Posted on 02/20/2006 6:24:40 AM PST by Shalom Israel
Shalom Israel wrote: “First, if such a contract of adhesion existed, there must exist an adhesing party. You (or someone in this thread) denied that the government is the "other party" to the "social contract," which leaves no adhesing party at all.”
(I believe I’m the one who denied the government is the “other party.”)
But that doesn’t leave “no adhesing party at all.” The other adhesing party or parties would be other citizens.
Shalom Israel wrote: “…the government has not ever asserted its rights per the contract: namely, it has never deported anyone for breach of the social contract. The government has never attempted to enforce the terms, "abide by the contract, or else leave the country."”
You can opt out of the contract by leaving the country per tpaine. I say you can opt out by leaving the country or become an outlaw. The government (more correctly the citizens using the government as a tool) regularly (but not always) attempts to enforce the terms of the contract. That’s why we have prisons in which we put some outlaws.
Shalom Israel wrote: “Third, constitutional rights are applied to minors as well as adults. Therefore, the privileges of alleged the "social contract" accrue to minors; but this is only possible if the obligations of the contract also accrue to minors. Therefore, it is not possible that the contract comes into force at age 18.”
I didn’t quite follow that. In any case, some of the privileges of the social contract accrue to minors because we can allow that if we choose and we have so chosen. We have also chosen not to require all the obligations of the contract from minors till they have reached a stage of maturity and understanding at which we can reasonably expect them to fulfill those obligations, which we may have arbitrarily declared to be at the age of 18. To do otherwise would not be just. And we’d have to put too many of them in prison.
tpaine wrote: Our Constiututions contract doesn't need signing.
Shalom Israel wrote: Then it isn't a contract. Thanks for admitting it
kriskrinkle writes: If our Constitutions contract doesn't need signing and therefore is not a contract for that reason, then neither an implied contract or an adhesive contract are contracts because they don't need signing.
I meant to ping you on this.
I meant to ping you on posts 360 and 362 and I screwed up my post 363.
It's too late and I'm getting tired and some of this is hard to wade through.
I beg your pardon.
"Kris, what we have here is 'bold' evidence of a very naive mind."
I observe that your style can be more direct than mine. (That's an observation not a criticism.) You sometimes (not always) post what I might think.
Primarily as an exercise in self control I try not to post such thoughts even though I sometimes fall to the temptaion--and brother, I am certainly tempted sometimes.
In any case, I absolutely see where you are coming from.
No problem on the pings.. Good to have your comments. -- Thanks & regards.
Think it through more carefully. At the beginning, you aren't on his land. If he "bans your life" on his land, it doesn't matter; you aren't on his land. Now for such a ban to matter, you must be on his land. The key question is: how did you get there? If you got there without permission, then shooting you is what we call "self defense". If you got there with permission, then no he can't shoot you: he gave you his permission, and in doing so he waived his right to shoot you as a trespasser.
If you want to negate what I said, you have to start with what I said
"Banning your life on his property" is by itself a meaningless statement, because how you got onto his property is critical. Before he can shoot you on his land, you must be on it. To be on it, he must have allowed you on it. If he allowed you on it, then by doing so he has made a contract not to shoot you (unless you attack him).
Doesn't work: you're saying that I entered into a contract, even though I didn't, with other citizens, who also didn't enter into any contract. To enter a contract, you must do something that creates the contract.
You can opt out of the contract by leaving the country per tpaine.
You don't seem to have read my answers to tpaine. You're now claiming that someone else created a contract, declared me a party to it, and now leaves me no choice but to consider myself bound by it or to leave. You didn't explain where that someone, whoever they're supposed to be, got the right to give me such an ultimatum. If you try to explain it now, you'll catch yourself reasoning in a circle: apparently they got the authority from that same "social contract"... the one I'm challenging their authority to create in the first place.
I didn’t quite follow that.
I was answering tpaine's assertion that I came under the contract when I turned 18. That can't be true, because I had rights, under that same alleged contract, before I was 18. So I must already have been under it. When did I first have those rights? At birth. So the only conclusion is that I entered into a contractual relationship the minute I was born. Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is impossible.
