and talk to state it for us.

Modern social scientists have like have tended to neglect, the individual decision making that must be present in the formation of group action in the public sector. So modern social scientists are saying, look, it's not like something has been created and then everyone follows it. Rather everybody makes their own individual decisions and that's how we get our order.

And they reject contract theory of the state, as an explanation either, the origin or basis of political power. More chin, itself was appropriate but they've tended to overlook the elements within the contractarian tradition that provide us with a bridge between the individual choice, calculus and group decisions and basically a boils down to this.

A group decision is essentially the result of a whole bunch of individual decisions expressed in terms of economics. It's the invisible hand of America place. All of the selling and purchasing decisions made by individuals creates the overall economic rationale that we see for macrophenomena such as the cost of things or the price of things.

These individual decisions create supplying demand but it this happens not just in economics. Yeah, leave existence. Say of a social sanction again against walking outside. Naked is the result of all of the individual cases, real or hypothetical where people have walked outside naked and been resisted by members of the community or even more to the point where people have made these individual choices not to walk out naked to see how that works, right?

And, you know, it's a logic that I've explained in, in other places a logic where you have a network of interacting individuals, and then emerging from that is some kind of order the murmuration of starlings. Say, So that's the theory here. Well, how does that work? Well, the problem is it doesn't really address things like say, market failure.

A good example of a market. Failure is a scarcity, where if something becomes scarce, and the demand for it is inflexible, then the price rises through the roof, and the result is that you've got a very unequal distribution, some people get to eat, another people scarf, and we've seen that market failure.

Play in a variety of ways, over the years. Another example of market, failure is pollution where there is no mechanism for pricing pollution because there's insufficient demand for non-polluting things and so people can pollute for free resulting in a market failure, and call clouded skies that market failure still exist today.

Even in place it would with planned economies and planned markets. So go chay comes along says well, there needs to be a rational justification at least for a minimal set of rules, based on a principle of rational, self interest. And so, contractarianism is a response to these cases where for everyone following us.

They're self-interest would be harmful to everyone. So, it's going back. This original justification for social contract theory based on things like the prisoners dilemma. And you see this trope over and over again in this discussion. And so, the collection or the collective rationale of moral rules, basically is a device to secure quote, the cooperative outcome.

Now people again who've listened to me over the years, have heard me argue that, I mean, favor of things like cooperation rather than collaboration. So and cooperation is far better than everybody just doing their own thing. So to be rational, in this context, is to be disposed to act in a way that maximizes the satisfaction of one's interests.

If you're still being self-interested, it's an enlightened self-interest and it leads you to enter in to a contract with others. Not necessarily to work for the same end but to cooperate in such a way that you know, arising tide floats all boats and that's the idea here. And again, you've certainly heard about this and that almost invariably means giving up some of your own self-interest in order to produce the wider gain for everyone.

Now, you can see why this is necessary here we have from Garrett Hardy and the tragedy of the comments where people are maximizing their own self-interest. So the idea here, is that rational, individual decision making will harm resources holding common. So we have a common pool of water and the water table into the ground, so nobody owns it.

So you can just take as much as you want. But the result talked to California is the water table, gets lower, and lower and lower. The thing is there's two different responses to that and the typical response to that is to say, well, okay, that just proves that the water should be owned by somebody who would have a self-interest to take care of it.

And here we have John walk again, right? We'll make it property. We'll get people guaranteed of security over their property and not also the problem right now, the water they'll sell, it's where everyone else. But we know that that doesn't work because the person who has the water has been sent to sell it, and sell it, and sell it, until it runs out.

And in fact, as it runs out they can keep raising the price. And they've created, in fact, a situation of scarcity and exactly the sort of chaos that this was supposed to prevent. So the other side of that is okay, we should have a system of rules and regulations in order to manage the water and that's an approach.

A lot of governments have taken, but again, the question comes up, could a government manage the water table, any better than an individual because a government has an incentive to give out. And give up, give out more more water until the water table runs low. We saw that happening in the case of the Canadian fisheries were government after government, after government refused to lower the, the rate of which fish could be caught, what the result, a number of years ago, that the Atlantic called fishery.

