What is a time when you or someone you know experienced a clash between professional duties and familial duties?

Week 3 Discussion: Self and Others
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Required Resources
Read/review the following resources for this activity:
Textbook: Chapter 5, 6
Lesson
Minimum of 1 scholarly source (in addition to the textbook)
Initial Post Rather than living in chaos, danger, and the hostility of our neighbors, we find ways to live together. It isn’t easy, but can we avoid doing so?
If everybody has self-interest in their own welfare and safety, then everybody also has self-interest in the welfare and safety of others. Self-interest involves community interest, and we must think about what we are willing to give up in order to get that safety and stability for ourselves, our families, our community, our nation, and even the world.
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are just two examples of social contract moralists. Locke’s philosophy helped Thomas Jefferson formulate the United States Declaration of Independence. We are interested in what it means to live together in an orderly way under a social contract.
What is a time when you or someone you know of experienced a conflict between duty to self and loyalty to the community? What would logical reasoning say should be done in that case? Why that? What would an Ethical Egoist say to do? Why would they say to do that? Note what you feel is the best course of action.
What is a time when you or someone you know experienced a clash between professional duties and familial duties? Reference a professional code such as that of the American Nurses Association or American Bar Association in explaining the clash. What moral values should have been used in that case? Why those values? What would social contract ethics have said to have done? Why would social contract ethics say that? Note what you feel is the best course of action.
Articulate and evaluate a time when you or someone you know saw personal obligations collide with national obligations. How did that tension involve differing positions on a moral debate? Did those positions rely on any key moral theories? If so, how so? If not, why not? Note what you feel is the best course of action.

BOOK: The Elements of Moral Philosophy
James Rachels

CHAPTER 5
Ethical Egoism
The achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.
AYN RAND, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS (1961)
5.1. Is There a Duty to Help the Starving?
Each year millions of people die from health problems brought on by malnutrition. Often, those who die are children. Every day, around 15,800 children under the age of five die, almost always from preventable causes. That comes to around 5.9 million deaths each year. Even if this estimate is too high, the number who die unnecessarily is staggering.
Poverty poses an acute problem for many of us who are much better off. We spend money on ourselves, not only on necessities but on luxuries—jewelry, travel, the latest smartphone, and so on. In America, even people with modest incomes sometimes enjoy such things. But we could forgo our luxuries and give the money for famine relief instead. The fact that we don’t suggests that we regard our luxuries as more important than the lives of the starving.
Why do we let people die of hunger when we could save them? Few of us actually believe our luxuries are that important. Most of us, if asked directly, would feel embarrassed, and we might say that we should do more to help. One reason we don’t is that we rarely think about it. Living our own comfortable lives, we are insulated from the realities of poverty. The people starving are at some distance from us; we do not see them, and we can avoid thinking about them. And when we do think about them, it is only abstractly, as statistics. Unfortunately for the hungry, statistics have little power to move us.
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We respond differently when there is a “crisis,” as when Hurricane Harvey dumped fifty inches of rain onto Houston over four days, and millions of people had to flee their homes. Then the horrors are newsworthy, and relief efforts are mobilized. But when the suffering is scattered, the situation seems less pressing. The 5.9 million children who die each year might all be saved if they were gathered in, say, Chicago.
But leaving aside the question of why we behave as we do, what is our duty? What should we do? Common sense might tell us to balance our own interests against the interests of others. It is understandable, of course, that we look out for ourselves, and no one can be blamed for attending to her own basic needs. But at the same time, the needs of others are important, and when we can help others—especially at little cost to ourselves—we should do so. So, if you have an extra $10, and giving it to charity would help save a child’s life, then common sense would say that you should do so.
This way of thinking assumes that we have duties to others simply because they could be helped or harmed by what we do. If a certain action would benefit (or harm) other people, then that is a reason why we should (or should not) perform that action. The commonsense assumption is that other people’s interests count, from a moral point of view.
But one person’s common sense is another person’s naïve platitude. Some people believe that we have no duties to others. On their view, known as Ethical Egoism, each person ought to pursue his or her own self-interest exclusively. This is the morality of selfishness. It holds that our only duty is to do what is best for ourselves. Other people matter only insofar as they can benefit us.
5.2. Psychological Egoism
Before we discuss Ethical Egoism, we should discuss a theory it is often confused with—Psychological Egoism. Ethical Egoism claims that each person ought to pursue his or her own self-interest exclusively. Psychological Egoism, by contrast, asserts that each person does in fact pursue his or her own self-interest exclusively. These theories are very different. It is one thing to say that people are self-interested and that our neighbors will not give to charity. It is
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quite another thing to say that people ought to be self-interested and that our neighbors ought not to give to charity. Psychological Egoism makes a claim about human nature, or about the way things are; Ethical Egoism makes a claim about morality, or about the way things should be.
Psychological Egoism is not a theory of ethics; rather, it is a theory of human psychology. But ethicists have always worried about it. If Psychological Egoism were true, then moral philosophy would seem pointless. After all, if people are going to behave selfishly no matter what, then what’s the point of discussing what they “ought” to do? Whatever it is they “ought” to do, they aren’t going to do it. It might be naïve of us to think that our moral theories can matter in the real world.
Is Altruism Possible? In 1939, when World War II began, Raoul Wallenberg was an unknown businessman living in Sweden. During the war, Sweden was a good place to be. As a neutral country, it was never bombed, blockaded, or invaded. Yet, in 1944, Wallenberg voluntarily left Sweden for Nazi-controlled Hungary. Officially, he would just be another Swedish diplomat in Budapest. But his real mission was to save lives. In Hungary, Hitler had begun implementing his “final solution to the Jewish problem”: Jews were being rounded up, deported, and then murdered at Nazi killing stations. Wallenberg wanted to stop the slaughter.
Wallenberg did help to persuade the Hungarian government to halt the deportations. However, the Hungarian government was soon replaced by a Nazi puppet regime, and the mass killing resumed. Wallenberg then issued “Swedish Protective Passes” to thousands of Jews, insisting that they all had connections to Sweden and were under the protection of his government. Wallenberg also helped many people hide. When these people were discovered, he would stand between them and the Nazis, telling the Germans that they would have to shoot him first. All in all, he saved thousands of human lives. At the end of the war, Wallenberg stayed in Hungary, amid the chaos, as most other diplomats fled. He then disappeared, and for a long time his fate was unknown. Now we believe he was killed, not by the Germans, but by the Soviets, who imprisoned him after taking over Hungary. Wallenberg’s body was never found, and
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the Swedish government did not officially declare him to be dead until 2016.
Wallenberg’s story is especially dramatic, but it is not unique. The Israeli government recognizes over 22,000 Gentiles who risked their lives trying to save Jews from being murdered in the Holocaust. The Israelis call these heroic individuals “The Righteous among the Nations.” And though few of us have saved lives, acts of altruism appear to be common. People do favors for one another. They give blood. They build homeless shelters. They volunteer in hospitals. They read to the blind. Many people give money to worthy causes. In some cases, the amount given is extraordinary. Warren Buffett, an American businessman, gave $37 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote global health and education. Zell Kravinsky, an American real estate investor, gave his entire $45-million fortune to charity. And then, for good measure, he donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. Oseola McCarty, an 87-year-old African-American woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, gave $150,000 to endow a scholarship fund at the University of Southern Mississippi. For 75 years, she had saved up money, working as a maid. She never owned a car, and at the age of 87, she still walked over a mile to the nearest grocery store, pushing her own shopping cart.