I do sign implied contracts. I do it by, for example, granting you permission to enter my land. Contracts of adhesion are invalid, and even US law (almost) agrees--for now. A contract of adhesion is a kind of trap: when I open the package, it grabs my ankle and won't let go. The intent behind them is to create the illusion of consent, as if I said to you, "By using the toilet anytime in March, you consent that I'm your rightful overlord." Use the toilet--I dare you! It only proves that you consent...
"Social" contracts are even less valid: someone imposes them on me even though I didn't open any package. They get the authority to do that from the "social contract". Which, of course, is binding, because I'm under this social contract. I came to be under it because someone imposed it on me. And he had the authority to impose it, because the social contract gives him that authority...
OK, this definition explicitly says a social contract is a contract. A contract, in turn, is "An agreement formed by an exchange of promises in which the promise of one party is consideration supporting the promise of the other party." This is contradictory, because the citizen does not in fact exchange any promises.
The definition is also faulty on the grounds that there's no such thing as a "hypothetical" agreement. How do two people "hypothetically" agree?
agreement among all the people in a society to give up part of their freedom to a government in exchange for protection of natural rights.
This again says that a "social contract" is an agreement. Yet it binds "all the people," even though they never actually agree to it--as tpaine said, my parents supposedly agreed for me. But no, they didn't either! My grandparents agreed for my parents and for me... So once again a social contract is an agreement that I become a party to without actually agreeing to anything.
A theory on how government and societies began. Contractarians hold that societies were formed by the consent of the populations of various areas who decided, for whatever reasons (these vary from philosopher to philosopher) that it would be to their mutual advantage to band together and cooperate.
I answered this definition already: no such decision process explains the origin of society. Rather, tribal social structure is common to all apes, and a family-based social order is common to all placental mammals. Government (e.g., by the alpha male--whether his name is "Bongo" or "Nebuchadnezzer") and society (i.e., the tribe) predated even rational thought itself, and was therefore certainly not the product of such a contractual process.
an implicit agreement among people that results in the organization of society; individual surrenders liberty in return for protection
An implicit agreement is created when I do something indicative of my consent. For example, issuing an invitation. This implicit agreement was apparently agreed to by my act of being born--but a newborn can't consent to anything. The agreement is therefore not implicit at all, but externally imposed.
All members within a society are assumed to agree to the terms of the social contract by their choice to stay within the society.
Already addressed more than once: nobody has the authority to tell me that I must accept a contract against my will or else leave the country. Some people claim they have the authority, but they claim that they got it from the social contract which I claim they don't have the authority to impose on me. They claim they can impose it on me, of course, by virtue of the social contract...
For Hobbes, the contract was an agreement between society and its government.
Thank you; you stand corrected.
For Rousseau, it was an agreement between individuals to create a society and a government.
Once again, a social contract is supposedly an agreement, but I'm bound by it whether or not I agree. If I disagree, the same people trying to force this contract upon me insist that I vacate my property and leave the country. Their authority to do so comes from the "social contract," which I never agreed to in the first place...
Like John Locke, Rousseau believed that a government should come from the consent of the governed. ...
This phrase, "the consent of the governed", is also self-contradictory: it implies that all subjects of government consent to that government. In reality, no such consent is even requested; anyone who declares himself non-consenting, and acts contrary to the orders of government, will be imprisoned. This, like an "agreement among all the people", is a fiction, because the people do not in fact all agree.
Social contract theory (or contractarianism) is a concept used in philosophy, political science and sociology to denote an implicit agreement within a state regarding the rights and responsibilities of the state and its citizens, or more generally a similar concord between a group and its members, or between individuals. All members within a society are assumed to agree to the terms of the social contract by their choice to stay within the society without violating the contract
Each of these points has been answered earlier in this post.
I told you you were going to have other things to do.
Yawn. Did you know when you posted them, that you were regurgitating multiple versions of the two definitions I'd already debunked? Or did you honestly think these were different in some way?
It does not, precisely because the mutual understanding does not carry with it any obligation. I can avoid any and all of the many implied contracts embodied in our culture. I don't have to let you ring my doorbell: I can put a sign up that says, "No visitors: violators will be shot." I can invite you to lunch by saying, "Yo, Kris, come on over for lunch--but if you tick me off, I promise I'll shoot you. Matter of fact, sign this, in case the police want some proof..."
