The question whether it is possible to be both a Humean and a contractarian arises from the interpretation of Hume as a theorist of spontaneous order, a theory that is usually taken to be incompatible with contractarianism. I argue that this interpretation is unconvincing and anachronistic. The real reason why it is problematic to view Hume as a contractarian is not because he is proponent of spontaneous order, but because he is a virtue-ethicist. I argue that Hume adopted and elaborated on the natural law account of the origins of property as conventional, but provided a different and separate account of the obligation to respect property rights.
What is sociology? And if so, how many? (cf. Precht 2011) While basically all social scientists agree on the answer to the second question, there is no consensus with respect to the first. Richard Swedberg, well-known for his work in economic sociology (Granovetter and Swedberg 2011) and one of the doyens of the rising movement in analytical sociology (Hedström and Swedberg 1998), would probably answer: " Boring! " In his recent monograph " The Art of Social Theory " Swedberg deplores the state of the art in sociological theorizing. In comparison to methods of empirical research, sociological theory has seen little advancement in the last six decades. On the one hand there is empiricist research in which references to tiny bits of theory figure as attempts in mere window-dressing. On the other hand, we have abstract theory, which is utterly disentangled from empirical reality, typically in form of vague orientation hypotheses concerning metatheory (" The notion of. .. should be in the centre of sociological theory, because. .. "), grand theory, or writings about the writings of other theorists. First and foremost, Swedberg misses original, creative thoughts in dealing with social phenomena. With this monograph and its companion volume (Swedberg 2014b) he primarily aims at providing practical guidelines on how to theorize well. " The Art of Social Theory " is organized in two parts (" How to Theorize " and " Preparing for Theorizing "). Each part contains five chapters of approx. 20 pages. A short introduction and a small essay on Charles Sanders Peirce's life and methodological views complement the book. There is no need to go through the book chapter by chapter. Instead, we can quickly summarize its main points as follows. A theory is a statement about the explanation of a phenomenon and it is the outcome of theorizing (Swedberg 2014, 17). Theorizing is indispensable in the research process and should be conducted before a concrete research design is set up. Swedberg suggests the term " prestudy " for this early stage of theorizing. On this stage, the researcher tries to identify an interesting phenomenon to study, gives a name to the phenomenon, defines relevant concepts as well as typologies, and finally formulates an explanation. It is important to understand that the prestudy adheres to the logic of discovery and not to the logic of justi
To nudge is to design choice contexts in order to improve choice outcomes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein emphatically endorse nudging but reject more restrictive means. In contrast, I argue that ...
This paper uses hypothetical contractarianism to consider the value of children’s rights laws as a means of protecting children. Laws protecting children from their parents have the unintended but predictable consequence of making child-rearing less desirable for some parents and thereby reducing the number of children born. Such laws therefore produce a trade-off between the expected wellbeing of actual and possible persons. I show that a possible child behind an appropriate veil of ignorance may rationally oppose laws which benefit some and harm no actual children.
We discuss how information about choice-relevant differences between alternatives can be revealed from preference information. We provide axiomatic characterisations of two classes of Similarity Revelation Rules: one that allows for different similarity thresholds for different pairs of alternatives, and one in which the threshold is the same for all pairs of alternatives. A third result proves the necessary and sufficient condition for the characterised class of rules to yield a transitive similarity relation. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the analysis and the relationship between transitivity (of preferences) and the choice-relevant similarities between options.
Increasing empirical research on productivity supports the use of statistical or ‘rational’ discrimination in hiring. The practice is legal for features of job applicants not covered by human rights discrimination laws, such as being a smoker, residing in a particular neighbourhood or being a particular height. The practice appears largely morally innocuous under existing philosophical accounts of wrongful discrimination. This paper argues that lawful statistical discrimination treats job applicants in a way that may be considered degrading, and is likely to constrain people’s freedoms in relation to employment, thus giving us reason for moral concern.
The article focuses on the justification provided by classical contract theory for the right of states to enact laws and the corresponding obligation of political allegiance. At first the distinction between political authority and parental authority developed by John Locke in his seminal work “Two Treatises of Government” is explored. Thereafter it is discussed why the interests of individuals in the creation of a state fail to vindicate the exercise of governmental power. As regards David Hume’s influential objections to contract theory, it is argued that the consent criterion of political legitimacy withstands his criticism. Hume cannot establish that the core idea of Locke’s justificatory approach is wrong; he merely demonstrates that hardly any existing state meets the consent requirement. Finally the question is discussed which conditions a state must fulfil in order to be entitled to claim that its citizens tacitly approve of its authority.