These are remarkable deeds, but should they be taken at face value? According to Psychological Egoism, we may see ourselves as noble and self-sacrificing, but really we are not. In reality, we care only for ourselves. Could this theory be true? Why have people believed it, in the face of so much contrary evidence? Two arguments are often given for Psychological Egoism.
The Argument That We Always Do What We Want to Do. “Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.” So wrote Dale Carnegie, the author of the first and best self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Carnegie thought of desire as the key to human psychology. If he was correct, then when we describe one person’s action as altruistic and another person’s action as self-interested, we may be overlooking the fact that in each case the person is merely doing what he or she most wants to do. For example,
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if Raoul Wallenberg chose to go to Hungary, then he wanted to go there more than he wanted to remain in Sweden—and why should he be praised for altruism when he was only doing what he wanted to do? His action sprang from his own wishes, from his own sense of what he wanted. Thus, he was moved by his own self-interest. And because the same may be said about any alleged act of kindness, we can conclude that Psychological Egoism must be true.
This argument, however, is flawed. There are things that we do, not because we want to, but because we feel that we ought to. For example, I may write my grandmother a letter because I promised my mother I would, even though I don’t want to do it. It is sometimes suggested that we do such things because we most want to keep our promises. But that is not true. It is simply false to say that my strongest desire is to keep my promise. What I most want is to break my promise, but I don’t, as a matter of conscience. For all we know, Wallenberg was in this position: Perhaps he wanted to stay in Sweden, but he felt that he had to go to Hungary to save lives. In any case, the fact that he chose to go does not imply that he most wanted to do so.
The argument has a second flaw. Suppose we concede that we always act on our strongest desires. Even if this were so, it would not follow that Wallenberg acted out of self-interest. For if Wallenberg wanted to help others, even at great risk to himself, then that is precisely what makes his behavior altruistic. The mere fact that you act on your own desires does not mean that you are looking out for yourself; it all depends on what you desire. If you care only about yourself and give no thought to others, then you are acting out of self-interest; but if you want other people to be happy, and you act on that desire, then you are not. To put the point another way: In assessing whether an action is self-interested, the issue is not whether the action is based on a desire; the issue is what kind of desire it is based on. If you want to help someone else, then your motive is altruistic, not self-interested.
Therefore, this argument goes wrong in every way it could: The premise is not true—we don’t always do what we most want to do—and even if it were true, the conclusion would not follow from it.
The Argument That We Always Do What Makes Us Feel Good. The second argument for Psychological Egoism appeals to the fact that
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so-called altruistic actions produce a sense of self-satisfaction in the person who performs them. Acting “unselfishly” makes people feel good about themselves, and that is why they do it.
According to a 19th-century newspaper, this argument was made by Abraham Lincoln. The Springfield, Illinois, Monitor reported,
Mr. Lincoln once remarked to a fellow-passenger on an old-time mud coach that all men were prompted by selfishness in doing good. His fellow-passenger was antagonizing this position when they were passing over a corduroy bridge that spanned a slough. As they crossed this bridge they espied an old razor-backed sow on the bank making a terrible noise because her pigs had got into the slough and were in danger of drowning. As the old coach began to climb the hill, Mr. Lincoln called out, “Driver, can’t you stop just a moment?” Then Mr. Lincoln jumped out, ran back, and lifted the little pigs out of the mud and water and placed them on the bank. When he returned, his companion remarked: “Now, Abe, where does selfishness come in on this little episode?” “Why, bless your soul, Ed, that was the very essence of selfishness. I should have had no peace of mind all day had I gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those pigs. I did it to get peace of mind, don’t you see?”
In this story, Honest Abe employs a time-honored tactic of Psychological Egoism: the strategy of reinterpreting motives. Everyone knows that people sometimes seem to act altruistically; but if we look deeper, we may find that something else is going on. And usually it is not hard to discover that the “unselfish” behavior is actually connected to some benefit for the person who does it. Thus, Lincoln talks about the peace of mind he got from rescuing the pigs.
Other examples of alleged altruism can also be reinterpreted. According to some of Raoul Wallenberg’s friends, he was depressed before he went to Hungary, feeling like his life wasn’t amounting to much. So he undertook deeds that would make him a heroic figure. His quest for a more significant life was spectacularly successful—here we are, more than 60 years after his death, talking about him. Mother Teresa, the nun who spent her life working among the poor in Calcutta, is often cited as a perfect example of altruism—but, of
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course, she believed that she would be handsomely rewarded in heaven. And as for Zell Kravinsky, who gave away both his fortune and a kidney, his parents never gave him much praise, so he was always trying to do things that even they would admire. Kravinsky himself said that, as he began to give away his money, he came to think of a donation as “a treat to myself. I really thought of it as something pleasurable.”
Despite all this, Lincoln’s argument is flawed. It may be true that one of his motives in saving the pigs was to preserve his own peace of mind. But the fact that Lincoln had a self-interested motive doesn’t mean that he didn’t have benevolent motives as well. In fact, Lincoln’s desire to help the pigs might have been even greater than his desire to preserve his peace of mind. And if this isn’t true in Lincoln’s case, it will be true in other cases: If I see a child drowning, my desire to help that child will usually be greater than my desire to avoid a guilty conscience. Cases like these are counterexamples to Psychological Egoism.
In some instances of altruism, we may have no self-interested motives. For example, in 2007, a 50-year-old construction worker named Wesley Autrey was waiting for a subway train in New York City. Autrey saw a man near him collapse, his body convulsing. The man got up, only to stumble to the edge of the platform and fall onto the train tracks. At that moment, the headlights of a train appeared. “I had to make a split[-second] decision,” Autrey later said. He then leapt onto the tracks and lay on top of the man, pressing him down into a space a foot deep. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time. People on the platform screamed. Five cars passed over the men, smudging Autrey’s blue knit cap with grease. When onlookers realized that both men were safe, they broke out into applause. “I just saw someone who needed help,” Autrey later said. He had saved the man’s life, never giving a thought to his own well-being.
There is a general lesson to be learned here, having to do with the nature of desire. We want all sorts of things—money, friends, fame, a new car, and so on—and because we desire these things, we may derive satisfaction from getting them. But the object of our desire is typically not the feeling of satisfaction—that is not what we are after. What we want is simply the money, the friends, the fame,
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and the car. It is the same with helping others. Our desire to help others often comes first; the good feelings we get may merely be a by-product.
Conclusion about Psychological Egoism. If Psychological Egoism is so implausible, why have so many intelligent people been attracted to it? Some people like the theory’s cynical view of human nature. Others may like its simplicity. And, indeed, it would be pleasing if a single factor could explain all human behavior. But human beings seem too complicated for that. Psychological Egoism is not a credible theory.
Thus, morality has nothing to fear from Psychological Egoism. Given that we can be moved by regard for our neighbors, it is not pointless to talk about whether we should help them. Moral theorizing need not be a naïve endeavor, based on an unrealistic view of human nature.
