Stuart K. Hayashi
This is intended to be part of a series explaining the fallacy behind the notion that a "Social Contract" provides justification for collectivist laws.
Whenever I explain to "liberals" and conservatives that the very institution of taxation is immoral, they ejaculate the knee-jerk reply that "we all live in 'Society,' and by living in Society, you agree to the terms of the Social Contract."
According to Social Contract theory, human beings must sacrifice some freedom for "the greater good." Social Contract theorists from the early Enlightenment postulated that the first human beings existed in a "state of nature" that was nothing more than an anarchic chaos in which you could murder anyone or be murdered at any time. This is complete freedom, the Social Contract philosophers disingenuously estimate, but there is no security.
Thomas Hobbes, an early Social Contract theorist (and also the namesake of a highly-overrated comic-strip character), described life under this condition as "solitary," as well as "nasty, brutish, and short."
Thus, say the Social Contract theorists, human beings formed governments to protect the tribe as a whole. The existence of any laws limits everyone's freedom but it also provides more security. In the "state of nature," I once had the freedom to go around beating people up. Now, I no longer have that liberty. But, in return, I myself am safe from having someone else assault my person.
This, insist the theorists, is the basis of democracy. Everyone is safer, and the government has an ethical basis for existing because it has, in the words of the Declaration of Independnece, "the consent of the governed."
The exchange between the Government ("Society") and me is the Social Contract. The Government agrees to protect me. Likewise, I assent to follow the laws of that government, no matter how much I may disapprove of some of them.
Consequently, when I point out that taxation is a form of extortion, wherein the government points a gun at you and threatens, "Your money or your life!", welfare-statist (il)liberals and jingoistic conservatives scold me for my so-called ignorance.
They get even angrier when I note that the draft and Jury "Duty" subpoenas are involuntary servitude. They screech that because I live in "Society" under the protection of the U.S. government, I have contractually obligated myself to pay taxes and to serve in the military or jury if the government so forces me. They say that this is not involuntary at all, as it is part of my voluntary Contractual agreement with "Society."
This is hogwash on so many levels.
Let's begin at the flaws that Social Contract theorists make from the outset.
The Holes in the "State of Nature" Verbiage
The sort of "anarchy" that supposedly arose from the "state of nature" never truly existed. The institution of de-facto government is at least as old as mankind itself (perhaps even older).
The apes that exist today, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, already have a visible "social order" that became the precursor for government. A "society" of gorillas -- called a band -- is collectivist but elitist rather than egalitarian. The strongest male of the band is the de-facto Head of State, for he is the leader. He has as much sex as he wants with the females, and the other males yield to him in fear; any male that defies his authority will receive a beating and possibly become exiled from the "society." (Terms for groups of monkeys include troop and tribe and even . . . cartload?)
Such ape patterns are older than our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens (yes, the "sapiens" is technically listed twice). Consequently, the patterns that would eventually "evolve" into government predate our kind (known as Cro-Magnon Man).
Hobbes was right about primitive human beings having lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short," but the institution of government did nothing to solve that until the advent of industrialization at the twilight of the eighteenth century.
From One Million Years B.C. to 1800 A.D., the average human lifespan remained at a steady 27 years. This was for every one of the six inhabited continents, even though government existed during that entire duration -- and codified government had already emerged by 5000 B.C. Yet from 1800 A.D. to 1900 A.D., the average lifespan for Europeans and North Americans shot up to 47 years -- as a conequence of the Industrial Revolution. Further advances in industrialization increased the standard of living so that the average European and U.S. lifespan shot up to 77 years by 1988 A.D.
Government alone did not stop U.S. lives from being "nasty," "brutish," or "short"; what changed the situation was that a national government more relatively laissez-faire than most allowed enough freedom to give human incentives to create the wealth that lengthened lifespans.
And Hobbes was outright wrong about life for primitive men being "solitary" -- members of our species's scientifically-classified order, Primates, which includes apes, associated with one another in groups even before our own species evolved.
In short, "Government" and "Society" -- at least in very primitive forms -- anteceded the modern human species. "Society" and "Government" are not true innovations. What separates us human beings from our ape ancestors is that we are able to codify and conceptualize these social formations through our rational faculty, which gives us the ability to think and create words to symbolize ideas for the purpose of communcating with ourselves and others.
The False Dichotomy Between Liberty and Security
The Social Contract theorists also flub when they draw a fallacious distinction between individual freedom and societal security. Actually, the objectively best form of government protects the life, liberty, and private property of every human being from the initiation -- in other words, the starting -- of physical force (violence or the threat thereof) against the person or private property of innocent people who have initiated no such force upon anyone else and do not consent to such force.
The government should otherwise let everyone do anything they want with their own private property (which includes their own bodies) with consenting adults.
The fact is that freedom and security are not inversely related. Freedom is a special kind of security -- security from somebody using violence against your or your private property without your consent when you have not started any such violence on any other nonconsenting person's life or property.
In other words, to live under a form of anarchy in which you could murder anyone or be murdered at any time, without anyone's life or property being protected, is not total freedom. It is the opposite. It is de-facto totalitarianism. You are no freer from tyranny -- and, by "tyranny," I mean the constant threat of arbitrary violence -- under this sort of anarchy than you are under Stalinism.