For example, basically ended. So the first of those sorts of cases are not the last little sort of cases. So the needs to be a mechanism to reach some sort of an agreement. It needs to be a rational mechanism such that it won't result in the draining of all the water or the catching of all the fish.

Which means it's got to protect against a self-serving interest on either the part of government or on the part of individual property holders. It should as Rousseau would say represent the general will, the problem is the invisible hand of the marketplace. Might not arguably will not produce that kind of results.

That's not the only problem with social contract theory. Let's just one of them. Another problem this comes from Martianus bomb is that social contract tradition especially in its rolesian form, cannot give justice to disabled people more. It cannot supply global justice beyond the nation state and more, it cannot render justice to animals.

And this all has to do with how we've set this up. Originally, the decision makers, in the original position. Well, first of all, they're all human animals can't be represented here because animals aren't capable of negotiating. A satisfactory outcome and it's goes well beyond the scope of roles this theory to have some people in aging that their animals or at least imagine the possibility.

That means this idea. They might be animals. No, and that's a bit difficult to accept it face value, because most of us have the capacity to imagine. We are an animal or at least to emphasize that the condition of an animal. And, you know, I could prove that pretty simply by bringing in a cat here and torturing it.

Now I'm not going to do that nor would I actually seriously contemplate doing that. But any reaction that you had negative to what I just said, is evidence that now we can imagine Similarly. And by inference, we're not really able to put ourselves in the position of the disabled, at least not.

Unless we are actually disabled because we can't imagine the barriers that they face and this is true whether they're in a wheelchair or whether they're blind or whether they're cognitively disabled, you know? We're just not able to conceive of what they're rights and interests and needs would be. And then in in the case of global social contracts, we're just not in a position to care one way or another about the result of the contract, you know, we can imagine that we will live everywhere or anywhere, but we're not really imagining that we're living in Kurdistan really.

So for the unique conditions of the Kurds, we're not able to bring those into our calculations, you know, and ethics. Morality, only goes so far. All right, we're we're only concerned about, you know, at least our immediate area or perhaps our immediate country, but we don't really project ethics, you know, around the world to other nations and other states.

And perhaps neither should we. So we need something else and thus is interested. And here I quote, from an article in how a view that finds human dignity, expressed in a variety of life, activities, have given some examples translate into demands of justice. It's not going to be produced through a social contract and indeed it points to what we might call the fragility of goodness.

Here's Nusbaum again. More people and more beings deserve justice than those who make the rules just because you weren't so reflective, doesn't mean you don't have a dignity that demands respect. There is more to life than profiting off each other for human beings fellowship, and compassion are ends in themselves too.

And it's hard to see how any of that self-dignity respect fellowship compassion, we could add a number of other things is going to work. It's way into a social contract. The privacy of a public chat on Twitter. Can't imagine seeing that come up. I can't imagine that being discarded one way or another, because it just really has nothing to do with rights fairness or anything else has.

We currently conceived them, and yet there's an ethical dimension there. You know, unless the thing about contracts contracts and the concept of contracts, presumes something like radical individualism and self-interest. Now I know corporations can make contracts, but in order for that to happen we have to think of corporations as individuals or even corporations as persons acting in their own rational self-interest and indeed persons with a fiduciary duty to act in their own rational self-interest.

But there are issues with this idea of radical individualism and self-interest. First of all, we can't all be self-sufficient and we. Yeah, and we can't even imagine a world in which we are also sufficient in the fact, it is arguable and I would argue nobody is self-sufficient and and also we have preferential attachments.

We can't treat the rest of the world equally. I treat the people in the next room. Far more. Preferentially that I treat people in the next country. Much less people around the world and many people were guarding that's the way it should be, you know, family. First, also, contract theory, presumes that the only obligations we have are those that are freely chosen which allows for the objection of.

Well, then I don't freely choose any obligations or there are some obligations. I can't choose. It's just not, I'm not capable of it. So we need some way of imagining, how non-punitively, presumably we deal with people who are living outside the contract. And again they can't just pack up and move away the the slogan, you'll love it or leave.

It is not a practical option particularly if it's somewhere where you were born, right? You know, I being born Canadian. I'm just it's not an option for me to leave Canada and go live somewhere else. If I don't like the way we do ethics here in Canada and yet being in Canada, there's no way really for me to live outside the socially constructed.