5.3. Three Arguments for Ethical Egoism
Ethical Egoism, again, is the doctrine that each person ought to pursue his or her own self-interest exclusively. This is not the commonsense view that one should promote one’s own interests in addition to the interests of others. Ethical Egoism is the radical idea that the principle of self-interest accounts for all of one’s obligations.
However, Ethical Egoism does not tell you to avoid helping others. Sometimes your interests will coincide with the well-being of others, so you’ll help yourself by helping them. For example, if you can convince your teacher to cancel the assignment, this will benefit you and your classmates. Ethical Egoism does not forbid such actions; in fact, it may recommend them. The theory insists only that the benefit to others is not what makes the act right. Rather, the act is right because it benefits you.
Nor does Ethical Egoism imply that in pursuing your interests, you should always do what you want to, or what offers you the most short-term pleasure. Someone may want to smoke cigarettes, or bet all his money at the racetrack, or set up a meth lab in his basement. Ethical Egoism would frown on all of these actions, despite their
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possible short-term benefits. Ethical Egoism says that a person ought to do what really is in his or her own best interests, over the long run. It endorses selfishness, not foolishness.
Now let’s discuss the three main arguments for Ethical Egoism.
The Argument That Altruism Is Self-Defeating. The first argument has several variations:
Everyone is aware of his or her own wants and needs. Moreover, each of us is uniquely placed to pursue those wants and needs effectively. At the same time, we understand other people only imperfectly, and we are not well placed to advance their interests. For these reasons, if we try to be “our brother’s keeper,” we will often bungle the job and do more harm than good.
At the same time, the policy of “looking out for others” is an offensive intrusion into other people’s privacy; it is essentially a policy of minding other people’s business.
Making other people the object of one’s “charity” is degrading to them: it robs them of their dignity and self-respect, and it says to them, in effect, that they are not competent to care for themselves. Moreover, such a policy is self-fulfilling: those who are “helped” cease to be self-reliant and become passively dependent on others. That is why the recipients of charity are often resentful rather than appreciative.
In each case, the policy of “looking out for others” is said to be self-defeating. If we want to do what is best for people, we should not adopt so-called altruistic policies. On the contrary, if each person looks after his or her own interests, everyone will be better off.
It is possible to object to this argument on a number of grounds. Of course, no one favors bungling, butting in, or depriving people of their self-respect. But is that really what’s going on when we feed hungry children? Is the starving child in Somalia really harmed when we “intrude” into “her business” by giving her food? It hardly seems likely. Yet we can set this point aside, for this way of thinking has an even more serious defect.
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The trouble is that it isn’t really an argument for Ethical Egoism at all. The argument concludes that we should adopt certain policies of behavior, and those policies may appear to be egoistic. However, the reason we should adopt those policies is decidedly unegoistic. It is said that adopting those policies will promote the betterment of society—but according to Ethical Egoism, we shouldn’t care about that. Spelled out fully, the argument says:
(1) We ought to do whatever will best promote everyone’s interests.
(2) The best way to promote everyone’s interests is for each of us to pursue our own interests exclusively.
(3) Therefore, each of us should pursue our own interests exclusively.
If we accept this reasoning, then we are not Ethical Egoists. Even though we might behave like egoists, our ultimate principle is one of beneficence—we are trying to help everyone, and not just ourselves. Rather than being egoists, we turn out to be altruists with a peculiar view of what promotes the general welfare.
Ayn Rand’s Argument. Philosophers don’t pay much attention to the work of Ayn Rand (1905–1982). The major themes in her novels—the primacy of the individual and the superiority of capitalism—are developed more rigorously by other writers. Yet she was a charismatic figure who attracted a devoted following. Ethical Egoism is associated more with her than with any other 20th-century writer.
Ayn Rand regarded the “ethics of altruism” as a totally destructive idea, both in society as a whole and in the lives of those taken in by it. Altruism, she thought, leads to a denial of the value of the individual. It says to a person: Your life is merely something to be sacrificed. “If a man accepts the ethics of altruism,” she writes, “his first concern is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.” Those who promote the ethics of altruism are beneath contempt—they are parasites. Rather than working to build and sustain their own lives, they leech off those who do. Rand continues,
Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs can be of no value to a human being—nor can he gain any benefit from living in a society geared to their needs, demands and protections, a
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society that treats him as a sacrificial animal and penalizes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a society based on the ethics of altruism.
By “sacrificing one’s life,” Rand does not mean anything so dramatic as dying. A person’s life consists, in part, of projects undertaken and goods earned and created. Thus, to demand that a person abandon his projects and give up his goods is to demand that he “sacrifice his life.”
Rand also suggests that there is a metaphysical basis for Ethical Egoism. Somehow, it is the only ethic that takes seriously the reality of the individual person. She bemoans “the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp … the value of an individual life; it reveals a mind from which the reality of a human being has been wiped out.”
What, then, of the hungry children? It might be said that Ethical Egoism itself “reveals a mind from which the reality of a human being has been wiped out,” namely, the human being who is starving. But Rand quotes with approval the answer given by one of her followers: “Once, when Barbara Brandon was asked by a student: ‘What will happen to the poor …?’ she answered: ‘If you want to help them, you will not be stopped.’”
All these remarks are part of a single argument that goes something like this:
(1) Each person has only one life to live. If we value the individual, then we must agree that this life is of supreme importance. After all, it is all one has, and all one is.
(2) The ethics of altruism regards the life of the individual as something to be sacrificed for the good of others. Therefore, the ethics of altruism does not take seriously the value of the individual.
(3) Ethical Egoism, which allows each person to view his or her own life as having supreme value, does take the individual seriously—it is, in fact, the only philosophy that does.
(4) Thus, we should accept Ethical Egoism.
One problem with this argument, as you may have noticed, is its assumption that we have only two options: Either we accept the
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ethics of altruism, or we accept Ethical Egoism. The choice is then made to look obvious by depicting altruism as an idea that only an idiot would accept. The ethics of altruism is said to be the view that one’s own interests have no value and that we must be ready to sacrifice ourselves totally whenever anybody asks us to. If this is altruism, then any other view, including Ethical Egoism, will look good by comparison.
But that is hardly a fair picture of the options. What we called the commonsense view stands between the two extremes. It says that one’s own interests and the interests of others are important, and so we must strike a balance between them. Sometimes, one should act for the sake of others; at other times, one should look after oneself. Even if we reject the extreme ethics of altruism, we needn’t embrace the extreme of Ethical Egoism. There is a middle ground.
Ethical Egoism as Compatible with Commonsense Morality. The third argument takes a different approach. Ethical Egoism is usually presented as challenging common sense. It is possible, however, to interpret it as supporting our commonsense moral view.
This interpretation goes as follows: Ordinary morality consists in obeying certain rules. We must speak the truth, keep our promises, avoid harming others, and so on. At first, these duties seem to have nothing in common—they are just a bunch of discrete rules. Yet there may be a unity to them. Ethical Egoists would say that all these duties spring from the one fundamental principle of self-interest.