For the government to create a system wherein it exercises violence against only those whom its executive branch have rationally ascertained to have definively initiated force against innocent, nonconsenting parties, is not a system where some "freedom" is limited for the sake of security. It maximizes both freedom and security on the individual level. The societal group being better off is merely a consequence -- and indeed, can only be a consequence -- of the individual's rights remaining sovereign.
Thus, any morally just government is based upon individual rights, and not the security of the group (the group's security can only be the result of the guarding of what is much more morally relevant -- the liberty of the individual from coercive violence).
In other words, a laissez-faire system of government does not limit any freedom to give you security. Rather, it gives you absolute freedom by securing you from that which threatens violence upon your person or private property.
Does Democracy Entail the Consent of the Governed -- Everyone Governed?
Social Contract theorists state that the sort of government most consistent with the Social Contract is democracy, because "the people" elect a ruler. Ergo, the elected sovereign rules only with "the consent of the governed." The same cannot be said of a king, since he was not directly elected by "the people" and so "the people" did not really give their consent.
Such rationalizations amount to utter tripe. The conclusion that a democratically elected leader has "the consent of the governed" makes the foolish assumption that consent is given on the collective level instead of the individual.
If 51 percent of "the people" vote for the Head of State, then we are led to believe that he has "the consent of the governed," because the majority ostensively represents the whole.
Yet it does not. The elected leader does not truly have "the consent of the governed" if he has 51 percent of the vote -- he only has the (tacit) consent of 51 percent of voters. As for the other 49 percent, he and the majority merely impose themselves upon this minority -- a minority that has not offered its consent.
The democratic Head of State does not even truly have the "governed"'s consent if he receives 99.99 percent of the vote -- .01 percent does not really consent. The elected leader would only truly have the "consent of the governed" if he had the unanimous support of all who lived under his rule.
Sir Robert Filmer of the 1600s is remembered today almost entirely because John Locke wrote his Two Treatises on Government to rebut his Patriarcha (1680).
However, despite its countless flaws, Filmer's Patriarcha is correct to note that democracy cannot truly have the "consent of the governed" without unanimous -- rather than majority approval. In Chapter 2, Section 6, Filmer opines,
It may be answered by some that if either the greatest part of a kingdom [that is, the majority of voters], or if a smaller part only by themselves [a minority of voters], and all the rest by proxy, or if the part not concurring in election [that is, non-voters] do after, by a tacit assent, ratify the act of others [that is, go along with the voters who got their candidate elected], that in all these cases it may be said to be the work of the whole multitude [that is, we truly have "consent of the governed" because the ruler has unanimous consent among everyone he governs].
As to the acts of the major part of a multitude [the majority], it is true that by politic human constitutions it is oft[en] ordained that the voices of the most [the majority] shall overrule the rest; and such ordinances bind, because where men are assembled by a human power, that power that doth assemble them can also limit and direct the manner of the execution of that power, and by such derivative power, made known by law or custom, either the greater part, or two thirds, or three parts of five, or the like, have power to oversway the liberty of their opposites [that is, the minority voters]. But in assemblies that take their authority from the law of nature, it cannot be so; for what freedom or liberty is due to any man by the law of nature no inferior power can alter, limit or diminish; no one man nor a multitude can give away the natural right of another [wise sentence!!! --S.H.]. The law of nature is unchangeable, and howsoever one man may hinder another in the use or exercise of his natural right, yet thereby no man loseth the right of itself; for the right and the use of the right may be distinguished, as right and possession are oft[en] distinct. Therefore, unless it can be proved by the law of nature that the major or some other part [the majorit voters] have power to overrule the rest of the multitude [the minority voters], it must follow that the acts of multitudes not entire [that is, the majority voters and the rest of the population] are not binding to all but only to such as consent unto them.
In other words, how can you say an elected official has "the consent of the governed" when he governs over a minority that withheld consent to his rule by voting against him?
It is, consequently, quite hypocritical of Social Contract theorists to invoke "the consent of the governed" to tout democratic elections as a fully valid means of selecting who will reign over a people.
When Did I Consent to the "Social Contract"'s Terms?
If my living in society somehow legally and ethically binds me to the Social Contract's terms (which the Social Contractarians so conveniently avoid specifying), then exactly when did my consent to the Social Contract become legally binding?
Recall that any contract you may potentially agree to objectively becomes legally binding at the point where both parties making the agreement have expressed their committment to it.
People typically live and work in societies into which they are born. It is not sane, however, to say that one signs any Social Contract by having been born, as that is not voluntary; you could not even offer consent (not even a kid's equivalent of "consent").
When you partake in any contract -- even an implicit, common-law contract (more on those later), it is because of behavior you voluntarily engaged in.
Meanwhile, you have no real choice in what society you lived in as a child. So your simply being born into and growing up in a community is not a valid offering of consent. Just because I grew up in a cetain region, my doing so did not contractually obligate me to follow morally abhorrent laws that threatened to use force against me for disobedience.
Therefore, my living in this society as a child was not a tacit "signing" of any Social Contract on my part. (Besides, I wasn't legally competent anyway.)
But what about adulthood? If you in live in a country as an adult, when you are legally permitted to leave it, then does that constitute a signing of the Social Contract?
There is a problem there. Any valid contract -- including an oral one -- has definable terms which are to be amended only with the consent of all parties who agreed to the previous terms in the first place.
Then again, how does any philosopher know what the terms of the Social Contract are, to begin with? Now that's worth some discussion...
Continued in Part 2, Part 3, Part 4...