In his latest book “Firm Commitment” Colin Mayer argues that current-shareholder value orientation leads to the exploitation of both current as well as future stakeholder groups. Drawing on research conducted throughout his entire career, Mayer asserts that market processes distort resources operating to the exploitation of stakeholders to those who have the most opportunity to use them—current shareholders of corporations. According to Mayer, factors that have facilitated the shareholders’ opportunity to obtain such a position are reputation, hostile take-overs and imprudent regulation. However, not only will shareholders guide their corporation’s resources to fund activities that harm current and future stakeholders (i.e. all stakeholders excluding current, but including future shareholders), but also will this behaviour be anticipated by these stakeholder groups. They will subsequently refuse to invest capital into, or in other words not commit, to such a corporation. This lack of commitment is harmful to all parties involved, including current shareholders. Mayer proposes corporate structures designed to overcome it.
The recent renaissance of work on conventions, informal institutions, and social norms has reminded us that between the state and individual choice is a network of informal social rules that are the foundation of our cooperative social life. However, even those who appreciate the importance of social norms are reluctant to say that they are about real morality. The first part of the essay examines why this is so. The problem, I suggest, is a widely-embraced view according to which moral judgment is an individual decision about a type of truth that is largely independent of social facts. I show that this popular conception undermines effective social norms and moral conventions. The second part of the essay analyzes the conditions under which effective conventions can be made consistent with diverse individual judgments as to what is morally acceptable — and so conventions can be understood to concern what is genuinely moral. The key, I argue, is the idea of a publicly justified morality as modeled by a hypothetical social contract.
Political philosophy relies on three alternative types of theory to explain social order. The first, is order anarchy, built on the system of spontaneous Humean conventions. They are equilibria, self-enforcing or enforced by the participants’ own contingent strategies and involve no central, specialised enforcer. The second type is contractarianism. This paper contends that its name is a misnomer hiding a redundancy. The third type is social contract theory, where there is unanimous commitment to submit to non-unanimous collective choices of certain kinds or reached by certain rules. The paper suggests that social contract theories serve mainly to render acquiescence in political obedience more palatable.
Frans van Winden presents a quick introduction to the dynamic ‘dual process’model of social ties, which was developed by van Winden and colleagues in vari-ous publications during the last 20 years. Drawing on evidence from economicsand psychology, van Winden argues that preferences are determined by differentmixtures of emotional/subcortical and cognitive/neocortical brain activity, withthe mixture depending on the social context. Thus, the main contribution of vanWinden’s approach concerns the role of preferences, which are not exogenouslygiven but endogenous. In particular, van Winden focuses on one specific aspectof the social context, namely affective social ties between individuals. He arguesthat close relationships are more affect-laden than exchange relationships, andthat by taking emotional and cognitive factors into account the ’dual process’model is able to explain voluntary contributions to public goods. The idea is thata player has social preferences and the weight given to another player’s payoffdepends on the strength of the social tie between both players, which changesover time due to automatic affective responses. Since the weights in a player’sutility function are endogenous, van Winden’s model encompasses other modelsin which the weights are fixed (e.g., selfish preferences, altruism, or inequalityaversion).In this comment, I want to discuss two aspects. The first aspect is conceptualand concerns the nature of affect-laden, close relationships. The second aspectconcerns the experimental evidence from van Dijk et al. (2002), Sonnemans et
Most meta-ethical theories fail either for lack of real content or because they fail to make needed distinctions, or to give sufficient account of what a moral theory is about. Positing that values are intuited is useless or worse, since the very problem that gives rise to the need for morals is that people’s value vary, greatly, from one to another, thus leading to conflict, and “intuition” is no basis for interpersonal agreement, if we have initial disagreement - as we seem to do. Conflicts can, of course, be steamrollered when the philosopher proposes that everybody should do things his way. But the trouble is that people may not (almost certainly will not) have motivation to conform to what the philosopher proposes. Yet motivation is of the essence. A moral theory that everyone is free to recognize with no discernible effects on his behavior is useless. The “Social Contract” idea is, very simply, to account for morals by starting with the actual motivations and deliberations of individuals, then considering the effect of placing such individuals in a society of other, especially differing ones. If we play our cards right, so that in some relevant and useful sense, everyone can expect to do better by embracing moral constraints, then the motivation problem is squarely faced from the start. The idea is that it will transfer to morals by virtue of the relations we can expect to have in society, given our various interests. This essay explores these issues, explaining why there is simply no alternative to the social contract idea.
In this essay I argue that one can understand the relationship between those who rule and those who are ruled in civil society as an implicit contractual relationship or contract by convention. I use variations of the extensive form Trust Game to summarize the structures of alternative forms of contracts, and apply these variations to model the relationship between the rulers and those under their rule. One of these variations, the Irrevocable Sovereignty Game, summarizes Hobbes’ main argument for why it is conceptually impossible for a contract to exist between a sovereign and the subjects under its rule. I argue that Hobbes’ argument presupposes a common understanding of a contract as a set of promises enforceable by a third party, such as a legally binding agreement. I use another variation of the Trust Game, the Repeatable Sovereignty Game, to show that rulers and ruled can establish and maintain a convention requiring the ruled to obey their rulers’ commands in return for these rulers providing the ruled satisfactory benefits. In effect, the ruled and their rulers create an implicit contract that is self-enforcing rather than an explicit contract requiring third-party enforcement. I argue that this idea of a governing convention has roots in David Hume’s discussions of government, and is even implicit in Hobbes’ own treatment of sovereignty.