Understood in this way, Ethical Egoism is not such a radical doctrine. It does not challenge ordinary morality; it only tries to explain and systematize it. And it does a surprisingly good job. It can provide plausible explanations of the duties mentioned above, and more:
The duty not to harm others: If we do things that harm other people, other people won’t mind harming us. We won’t have friends; we will be shunned and despised; and we won’t get help when we need it. If our offenses are serious enough, we might wind up in jail. Thus, it benefits us not to harm others.
The duty not to lie: If we lie to other people, we will suffer all the ill effects of a bad reputation. People will distrust us
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and avoid doing business with us. People will be dishonest with us once they realize that we have been dishonest with them. Thus, we benefit from being truthful.
The duty to keep our promises: It is to our own advantage to enter into mutually beneficial arrangements with other people. To benefit from those arrangements, we need to be able to rely on others to keep their word. But we can hardly expect them to do that if we do not keep our promises to them. Therefore, from the point of view of self-interest, we should keep our promises.
Pursuing this line of reasoning, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) suggested that the principle of Ethical Egoism leads to nothing less than the Golden Rule: We should “do unto others” so that others will be more likely to “do unto us.”
Does this argument succeed in establishing Ethical Egoism as a viable theory of morality? It may be the best try. However, there are two serious problems with it. First, the argument does not prove as much as it needs to. It shows only that it is usually to one’s advantage to tell the truth, to keep one’s promises, and to avoid harming others. But a situation might arise in which you could profit from doing something horrible, like killing someone. In such a case, Ethical Egoism cannot explain why you shouldn’t do the horrible thing. Thus, it looks like some of our moral obligations cannot be derived from self-interest.
Second, suppose that giving money to famine relief is somehow to one’s own advantage. It doesn’t follow that this is the only reason to do so. Another reason might be to help the starving people. Ethical Egoism says that self-interest is the only reason to help others, but nothing in the present argument really supports that.
5.4. Two Arguments against Ethical Egoism
The Argument That Ethical Egoism Endorses Wickedness. Consider these wicked actions, taken from various news stories: To make more money, a pharmacist filled prescriptions for cancer patients using watered-down drugs. A paramedic gave emergency patients injections of sterile water rather than morphine, so he could sell the
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morphine. Parents fed their baby acid, so they could fake a lawsuit, claiming the baby’s formula was tainted. A male nurse raped two patients while they were unconscious. A 73-year-old man kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, against her will. A 60-year-old man shot his letter carrier seven times because he was $90,000 in debt and thought that being in federal prison would be better than being homeless.
Suppose that someone could actually benefit from doing such things. Wouldn’t Ethical Egoism have to approve of such actions? This seems like enough to discredit the doctrine. However, this objection might be unfair to Ethical Egoism, because in saying that these actions are wicked, it assumes a nonegoistic conception of wickedness.
The Argument That Ethical Egoism Is Unacceptably Arbitrary. This argument may refute Ethical Egoism. Unlike the previous argument, it tries to explain why the interests of other people should matter to us. But before examining it, let’s consider a general point about moral values.
There is a family of moral views that have this in common: They divide people into groups and say that the interests of some groups count more than the interests of other groups. Racism is the most obvious example. Racists divide people into groups according to race and assign greater importance to the well-being of one race than to the well-being of other races. In fact, all forms of discrimination work like this—anti-Semitism, nationalism, sexism, and so on. People in the sway of such attitudes will think, in effect, “My race counts for more,” or “People who believe in my religion count for more,” or “My country counts for more,” and so on.
Can such ideas be defended? The people who accept them don’t usually give arguments for them—racists, for example, rarely try to justify racism. But suppose they did. What could they say?
There is a general principle that stands in the way of any such justification. Let’s call it the Principle of Equal Treatment: We should treat people in the same way unless there is a good reason not to. For example, suppose we’re considering whether to admit two students to law school. If both students graduated from college with honors and aced the entrance exam—if both are equally qualified—then it is
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arbitrary to admit one but not the other. However, if one graduated with honors and scored well on the admissions test while the other dropped out of college and never took the test, then it is acceptable to admit the first student but not the second.
At root, the Principle of Equal Treatment is a principle that requires fairness in our dealings with others: Like cases should be treated alike, and only dissimilar cases may be treated differently. Two points should be made about the principle. The first is that treating people in the same way does not always mean ensuring the same outcome for them. During the Vietnam War, young American men desperately wanted to avoid getting drafted into the armed services, and the government had to decide the order in which draft boards would call people up. In 1969, the first “draft lottery” was televised to a national audience. Here is how it worked: The days of the year were written on 366 slips of paper (one slip for February 29) and inserted into blue plastic capsules. Those capsules were placed in a glass jar and mixed up. Then, one by one, the capsules were drawn. September 14 was drawn first—so, young men with that birthday, age 18–26, would be drafted first. The winners of the lottery, drawn last, were born on June 8. These young men never got drafted. In college dormitories, groups of students watched the drawings live, and it was easy to tell whose birthday had just come up—whoever just groaned or swore. Obviously, the outcomes were different: In the end, some people got drafted, and others didn’t. However, the process was fair. By giving everyone an equal chance in the lottery, the government treated everyone in the same way.
A second point concerns the scope of the principle, or which situations it applies to. Suppose you’re not going to use your ticket to the big game, and so you give it to a friend. In doing so, you are treating your friend better than everyone else you could have given the ticket to. Does your action violate the Principle of Equal Treatment? Does it need justification? Moral philosophers disagree about this. Some of them think that the principle does not apply to cases like this. The principle applies only in “moral contexts,” and what you should do with your ticket is not important enough to count as a “moral question.” Others think that your action does require justification, and various justifications might be given. Your action might be justified by the nature of friendship; or by
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the fact that it would be impossible for you to hold a lottery at the last minute for all the ticketless fans; or by the fact that you own the ticket, and so you can do what you want with it. For our purposes, in assessing Ethical Egoism, it doesn’t matter exactly how these questions are answered. It’s enough that everyone accepts the principle, under one interpretation or another. Everyone believes in treating people similarly, unless the facts demand otherwise.
Consider an example. When Donald Trump kicked off his candidacy for president in 2015, he said of Mexicans immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And Trump soon widened his attack: “It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America….” The first remark sounds like nationalism: People are divided into two groups, based on their country of origin, and the people in one group (the Mexicans) are to be treated worse than the people in the other group (the non-Mexicans). Trump’s second remark sounds like racism: People are now divided into two racial groups, Latinos and non-Latinos (or, perhaps, people with brown skin and people without such skin), and our immigration policy should favor those in the second group.
Note, however, that Trump did not merely indicate a preference for some groups over others; he also tried to give a reason for this: that Mexican and Latino immigrants to America (or brown people in general) are a bunch of criminals. In fact, that claim is false; people in America actually commit more crimes if they were born in America than if they were not. Evidently, people who want to come to America, and who make the effort to do so, behave better once they are in America than people who were simply born there. Thus, Trump’s “justification” of his stance on immigration fails. But notice what else is true: Even Donald Trump believes in the Principle of Equal Treatment. Trump could have just said, “Let’s keep Latinos out” without saying why. However, he knew that he had to try to give a reason: He needed to offer some factual basis for denying Latinos entry to the United States, given that other people are let in. So, he called them drug-dealing rapists. Stereotypes exist because even racists know that they must explain why the people they hate deserve worse treatment than others.
