In Search of the Reason and the Right—Rousseau’s Social Contract as a Thought Experiment

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-526
Author(s):  
Nenad Miscevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Right

scholarly journals A Thought Experiment on Sustainable Management of the Earth System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Wolfram Barfuss ◽  
Jonathan F. Donges
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Optimal Control ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
Safe Operating ◽  
Qualitative Decision

We introduce and analyse a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of climate change. In it, each generation can choose between just two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as this one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyse this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Despite the simplicity of the setup, we find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches.

The national idea of Russia in the world-historical progress of equality, freedom and justice. Manifesto on Islam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladik Nersesyanc
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Socialist System ◽  
Equal Share ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Right

The article substantiates the doctrine of Zionism as a post-socialist system and the national idea of modern Russia. The basis of civilizationism is civil property, the right of every citizen to an equal share of the socialist inheritance (national property). In the current circumstances, to achieve a real socio-political agreement in the country, to overcome the war for property, to really recognize the results of previous reforms by society and to support new transformations, a fair social contract on the creation of a civil property fund is necessary.

The Good Green Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hale
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Right

This chapter addresses the book’s core distinction by contrasting the right and the good. It utilizes a thought experiment – the Parable of Wicked and Wild – to argue that the imperative of justification is paramount to building a viable environmental ethics. Such an environmentalism would seek to build a “viridian commonwealth” in which citizens and industries act with and for reasons that are or could be subjected to the scrutiny of all citizens.

Education and the European Social Contract

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-66
Author(s):  
Xavier Prats Monné
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
Twenty First Century Learning ◽  
The Right ◽  
Education And Society

A European social contract is possible—if the discussion shifts from who has the right to act to who can help. Education is a striking example of Europe’s paradox: the areas that interest its citizens most—education, health, social protection—are those where EU institutions have the least competence. Yet while the main policy responsibility and funding instruments are at national or regional level, the key global trends in education and the reforms they require call for a strong effort from both the EU and its member countries: an extraordinary expansion of the demand for higher education and new skills; a renewed interest in the interaction between technology, education, and society, driven by the advancement of data analysis and artificial intelligence; and a growing concern about the role of education in reducing inequality and social exclusion. Education has a great future—but it will not be education as we know it; the credibility of Europe’s social contract will rest on its capacity to build and communicate the case for change and to articulate a guiding vision for twenty-first-century learning.

US Welfare Reform: Rewriting the Social Contract

2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEIL GILBERT
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Public Assistance ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Deficit Reduction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Right ◽  
Temporary Assistance ◽  
Welfare Reforms

AbstractThis paper analyses recent developments in US welfare policy and their implications for future reforms. The analysis begins by examining how the enactment of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programme in 1996 changed the essential character of public assistance and the major social forces that accounted for this fundamental shift in US welfare policy. It then shows how the most recent welfare reforms under the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 broadened and intensified the TANF requirements, leaving four avenues along which issues of conditionality and entitlement are likely to be played out in future welfare reforms. Finally, the discussion highlights how a new social contract is being forged through progressive and conservative proposals, which shift the focus of public assistance from the right to financial support to the right to work and earn a living wage.

scholarly journals ‘Economic property rights’ as ‘nonsense upon stilts’: a comment on Hodgson

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 725-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL H. COLE
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Brute Fact ◽  
Category Mistake ◽  
Institutional Fact ◽  
The World ◽  
Collective Acceptance ◽  
The Right

AbstractHodgson's (2015) critique of extra-legal ‘property rights’ – in this case, so-called ‘economic property rights’ – is right on target. This Comment contributes two further points to his critique. First, the notion of ‘economic property rights’ is based on what Gilbert Ryle (1949) referred to as a ‘category mistake’, conflating physical possession, which is a brute fact about the world, with the right or entitlement to possession, which is a social or institutional fact that cannot exist in the absence of some social contract, convention, covenant, or agreement. The very notion of a non-institutional ‘right’ is oxymoronic. Second, the fact that property is an institutional fact does not mean it must exist with the structure of a ‘state’ (as Bentham suggested). Rather, institutions like ‘property rights’ only require some community, however large or small, operating with what Searle (1995; 2005) calls collective intentionality and collective acceptance, according to shared ‘rules of recognition’ (Hart, 1997).

Contractarian Business Ethics: Credentials and Design Criteria

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 1337-1355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Wempe
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Choice Situation ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
The Social ◽  
Stakeholder Model ◽  
Practical Guidance

Contractarian business ethics (CBE) is in great vogue in the present study of corporate morality. Its stated ambition is to provide better practical guidance than the more general ethical theories of business ethics, such as Kantianism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics or the stakeholder model. But how good is this new trend in business ethics theorizing? This article aims to assess CBE's credentials as a social contract argument. For this purpose, it embarks on a comparative analysis of the use of the social contract model in two earlier domains: political authority and social justice. Building on this comparison, it then develops four criteria for any future CBE. To apply the social contract model properly to the domain of corporate morality, it should be: (1) self-disciplined, i.e. not aspire to results beyond what the contract model can realistically establish; (2) argumentative, i.e. provide principles that are demonstrative results of the contractarian method; (3) task-directed, i.e. it should be clear what the social contract thought-experiment is intended to model; and (4) domain-specific, i.e. the contractarian choice situation should be tailored to the defining problems of corporate morality.

Can Australia Learn from Austria About Incomes Policies?

1984 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dunkley
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Social Partnership ◽  
Incomes Policy ◽  
The Right

The notion of incomes policies remains contentious, despite many years of ex perimentation in a number of different countries. A few commentators are now distinguishing between `temporary' and 'permanent' forms of such policies, an example of the latter being presented in this article. It is argued that a working system of permanent incomes policies has been developed in Austria through a broadly based 'social partnership', which has led to a good deal of political and economic consensus. Evidence is adduced to suggest that, on a number of grounds, this system can be said to have successfully combated stagflation. It is hypothesised that at least six basic prerequisites are essential for the establishment of a permanent social-contract-based incomes policy, and although Austria has accomplished all of these, in Australia they are seriously under-developed. Recent Australian developments are pointing in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.

scholarly journals Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, A Love Story

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Kelly Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Love Story ◽  
The Social ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Voice

In The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-Possible Self-Love, Pleshette DeArmitt opens the space for an alternative to origin story so popular with political philosophers, namely, the social contract, which assumes a rational and self-identical subject.  She does this obliquely by deconstructing narcissism as love of the self-same, or, love of what Kristeva might call “the clean and proper self.”  Like Echo interrupting Narcissus’s soliloquy of deadly self-absorbed pleasure and his solitary auto-affection upon seeing his own reflection, Pleshette interrupts the seeming proximity of self-same, the closeness of near, and the propinquity of proper by deflecting the image of Narcissus onto the voice of Echo, who comes into her own by repeating his words.  How, asks Pleshette, can Echo’s reiteration of the words of another be anything more than mere repetition or reduplication?  Echoing Derrida, she answers that it is through a declaration of love.  Echo’s repetition of the words of Narcissus take on new meaning, and allow her to express herself, and her love, through the words of the other.  After all words are words of the other.  Language comes to us from the other.  Echo becomes a self, a “little narcissist,” through an address from and to the other, through the appropriation and ex-appropriation of the other’s words. 

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