TITLE:
The Promise of Democracy: The Performative Social Contract, Pluralism, and Equality
AUTHORS:
Fred D’Agostino
KEYWORDS:
Social Contract, Public Reason, Moral Pluralism, Informed Consent, In-complete Contracts, Relational Contracts, Legitimacy, Stability, Hegemony
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.10 No.2,
March
31,
2020
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I will use methods associated primarily with applied
ethics and economic theory to provide a philosophical demonstration, within the
social contract tradition, of the importance
for a democracy of the substantive equality of its citizens. The social contract is a
familiar modality of contemporary democratic theorising in
political philosophy. An unfamiliar but promising way of thinking about the
social contract is via analogy with some features, and in particular, the extended temporality and,
indeed, performativity, of “real-world” contracting. Real-world contractors
agree to create the conditions, over a temporally-extended period, in which the
terms of their agreement are materially realised.
The question of their contract’s ethical standing is not an ex ante one-off, but is considered, rather,
against a sequence of ex post milestones. Ideally, as this
sequence unfolds, the contractors (and others) will (performatively) summon
into being the very conditions that embody the terms of the contract, thus
progressively authorising it ex post facto. This approach draws on ideas,
in jurisprudence, about relational contracts, and, in economics, about
incomplete contracts. An approach of this general kind is well adapted to the circumstances
of diversity in which all contemporary political theorising is placed and, arguably, gives a rationale for something
like the modern social-democratic welfare state.