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Ethical Egoism also violates the Principle of Equal Treatment. It divides the world into two groups of people—one’s self and everyone else—and urges us to favor the interests of those in the first group over the interests of those in the second group. But each of us can ask the following questions: What is the difference between me and everyone else that justifies placing myself in this special category? Am I more intelligent? Are my accomplishments greater? Do I enjoy life more? Are my needs and abilities different from the needs and abilities of others? In short, what makes me so special? Failing an answer, it turns out that Ethical Egoism is an arbitrary doctrine, in the same way that nationalism and racism are arbitrary. Each doctrine violates the Principle of Equal Treatment.
We should care about other people because their needs and desires are comparable to our own. Similar cases should be treated similarly. Consider, one last time, the starving children we could feed by giving up some of our luxuries. Why should we care about them? We care about ourselves, of course—if we were starving, then we would do almost anything to get food for ourselves. But what is the difference between us and them? Does hunger affect them any less? Are they less deserving than we are? If we can find no relevant difference between us and them, then we must admit that if our needs should be met, then so should theirs. This realization—that we are on a par with one another—is the deepest reason why our morality must recognize the needs of others. And that is why, ultimately, Ethical Egoism fails as a moral theory.
Notes on Sources
The statistics on childhood mortality are from unicef.org (“Child Survival/Under-Five Mortality”), accessed on August 30, 2017.
Fifty inches of rain on Houston: Todd C. Frankel, Avi Selk, and David A Fahrenthold, “Residents Warned to ‘Get Out or Die’ as Harvey Unleashes New Waves of Punishing Rains and Flooding,” The Washington Post, August 30, 2017.
On Raoul Wallenberg, see John Bierman, The Righteous Gentile (New York: Viking Press, 1981), and Sewell Chan, “71 Years after He Vanished, Raoul Wallenberg Is Declared Dead,” The New York Times, October 31, 2016. On Gentiles who risked their lives to protect Jews, see http://www.yadvashem.org.
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On Zell Kravinsky, see Ian Parker’s “The Gift,” in the New Yorker (August 2, 2004). On Oseola McCarty, see Bill Clinton, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 26.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981; first published in 1936), p. 31.
The story about Abraham Lincoln is from the Springfield Monitor, quoted by Frank Sharp in his Ethics (New York: Appleton Century, 1928), p. 75.
Cara Buckley, “Man Is Rescued by Stranger on Subway Tracks,” The New York Times (January 3, 2007).
Ayn Rand is quoted from her book The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), pp. 27, 32, 80, and 81.
The newspaper stories are from The Baltimore Sun, August 28, 2001; The Miami Herald, August 28, 1993, October 6, 1994, and June 2, 1989; The New York Times, April 28, 2008; and the Macon Telegraph, July 15, 2005.
Donald Trump’s June 16, 2015, speech can be read at “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech” on time.com. Also see Richard Perez-Penajan, “Contrary to Trump’s Claims, Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes,” The New York Times, January 26, 2017.
CHAPTER 6
The Social Contract Theory
Wherever law ends, tyranny begins …
JOHN LOCKE, THE SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT (1690)
6.1. Hobbes’s Argument
Suppose we take away all the traditional props for morality. Assume, first, that there is no God to issue commands and reward virtue. Next, suppose that there are no “natural purposes”—objects in nature have no inherent functions or intended uses. Finally, assume that human beings are naturally selfish. Where, then, could morality come from? If we cannot appeal to God, natural purpose, or altruism, is there anything left to base morality on?
Thomas Hobbes, the leading British philosopher of the 17th century, tried to show that morality does not depend on any of those things. Instead, morality should be understood as the solution to a practical problem that arises for self-interested human beings. We all want to live as well as possible; but in order to flourish, we need a peaceful, cooperative social order. And we cannot have one without rules. Those rules are the moral rules; morality consists of the precepts we need to follow in order to get the benefits of social living. That—not God, inherent purposes, or altruism—is the key to understanding ethics.
Hobbes begins by asking what it would be like if there were no way to enforce social rules. Suppose there were no government institutions—no laws, no police, and no courts. In this situation, each of us would be free to do as we pleased. Hobbes called this “the state of nature.” What would it be like? Hobbes thought it would be dreadful. In the state of nature, he says,
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there would be no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The state of nature would be awful, Hobbes thought, due to four basic facts about human life:
There is equality of need. Each of us needs the same basic things in order to survive—food, clothing, shelter, and so on. Although we differ in some of our needs (diabetics need insulin, others don’t), we are all essentially alike.
There is scarcity. We do not live in the Garden of Eden, where milk flows in streams and every tree hangs heavy with fruit. The world is a hard, inhospitable place, where the things we need do not come in abundance. We have to work hard to produce them, and even then they may be in short supply.
There is the essential equality of human power. Who will get the scarce goods? No one can simply take what she wants. Even though some people are smarter and tougher than others, even the strongest can be brought down when those who are less strong act together.
Finally, there is limited altruism. If we cannot prevail by our own strength, what hope do we have? Can we rely on the goodwill of others? We cannot. Even if people are not wholly selfish, they care most about themselves, and we cannot assume that they will step aside when their interests conflict with ours.
Together, these facts paint a grim picture. We all need the same basic things, and there aren’t enough of them to go around. Therefore, we will have to compete for them. But no one can prevail in this competition, and no one—or almost no one—will look after his neighbors. The result, as Hobbes puts it, is a “constant state of war,
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of one with all.” And it is a war no one can win. Whoever wants to survive will try to seize what he needs and prepare to defend it from attack. Meanwhile, others will be doing the same thing. Life in the state of nature would be intolerable.
Hobbes did not think that all this was mere speculation. He pointed out that this is what actually happens when governments collapse during civil uprisings. People hoard food, arm themselves, and lock out their neighbors. Moreover, nations themselves behave like this when international law is weak. Without a strong, overarching authority to maintain the peace, countries guard their borders, build up their armies, and feed their own people first.
To escape the state of nature, we must find a way to work together. In a stable and cooperative society, we can produce more essential goods and distribute them in a rational way. But establishing such a society is not easy. People must agree on rules to govern their interactions. They must agree, for example, not to harm one another and not to break their promises. Hobbes calls such an agreement “the social contract.” As a society, we follow certain rules, and we have ways to enforce them. Some of those ways involve the law—if you assault someone, the police may arrest you. Other ways involve “the court of public opinion”—if you get a reputation for lying, then people may turn their backs on you. All of these rules, taken together, form the social contract.
It is only within the context of the social contract that we can become beneficent beings, because the contract creates the conditions under which we can afford to care about others. In the state of nature, it is every man for himself; it would be foolish for anyone to look out for others and put his own interests in jeopardy. But in society, altruism becomes possible. By releasing us from “the continual fear of violent death,” the social contract frees us to take heed of others. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) went so far as to say that we become different kinds of creatures when we enter civilized relations with others. In The Social Contract (1762), he writes,
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man…. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses … does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced
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to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations…. His faculties are so stimulated and developed, … his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it forever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.
And what does the “voice of duty” require this new man to do? It requires him to set aside his self-centered designs in favor of rules that benefit everyone. But he is able to do this only because others have made the same pledge—that is the essence of the “contract.”