Ethical framework that we find ourselves in and there's no way to change it either. These are issues.

We have this idea of individualism. Maybe we can just think of it as theoretical or as Buchanan. Intellect say methodological individualism and and the way we'll think of it is that human beings are conceived. As the only ultimate choice makers in determining group as well as private action. So how's the corporation going to decide?

Well, think about the individual running. The corporation is making that decision and we've looked at this quite closely. Well, economists have looked at this quite closely just how individuals make decisions and what we sometimes, call the market sector or corporation companies and all of that and there's, there's a, it's a huge field of study and it's pretty easy to be cynical about that field to study.

You know, I call it market rationalization with the emphasis on the word, rationalization, you know, it's pretty easy to make unethical decisions when you're acting on behalf of the corporation, instead of behalf as an oven individual, instead of for yourself. And in fact, the whole mechanism of incorporation and corporate bankruptcy, allows people to avoid responsibility for the decisions that they make for their corporation.

That's the whole point, right? And although some people have said in this course that, you know, there should be a method of allowing corporations to die or actually killing corporations and that certainly see the justification for that. But in an important sense, that's to punish the wrong party, at least on mission analysis because the person you made the decision wasn't, the corporation is actually the CEO, and that's why.

Sometimes in Canadian law, we had a case recently where the company was allowed to avoid legal liability that would have essentially ended the company because in agreed to remove, all of the people who made the decision from the company. And so wiping that slate cleaning allows the company to survive.

And it still doesn't really punish the decision makers doesn't. There's also, you know, a cultural calculus of consent, which is a little bit different from the calculus of consent that Buchanan and Tulip talk about incorporations, and this is a way to depicting the way, cultures decide things and it's a relation between power faith, fake gender, health illness, relationships, etc.

Again though, you know do we distinguish the individuals in a culture who make a decision in the name of a culture from the culture itself? And that's not a, that's a non-trivial question. Particularly, as we move on through these next few considerations here,

The idea of a non-individualistic sort of ethic is captured in the idea of collectivism. And in their book, individualism and collective is a highly huey and Harry triangess talked about collectivism as incorporating concern where this means concern, for the impact of one's actions, on other people sharing of mutual or material, and non-material, resources, including cultural resources, but collectivism also includes susceptibility to social influence think, for example, of peer pressure, self-presentation and face work that, you know, there the the face that you have, the way you face the world, not make up, although it can include makeup our factors where there's a sharing of outcomes and here a good way to think of it is collective responsibility or the corollary collective punishment, but, you know, it's but it's also, you know, a father, taking pride in the son's accomplishments or one brother.

Feeling guilty about the actions of another brother and then the feeling of involvement in other people's lives. You know, you don't live as a single individual, you are actually a part of this larger social organization, the collective. And it's this collective that generates, ethical roles and responsibilities rather than say rational individualistic decision making and there's a range of theories based on the idea of creating ethics collectively.

And this is what my Twitter opponent was appealing to, right? He was saying, basically, there is this collective ethos of privacy that has developed over time on Twitter and that's the ethics that's being violated. Also, there's an ethic of polite conversation. You're also violating violating that you continue and, you know, there are some questions.

So, ask your right? How do we know that that's the collective ethic of Twitter and how do we know that I'd violated it and what's the sanction for it? Well, part of this story comes from Fenimore and sickling, sicking and the life stages or the life cycle of a norm and think about how this works.

There's the norm emergence where quote norm entrepreneurs seek to persuade each other and then there's the norm cascade where gradually there's tipping point and they norm internalization where it's just taken for. Granted, you can see those play out on in social communities online. I'm a devotee of a website called imager.

I am GUR and trust me there are. Yeah, we see this process. There are norms on immature. Immature. I don't know. That kind of defy explanations, for example, enter is a photo or image sharing site and it also includes short videos. So now what, then, the way it works is, there's a thing called user sub where anybody who's a user of engineer submits an image.

And then you could look at all those images as there submitted, and then you can vote them up or vote them down. And when they're voted up, when they get popular enough, then they, they end up on the most popular page and that's the page of people usually see when they go to imager.

