Unreasonable Foundations: David Gauthier on Property Rights, Rationality and the Social Contract
Author(s)
Milde, Michael
Abstract
An impressive array of political philosophers have championed the idea that a social contract, understood as a rational agreement among rational persons, can supply the normative blueprint for an ideally well-ordered society. One of the main attractions of the appeal to rationality has been that it promises to transcend all merely parochial interests and commitments, thereby allowing the terms of the resulting agreement to serve as a (virtually) universal social prescription. To succeed on this front, however, the contractarian program must first identify an initial, precontractual situation that all appropriately rational persons will, or should, acknowledge as the legitimate basis from which to choose or construct the form of their political union. The author’s primary aim in this paper is to show the untenability of the version of this approach that holds that the nature and scope of property rights can be ascertained independently of and prior to social interaction and agreement. Against this view, which has been the cornerstone of many prominent contractarian programs, he argues that while property rights are indeed methodologically desirable for delineating the features of the initial position and the parties in it, conceptions of property rights derived solely from conceptions of rationality and rational agency fail to be sufficiently determinate for the intended purpose. His suggestion is that certain parochial, contextual elements cannot be excluded from the characterization of the initial position if the resulting social contract is to be politically effective and meaningful.