The Social Contract Theory explains the purpose of both morality and government. The purpose of morality is to make social living possible; the purpose of government is to enforce vital moral rules. We can summarize the social contract conception of morality as follows: Morality consists in the set of rules, governing behavior, that rational people will accept, on the condition that others accept them as well. And rational people will accept a rule only if they can expect to gain from it. Thus, morality is about mutual benefit; you and I are morally bound to follow a rule only if we would be better off living in a society in which that rule was usually followed.
6.2. The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Hobbes’s argument is one way of arriving at the Social Contract Theory. Another argument makes use of the Prisoner’s Dilemma—a problem invented by Merrill M. Flood and Melvin Dresher around 1950. Here’s how the problem goes.
Suppose you live in a totalitarian society, and one day, to your astonishment, you are arrested and charged with treason. The police say that you have been plotting against the government with a man named Smith, who has also been arrested and is being held in a separate cell. The interrogator demands that you confess. You protest your innocence; you don’t even know Smith. But this does you no good. It soon becomes clear that your captors are not interested
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in the truth; they merely want to convict someone. They offer you the following deal:
If Smith does not confess, but you confess and testify against him, then they will release you. You will go free, while Smith will be put away for 10 years.
If Smith confesses and you do not, the situation will be reversed—he will go free while you get 10 years.
If you both confess, you will each be sentenced to 5 years.
If neither of you confesses, then there won’t be enough evidence to convict either of you. They can hold you for a year, but then they will have to let both of you go.
Finally, you are told that Smith is being offered the same deal, but you cannot communicate with him, and you have no way of knowing what he will do.
The problem is this: Assuming that your only goal is to spend as little time in jail as possible, what should you do? Confess or not confess? For the purposes of this problem, you should forget about maintaining your dignity and standing up for your rights. That is not what this problem is about. You should also forget about trying to help Smith. This problem is strictly about calculating what is in your own best interests. What will get you free the quickest?
The question may seem impossible to answer unless you know what Smith will do. But that is an illusion. The problem has a clear solution: No matter what Smith does, you should confess. This can be shown as follows:
(1) Either Smith will confess or he won’t.
(2) Suppose Smith confesses. Then, if you confess you will get 5 years, whereas if you do not confess you will get 10 years. Therefore, if he confesses, you are better off confessing.
(3) On the other hand, suppose Smith does not confess. Then, if you confess you will go free, whereas if you do not confess you get one year. Therefore, if Smith does not confess, you will still be better off confessing.
(4) Therefore, you should confess. That will get you out of jail the soonest, no matter what Smith does.
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So far, so good. But remember that Smith is being offered the same deal. Thus, he will also confess. The result will be that you both get 5-year sentences. But if you had both done the opposite, you both could have gotten only one year. It’s a curious situation: Because you and Smith both act selfishly, you both wind up worse off.
Now suppose you can communicate with Smith. In that case, you could make a deal with him. You could agree that neither of you will confess; then you will both get the one-year detention. By cooperating, you will both be better off than if you act independently. Cooperating will not get either of you the best result—immediate freedom—but it will get both of you a better result than you would have gotten alone.
It is vital, however, that any agreement between you and Smith be enforceable, because if he reneges and confesses while you keep the bargain, you will end up serving the maximum 10 years while he goes free. Thus, in order for you to rationally participate in such a deal, you need to be sure that Smith will keep up his end.
Morality as the Solution to Prisoner’s-Dilemma-Type Problems. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is not just a clever puzzle. Although the story it tells is fictitious, the pattern it exemplifies comes up often in real life. Consider, for example, the choice between two general strategies of living. You could pursue your own interests exclusively—in every situation, you could do whatever will benefit yourself, taking no notice of anyone else. Let us call this “acting selfishly.” Alternatively, you could care about others, balancing their interests against your own and sometimes forgoing your own interests for their sake. Let us call this strategy “acting benevolently.”
But it is not only you who must decide. Other people also have to choose which strategy to adopt. There are four possibilities: (a) You could be selfish while other people are benevolent; (b) others could be selfish while you are benevolent; (c) everyone could be selfish; and (d) everyone could be benevolent. How would you fare in each of these situations? You might assess the possibilities like this:
You would be best off if you were selfish while other people were benevolent. You would get the benefit of their
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generosity without having to return the favor. (In this situation, you would be a “free rider.”)
Second-best would be if everyone were benevolent. You would no longer have the advantages that come from ignoring other people’s interests, but you would be treated well by others. (This is the situation of “ordinary morality.”)
A bad situation, but not the worst, would be one in which everyone was selfish. You would try to protect your own interests, but you would get little help from others. (This is Hobbes’s “state of nature.”)
You would be worst off if you were benevolent while others were selfish. Other people could stab you in the back whenever they wanted, but you would never do the same. You would come out on the short end every time. (This is the “sucker’s payoff.”)
This situation has the same structure as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In fact, it is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, even though it involves no prisoners. Again, we can prove that you should adopt the selfish strategy:
(1) Either other people will respect your interests or they won’t.
(2) If they do respect your interests, you would be better off not respecting theirs, at least when that would be to your benefit. This would be the optimum situation—you get to be a free rider.
(3) If they do not respect your interests, then it would be foolish for you to respect theirs. That would land you in the worst possible situation—you get the sucker’s payoff.
(4) Therefore, regardless of what other people do, you are better off adopting the policy of looking out for yourself. You should be selfish.
And now we come to the catch: Other people, of course, can reason in this same way, and the result will be Hobbes’s state of nature. Everyone will be selfish, willing to knife anyone who gets in their way. In that situation, each of us would be worse off than if we all cooperated.
To escape the dilemma, we need another enforceable agreement, this time to obey the rules of mutually respectful social living.
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As before, cooperation will not yield the optimum outcome for each individual, but it will lead to a better result than non-cooperation. We need, in David Gauthier’s words, to “bargain our way into morality.” We can do that by establishing laws and social customs that protect the interests of everyone involved.
6.3. Some Advantages of the Social Contract Theory
Morality, on this theory, consists in the rules that rational people will accept, on the condition that others accept them as well. The strength of this theory is due, in large part, to the fact that it provides plausible answers to some difficult questions.
1. What moral rules are we bound to follow, and how are those rules justified? The morally binding rules are the ones that facilitate harmonious social living. We could not live together in peace if we allowed murder, assault, theft, lying, promise breaking, and so on. The rules forbidding those acts are, therefore, justified by their tendency to promote harmony and cooperation. On the other hand, “moral rules” that condemn prostitution, sodomy, and sexual promiscuity cannot be justified on these grounds. How is social living hampered by private, voluntary sexual activity? How would it benefit us to agree to such rules? What people do behind closed doors is outside the scope of the social contract. Such rules, therefore, have no claim on us.
2. Why is it rational for us to follow the moral rules? We agree to follow the moral rules because we benefit from living in a place where the rules are accepted. However, we actually do follow the rules—we keep our end of the bargain—because the rules will be enforced, and it is rational for us to avoid punishment. Why don’t you kidnap your boss? Because you might get caught.