So what are so basically ethics basically consisting, the rules quote unquote because it's not written. Really, of voting up. So, one of the rules is no selfies except on Christmas or for costly, which includes Halloween, but there are exceptions to this, you know, like late, what weight loss photos would be an example of that.

It's not actually written down anywhere, but every once in a while, someone will come along and say remember the rule, no selfies. But hardly anyone ever since that? You know, other roles Wednesdays are for Wednesday at them. There's a cater day on super bowl day, images filled with howls or superb owls.

And so on, there's a whole range of these things. So they're kind of an ethnic of the website, but it's not really ethics. Although there is a sanction, you won't get voted up if you violate them. Although sometimes people vote them up, anyways. So there is a sentence, which ethics can be created collectively, but it's less clear that there's a sense that people argue about these rationally, through debates and in positions of sanctions, through Twitter posts or whatever, you know, you can't argue your way to an ethic on a social network site.

Just doesn't work, you can't bully your way to an ethic on a social network side again, it doesn't work. And so the question is just, what is that process? That's happening. When an ethic appears on a social network site, we sort of want to assume that the community somehow collectively decides, but that very often is a company by a statement that you know and here is what they decided.

Let me tell you and that's when it becomes problematic. At least for me and the same is true more widely, right? People talk about community values and again nobody's sitting and writing down what the community values are. But somebody's always willing to come along and say the rare community values and here's what they are, let me tell you, and that's a problem.

There is a whole set of communitarian ethics and communitary and ethical theory. People like Michael Sandell and Charles Taylor have responded against the individualistic conception of self in roles in social contract. And, you know, we, we can allow for an ethic of individual decision, making, but at the same time, need to understand that what constitutes a self also includes that social background, or that cultural background in which the life choices, gain importance, and meaning, you know, a student responding to social pressure in a public school has a very different realization of self than a student responding to social pressure.

At homeschool it's just different and the differences. In culture result, in differences, in self. So, to follow a rule, involves this cultural or social self, and not just a rational, individualist self. Or, in other words, ethics are because of these cultural components of ourselves in an important sense. Non-rational, you know, there isn't the calculation that's coming out the other side.

Need this to the ethic of ubuntu or, you know, we could talk about it as Ubu unto and Mrs. Based on a matter of ones, relationality with others. And with the environment and all interdependent parts, it is a recognition again. That there is no self-sufficient person that each person is inherently the product of and related to everything around them.

And so, the perceived infallibility and supremacy of rationality and traditional social contract theory, especially as administered through machines, as we see in artificial intelligence, exacerbates marginalization it, forces us to neglect or ignore or to push away, those relations or the impact of those relation center, non-rational or can't be calculated to add to our personal or collective, happiness or benefit.

Now, we could talk about all the different ways in which these relationships accessory marginalization, you know, from the treatment of indigenous people and the settlement and development of countries such as Canada and Australia to the marginalization of old people who will know, longer offer, you know, contributions to society or innovation or productivity to the treatment of animals to a lack of respect for the environment and a view of our relation with the environment as exploitative, you know, all of these things fail to recognize the interdependence apparent.

And it's funny. I want to add a science fiction story, where long story short, hers, a disease that threatens humanity. Everyone's gonna die but they find the solution to that disease and the genetic makeup of a homeless person who's on the verge of death and the argument advanced in the scientific story is that we are all collectively, the holders of our genetics, you know, the human genetics isn't held in one individual person, but it's held across all of us.

And the important piece of genetic material might be in Amy one of us. And we see a similar argument raised, with respect to the rainforest and the huge diversity of life in the rainforest. That is in danger of being lost and the potential for medical treatments to be found in this rainforest and our dependence on that, you know, making the, you know, intertwining the fate of the main forest and the fate of ourselves and that might sound overly consequentialist and it is kind of consequentialist and it's kind of transactional.

But at the same time, if the risk a connection between who we are and what the rainforest is, then there's a connection between our ethics visa and our ethics fees of either the rainforest. We can see that connection and that connection has to inform ethical thinking and it takes us into the realm of Peter Singer.