The title of this special topic in RMM is borrowed from a paper of Hillel Steiner (1978) in which he argues against Robert Nozick’s (1974) invisible hand conception of the emergence of the state. Steiner believes that central institutions of social order such as money and government need some form of conscious endorsement by individuals to emerge and to persist over time. The idea to take this old—but still central—theme of the debate on the origin of social order as one starting point in a new attempt to evaluate the conception of a social contract was borne when Tony de Jasay (2010) criticized Bob Sugdens plea for a Humean version of contractarianism (2009, this journal). To Robert Sugden it seems perfectly consistent to be a Humean and a contractarian at the same time. To be sure: as an economist in the tracks of David Hume Sugden rejects the idea of explaining or justifying the fundamental social institutions by reference to some original contract. From a Humean point of view these institutions are simply the outcome and manifestation of social conventions. However, the relevant conventions are of a particular kind. They are promoting the common interest and can ultimately be characterized as a specific form of mutually advantageous social exchange: I abide by the social rules in exchange for your corresponding compliance. The concept of a contract, argues Sugden, is best suited to capture this “politics-as-exchange” (Buchanan 1987) conception of basic social institutions since a contract is typically based on reciprocity as well as consent. Anthony de Jasay responds that no alleged common interest—neither actual nor hypothetical—can ever suffice to justify what he calls “a rule of submission”. Subordinating the pursuit of individual interest to collective command is never possible in full agreement. But, no such subordination is actually required in the emergence and maintenance of the relevant conventions. Neither a global feeling of reciprocity nor any normative consent is needed as a motivational force to make conventions work. For Jasay the whole point of the Humean theory of social institutions based on convention is that enlightened self-interest combined with some awareness of actually existing behavioral regularities suffice to gen-
The idea of external validity, which is well-known in the social sciences, has recently also been emphasized in experimental economics. It has been argued that external validity is an important criterion in experimental research, which has been neglected by philosophy of science. In connection with this criterion, a methodology has been advanced in which inductive generalization and analogical inference play a central role. The hypotheticodeductive methodology is said to be untenable, or at least insufficient. In this paper, hypothetico-deductivism is defended. The idea of external validity, and the new plea for inductivism, is critically discussed. It is pointed out that the fundamental problems of inductivism are still unsolved. The criterion of external validity is superfluous and misleading. And the problems in experimental research associated with external validity can well be solved on the basis of deductivism.
The article systematically explores the compatibility of Hume’s political philosophy and contractarianism by reconstructing Hume’s criticism of the idea of a social contract. In a nutshell, the dispute concerns the theoretical reconstruction of the establishment and maintenance of normative institutions by individual behavior. At the center of the dispute are questions concerning the philosophical analysis of the normative force of obligatory norms, and the theoretical reconstruction of individual persons’ reasons—or motives—for following them. The main part of the article is dedicated to the reconstruction of the philosophical motivations behind the different positions. I will contrast contractarian idealism as a theoretical approach for the study of normative phenomena with Hume’s empiricist approach. I will also spell out the metaethical differences between the idea of a hypothetical contract and Hume’s rule-consequentialist reconstruction of the source of social and political obligations. Returning to the question of whether one can be both a contractarian and a Humean, the different implications of the two approaches for the theoretical understanding of normative rule-following will be presented. The conclusion is that one cannot be both a contractarian and a Humean. The article ends with a defense of the foregoing analysis against two objections.
After almost forty years, Robert Nozick’s seminal right-libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia continues to stand at the center of much of the discussion regarding prop- erty and its initial acquisition. Nozick’s most important contribution to that discussion is the formulation of his entitlement theory. Although the theory has received nearly unparalleled attention, its interpreters have misunderstood and misappropriated its most essential part: Nozick’s proviso. This paper presents a brief selection of the most representative interpretations of Nozick’s proviso, criticizes them, offers a textually well founded alternative reading of the proviso, and discusses its implications for Nozick’s entitlement theory as well as right-libertarian theories of property more generally
In this Comment, I examine Christoph Hanisch’s recent contribution to this journal. In commenting on Hanisch’s essay, I offer an interpretation of Amartya Sen’s notion of ‘commitment’ which makes committed choices both uncontroversial and quotidian. This interpretation contrasts with those which see some of Sen’s pronouncements on commitment to be obviously false, counterintuitive or psychologically impossible.