But what if you think you won’t get caught? Why follow the rules then? To answer this question, first note that you don’t want other people to break the rules when they think they can avoid punishment—you don’t want other people to commit murder, assault, and so on, just because they think they can get away with it. After all, they might be murdering or assaulting you. For this reason, we
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want others to accept the contract in more than a frivolous or lighthearted way. We want them to form a firm intention to hold up their end of the bargain; we want them to become the sort of people who won’t be tempted to stray. And, of course, they will demand the same of us, as part of the agreement. But once we have this firm intention, it is rational to act on it. Why don’t you kidnap your boss when you think you can get away with it? Because you’ve made a firm decision not to be that sort of person.
3. Under what circumstances is it rational to break the rules? We agree to obey the rules only on certain conditions. One condition is that we benefit from the overall arrangement. Another condition is that other people will do their part. Thus, when someone breaks the rules, he releases us from our obligations toward him. For example, suppose someone refuses to help you in circumstances in which he clearly should. If later on he needs your help, you may rightly feel that you have no duty to help him.
The same point explains why punishing criminals is acceptable. Lawbreakers are treated differently from other citizens—in punishing them, we treat them in ways that are normally forbidden, ways that they themselves wouldn’t agree to. Why can we do this? Remember that the rules apply to you only if other people also follow them. So, you may disregard those rules when dealing with someone who doesn’t follow them. In breaking the rules, the criminal thus leaves himself open to retaliation. This explains why it is legitimate for the government to enforce the law.
4. How much can morality demand of us? Morality seems to require that we be impartial—that is, that we give no greater weight to our own interests than to the interests of others. But suppose you face a situation in which you must choose between your own death and the deaths of five other people. Impartiality, it seems, would require you to choose your own death; after all, there are five of them and only one of you. Are you morally bound to sacrifice yourself?
Philosophers have often felt uneasy about this sort of example; they have felt instinctively that there are limits to what morality can demand of us. Therefore, they have traditionally said that such heroic actions are supererogatory—that is, above and beyond the call of duty, admirable when they occur but not morally
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required. Yet it is hard to explain why such actions are not required. If morality demands impartial behavior, and it is better that one person die rather than five, then you should be required to sacrifice yourself.
What does the Social Contract Theory say about this? Suppose the question is whether to have the rule “If you can save many lives by sacrificing your own life, then you must do so.” Would it be rational to accept this rule, on the condition that everyone else accepts it? Presumably, it would be. After all, each of us is more likely to benefit from this rule than to be harmed by it—you’re more likely to be among those saved than to be the one and only person who gives up her life. Thus, it may seem that the Social Contract Theory does require moral heroism.
But this is not so. On the Social Contract Theory, morality consists in the rules that rational people will accept on the condition that others accept them as well. However, it would not be rational to make an agreement that we don’t expect others to follow. Can we expect other people to follow this rule of self-sacrifice—can we expect strangers to form a firm intention to give up their lives for us? We cannot. Most people won’t be that benevolent, even if they have promised to be. Can we expect the threat of punishment to make them that benevolent? Again, we cannot; people’s fear of death is likely to overwhelm any fear they have of punishment. Thus, there is a natural limit to the amount of self-sacrifice that the social contract can require: Rational people will not agree to rules so demanding that others won’t follow them. In this way, the Social Contract Theory explains a feature of morality that other theories find mysterious.
6.4. The Problem of Civil Disobedience
Moral theories should help us understand concrete moral issues. The Social Contract Theory in particular should help us understand issues about social institutions—after all, explaining the proper function of those institutions is one of the main goals of the theory. So let’s consider again our obligation to obey the law. Are we ever justified in breaking the law? If so, when?
Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent protest against the government, where people break the law openly and do not resist
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arrest. The great modern examples of it are from the Indian independence movement, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948), and the American civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968). Both movements were characterized by public, conscientious, nonviolent refusal to comply with the law. In 1930, Gandhi and his followers marched to the coastal village of Dandi, where they defied British law by distilling salt from saltwater. The British had been controlling salt production in order to force the Indian peasants to buy it at high prices. In America, Dr. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in Alabama’s capital after Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Parks was defying one of the “Jim Crow” laws designed to enforce racial segregation in the South. Gandhi and King, the two greatest proponents of nonviolence in the 20th century, were both murdered by gunfire.
Their movements had different goals. Gandhi and his followers did not recognize the right of the British to govern India; they wanted to replace British rule with self-governance. King and his followers, however, did not question the legitimacy of the American government. They objected only to particular laws and particular social policies. For most of the 20th century, people of color were treated as an inferior underclass in America, especially in the South. In the South, places such as schools, restaurants, water fountains, bathrooms, and pools were segregated by race, and the “colored facilities” were always rundown as compared to the places where white people were welcome. African-Americans were poor, and a century after slavery, neighborhoods across America remained highly segregated, due to racist practices in the housing market. In the South, few African-Americans could vote because most municipalities made it impossible for them to register. In addition, blacks could not expect fair treatment from the legal system, where every police officer, judge, and juror was white.
Racial segregation was not only enforced by social custom, but it was also a matter of law, of laws that black citizens were denied a voice in formulating. When urged to rely on ordinary democratic processes, King pointed out that all attempts to use these processes had failed. And as for “democracy,” he said, that word has no
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meaning for those who have been denied the right to vote. Hence, King believed that blacks had no choice but to defy the unjust laws and to accept the consequences by going to jail.
Today we remember King as a great moral leader. At the time, however, his strategy of civil disobedience was highly controversial. Many liberals expressed sympathy for his goals but criticized his tactic of breaking the law. An article in the New York State Bar Journal in 1965 expressed the typical worries. After assuring his readers that “long before Dr. King was born, I espoused, and still espouse, the cause of civil rights for all people,” Louis Waldman, a prominent New York lawyer, argues,
Those who assert rights under the Constitution and the laws made thereunder must abide by that Constitution and the law, if that Constitution is to survive. They cannot pick and choose; they cannot say they will abide by those laws which they think are just and refuse to abide by those laws which they think are unjust….
The country, therefore, cannot accept Dr. King’s doctrine that he and his followers will pick and choose, knowing that it is illegal to do so. I say, such doctrine is not only illegal and for that reason alone should be abandoned, but that it is also immoral, destructive of the principles of democratic government, and a danger to the very civil rights Dr. King seeks to promote.
Waldman had a point: If our legal system is basically decent, then defying the law is, on its face, a bad thing because it might weaken people’s respect for the law generally. To meet this objection, King sometimes said that the evils he opposed were so serious, so numerous, and so difficult to fight that civil disobedience was justified as a last resort. The end justifies the means, though the means are imperfect. This argument may be enough to answer Waldman’s objections. But there is a more profound reply available.
According to the Social Contract Theory, we are obligated to obey the law because we each participate in a social system that promises more benefits than burdens. The benefits are the benefits of social living: We escape the state of nature and live in a society in which we are secure and enjoy basic rights. To gain these benefits,
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we agree to uphold the institutions that make them possible. This means that we must obey the law, pay our taxes, serve on juries, and so forth—these are the burdens we accept in return.
But what if some citizens are denied their basic rights? What if the police, instead of protecting those citizens, attack them with dogs while protecting those who lynch them? Under such circumstances, the social contract is not being honored. In asking the disadvantaged group to obey the law and pay their taxes and respect society’s institutions, we are asking them to accept the burdens of social living without receiving its benefits.