And the idea that, you know, when we talk about rights humans have rights animals, have rights hard to sentence have rights nature has rights. You know, we have to think of all of these as intertwine and interconnected and you can't give rights to one while at the same time oppressing, the rights of the others.

Well, it sounds great but there are criticism because, of course, there are criticisms, one of the criticisms of Ubuntu is that particularly with respect to cultural rights in entrance, to some of the existing and unchallenged discriminatory practices that are based on age, gender, and social standing. I had an image on the slide here to scene from tracks, which is an Australian movie that I like a lot, but a woman who takes some camels and crosses the Australian outback.

I mean, so doing she has to interact with Aboriginal people's Aboriginal cultures, And that forms a theme of the movie. Well, one of one of the expressions in the movie is that women do not handle the knife. She was about to cut and animal that she had caught for food and then realized no woman, do not.

I know the knife and the movie doesn't say this but that managed to save her from being poisoned because the animal had been poisoned so you can see the the reasoning for it. But at the same time you can feel the tension right of having to accept that. There is a rule here that says that that I as a woman cannot handle a knife.

That doesn't seem really right again with Ubuntu it enforces, groups solidarity at the expansive individual well-being. There's no way into the numbers of examples of that, you know, this sort of concern was the origin for my original groups versus network range of arguments that I began in 2004, and continued.

Since it tends to enforce conformity intense to enforce group. Think, you know, we all have to have these same values, the same ethical principles. When we are part of a group, the way we think, is the way the group thinks typically, I mean, not necessarily but there are problems with that.

And, you know, in the discussion like James Schwicky's, the wisdom of crowds pointing to the dangers of group, think and not allowing for independent thought, and independent points of view. Even in group interactions. And then finally reinforces and perpetuates, existing imbalances and power relations, for example, think of indigenous people in Canada and whether it's ethically, right to run a pipeline through their lands.

Now, they're all kinds of ways. We could decide on this but one way, we could decide on this is fairly straightforward. Do the indigenous people want us to run a pipeline through their lines? Well, here's the problem. The band councils that are elected. Say yes, the elders. That who are hereditary?

Say no. How did he decide? If we follow the principle of Ubuntu in this case, well then we have to take what the elder say seriously. Because they achieve their position as a result of long-standing tradition and ethics in these enemies. And so we have to respect that but it's really hard you know, coming from an outside perspective to to accept that somebody who does not respect, you know, the will of the entire community can speak on behalf of the community.

On the other hand, these democratic band councils or something that was imposed on these nations, by by the white western governments. There was the requirement that bank councils be operated democratically. And that's considered as a condition for self-governance. No, easy answers here. And they're seriously aren't easy answers here.

You know, I would think, you know, ethics also benefiting from discretion and just playing niceness, you wouldn't ram a pipeline through their land. If a significant representative, whether or not democratically elected said no, please don't do this, you know, not, everybody is governed by that principle other people derive.

The ethics from other principles and that forces them to argue for putting the pipeline through. These are hard questions. I don't think social contracts, answer these questions. Whether we define social contract is something that we negotiate or hypothetically negotiate or come up with as a principle of each person's individual actions as in an invisible hand, or as defined as community or socially determine values.

I don't think any of those stories gives us a satisfactory answers to the questions that we come up with when we're looking at specific ethical dilemmas and that's a problem. I'm just especially a problem because I've run out of ethical theories, looked at ethics as virtue looked at ethics.

As duty looked at ethics, as determined by consequences and looked at ethics by agreement and there are significant gaping holes in all of these theories. So in the next video I'm going to look a little bit at meta ethics how we talk about these theories, how we arrive at them generally.

And then finally, I'll look at it's true. Excuse me, that tells me I should be finishing this video. I'll be looking at the end of ethics, or where do we go from here? So, I hope you look. I hope you enjoyed this romp through social contract and ethics. Again I've left out far more than I've included here, but the purpose as usual isn't to give you a bunch of stuff.

To remember of the purpose is to have you thinking about these issues along with me, as I work through them. And perhaps coming up with new ideas or new thoughts or new ways of looking at some of these issues that you may then you may have had in the past.

So that's it for now, my voice is going horse. Again, another sign I've been going to long. Thanks a lot. I'm Stephen Downs.

Force:yes