This line of reasoning suggests that civil disobedience is not an undesirable “last resort” for socially disenfranchised groups. Rather, it is the most natural and reasonable means of expressing protest. For when the disadvantaged are denied the benefits of social living, they are released from the contract that would otherwise require them to follow society’s rules. This is the deepest argument for civil disobedience, and the Social Contract Theory presents it clearly and forcefully.
6.5. Difficulties for the Theory
The Social Contract Theory is one of the major options in contemporary moral philosophy, along with Utilitarianism, Kantianism, and Virtue Ethics. It is easy to see why; the theory seems to explain a great deal about moral life. Two important objections, however, have been made against it.
First, it is said that the Social Contract Theory is based on a historical fiction. We are asked to imagine that people once lived in isolation from one another, that they found this intolerable, and that they eventually banded together, agreeing to follow social rules of mutual benefit. But none of this ever happened. It is just a fantasy. So of what relevance is it? To be sure, if people had come together in this way, we could explain their obligations to one another as the theory suggests: They would be obligated to obey the rules that they had agreed to obey. But even then, there would be problems. Was the agreement unanimous? If not, what about the people who didn’t sign up—are they not required to act morally? And if the contract was made a long time ago by our ancestors, why should we be bound
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to it? But anyway, there never was such a contract, and so nothing can be explained by appealing to it. As one critic wisecracked, the social contract “isn’t worth the paper it’s not written on.”
To be sure, none of us ever signed a “real” contract—there is no piece of paper bearing our signatures. Immigrants, who promise to obey the law when they are granted citizenship, are the exception. The contract theorist might say, however, that a social arrangement like the one described does exist, for all of us: There is a set of rules that everyone recognizes as binding on them, and we all benefit from the fact that these rules are generally followed. Each of us accepts the benefits conferred by this arrangement; and, more than that, we expect and encourage others to observe the rules. This describes the actual world; it is not fictitious. And, by accepting the benefits of this arrangement, we incur an obligation to do our part—which at least means that we should follow the rules. We are thus bound by an implicit social contract. It is “implicit” because we become a party to it, not by explicitly making a promise, but by accepting the benefits of social living.
Thus, the story of the “social contract” need not be intended as a description of historical events. Rather, it is a useful analytical tool, based on the idea that we may understand our moral obligations as if they had arisen in this way. Consider the following analogy: Suppose you come upon a group of people playing an elaborate game. It looks like fun, and you join in. After a while, however, you begin to break some of the rules, because that looks like more fun. When the other players protest, you say that you never promised to follow the rules. However, your remark is irrelevant. Perhaps nobody promised to obey, but, by joining the game, each person implicitly agreed to abide by the rules that make the game possible. It is as though they had all agreed. Morality is like this. The “game” is social living; the rules, which make the game possible, are the rules of morality.
That response to the first objection, however, is ineffective. When a game is in progress, and you join in, it is obvious that you choose to join in, because you could have just walked away. For that reason, you must respect the game’s rules, or you will rightly be regarded as a nuisance. By contrast, somebody born into today’s big cooperative world does not choose to join it; nobody chooses to be born. And then, once a person has grown up, the costs of leaving that world are severe. How could you opt out? You might become
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a survivalist and never use electricity, roads, the water service, and so on. But that would be a great burden. Alternatively, you might leave the country. But what if you don’t like the social rules that exist in any of the other countries, either? Moreover, as David Hume (1711–1776) observed, many people are not “free to leave their country” in any meaningful sense:
Can we seriously say that a poor peasant … has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining [on a ship], freely consents 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.
Thus, life is not like joining a game, whose rules you may reject by walking away. Rather, life is like being thrust into a game you can’t walk away from. The contract theorist has not explained why one must obey the rules of such a game.
Does the first objection, therefore, refute the Social Contract Theory? I don’t think so. The contract theorist may say this: Participating in a sensible social scheme is rational; it really is in one’s best interest. This is why the rules are valid—because they benefit those who live under them. If someone doesn’t agree to the rules, the rules still apply to him; he’s just being irrational. Suppose, for example, that a survivalist forgoes the benefits of social living. May he then refuse to pay his taxes? He may not, because even he would be better off paying his taxes and enjoying the benefits of clean water, paved roads, indoor plumbing, and so on. The survivalist might not want to play the game, but the rules still apply to him, because it would really and truly be in his interest to join in.
This defense of the Social Contract Theory abandons the idea that morality is based on an agreement. However, it holds fast to the idea that morality consists in mutually beneficial rules. It also complies with our earlier definition, that morality consists in the set of rules, governing behavior, that rational people will accept, on the condition that others accept them as well. Rational people will accept rules of mutual benefit.
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The second objection is more troubling. Some individuals cannot benefit us. Thus, according to the Social Contract Theory, these individuals have no claim on us; we may ignore their interests when we’re writing up the “mutually beneficial” rules of society. The moral rules will, therefore, let us treat these individuals in any way whatsoever. This implication of the theory is unacceptable.
There would be at least three vulnerable groups:
Nonhuman animals
Future generations
Oppressed populations
Suppose, for example, that a sadist wanted to torment a cat. He would not benefit from a system of rules forbidding the torture of cats; after all, he is not a cat, and he wants to be cruel. So, any rules forbidding feline cruelty would not apply to him. Of course, the cat’s owners would be harmed under such a system—because they care about their cat—and so they might object to a system of rules allowing the torture of cats. In such cases, it is hard to know what moral rules would be valid. But suppose the sadist found some stray cats out in the woods. Now the Social Contract Theory cannot condemn him even if he commits acts of the greatest cruelty.
Or consider future generations. They cannot benefit us; we’ll be dead before they are even born. Yet we can profit at their expense. Why shouldn’t we run up the national debt? Why shouldn’t we pollute the lakes and coat the skies with carbon dioxide? Why shouldn’t we bury toxic waste in containers that will fall apart in a hundred years? It would not be against our interests to allow such actions; it would only harm our descendants. So, we may do so. Or consider oppressed populations. When the Europeans colonized new lands, why weren’t they morally allowed to enslave the native inhabitants? After all, the native inhabitants did not have the weapons to put up a good fight. The Europeans could benefit most by creating a society in which the native inhabitants would be their slaves.
This type of objection does not concern some minor aspect of the theory; it goes right to the root of the tree. The Social Contract Theory is grounded in self-interest and reciprocity; thus, it seems unable to adequately recognize the moral duties we have to individuals who cannot benefit us.
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Notes on Sources
The chapter-opening quote is from chapter 18, section 202, of Locke’s Second Treatise. The full sentence reveals a different meaning than the partial passage: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins if the law be transgressed to another’s harm.”
Hobbes on the state of nature: Leviathan, Oakeshott edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), chapter 13 (see p. 82).
Rousseau is quoted from The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1959), pp. 18–19.
Flood and Dresher first formulated the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Richmond Campbell, “Background for the Uninitiated,” Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation, edited by Richmond Campbell and Lanning Sowden (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), p. 3.
On the experience of blacks in 20th-century America, including their treatment in housing, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014.
On Louis Waldman, see Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, edited by Hugo Adam Bedau (New York: Pegasus Books, 1967), pp. 76–78 and 106–107.
David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” reprinted in Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, edited by Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner, 1948), p. 363.

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