By contrast, your "social contract" imposes obligations I can't get out of. I can't notify the IRS that I'm not paying their protection money anymore. If a police officer bashes in my door, I can't shoot him in self defense.
I see most of your PS as containing arguments in favor of the concept of the social contract, but it does not please me to address that right now.
Your little flourish on the end is kinda cute. However, "implied contracts" differ critically from "social contracts": namely, I can always refuse to enter into an implied contract by so stipulating. A "social contract" imposes terms on me that I can't escape by any means, even though I didn't agree to it.
What makes the two appear superficially similar is that people go around making presumptions: for example, the obnoxious so-and-sos will go ringing my doorbell unless I take positive steps to prevent it. But that's not because I'm trapped in a social contract which forces me to tolerate doorbell-ringing; I can in fact put a stop to it in several different ways. Rather, just as I said, it's a matter of communication. Cultural norms tell Americans that they should assume they can ring my doorbell; in Gondwanaland, cultural norms tell people that they should stand back six camel-lengths and whistle Dixie instead.
The resolution of the conundrum is to realize that these cultural norms are part of the language. They don't obligate me. It's simply that many types of agreements are so standard, that people can enter into them with few or no words. Simply crooking my finger constitutes an invitation to come closer, and a promise that when you get real, real close, I won't punch you in the eye.
But language does carry a cost: when it allows you to compress certain messages into a word, a wink or a nod, it leaves you no choice but to speak a lengthy sentence in order to communicate a different message.
Thus, in American, I can invite people to come seek my attention merely by having a doorbell and taking no other action. If I want to tell them to buzz off, which is an unusual message in American, I must use more extensive means of communication.
Deep in the backwoods of Yakutsk the situation is exactly reversed: a Yakut seeking someone's attention must stand outside the person's property and yodel. IF the property owner wants you to stand back and yodel, he need take no special action. If he wants you to march right up to his yurt and say howdy, he needs to take more complicated measures to communicate that to you.
It's important to appreciate this fully. In Japanese culture, the situation was actually different. If you insulted your host, he was rather likely to kill you. If a foreigner visited a Japanese home in those days, he needed to stipulate that he wished not to be killed, even if he should inadvertantly offer a deadly insult. Japanese culture standardized the implicit contract that you were wililng to be beheaded for violation of various mores--but you could, by agreement, refuse to enter into that implicit contract. American culture standardizes the opposite assumption.
Note: of course Japanese culture was far from libertarian. In general, persons of lower social class could not opt out of a beheading by someone of higher social class. They had social contracts too, you see.
It would depend on the circumstances. If the demographics are right, having 10-15% of a population die of old age in a 10-15 year period wouldn't be unusual. What do you think government would do about this, and why don't you answer the original question?
More like it creates the legal framework whereby you can defend your natural-law rights without having to go to "war," in the Lockean sense, each and every time your rights are trespassed. Suggesting anything man-made "creates" rights is simply dangerous in any context. What man creates, man can take away. What God creates, no man can take away.
An interesting topic . . .
I've read that one of the major reasons men like Samuel Adams etc. were so opposed to royal troops occupying Boston following the Stamp Act Crisis was that royal troops were given police duties there. Boston had no police force or constabulary of note, so regular lobster-backs were given the duty of enforcing the law. Perhaps they feared that a continental standing army would perform similar duties . . .?
They were trying to get Adams (Samuel) and Hancock, too, don't forget, who were hiding out in Lexington, and only avoided capture when they fled to a field with Gerry. So not only was it a "gun grab," but a "snatch & grab" as well.
Badly defeated? Had the Salem companies (under Pickering?) not dawdled in coming down from Essex county, and taken positions where they should have taken them, at Charleston Neck, arguably not a single British regular would've made it back to Boston alive. There wouldn't have been a single Englishman in uniform left to climb Breed's Hill that June, or leave Boston permanently shortly thereafter . . .
In the actual "stand up and point guns at each other from 10 feet" part of the battle, yes: badly defeated.
What you're describing is how the British were badly mauled by snipers on the way back home. But everybody knew that the Colonials couldn't win a revolution by sniping: they'd have to take on the British in real battles. That's where the likes of von Steuben were invaluable to us.
Excellent.
The other side of it is that to maintain a fixed standard of order, a government can be "limited" only to the extent that people are willing and able to constrain their own actions. John Adams's comment on the Constitution being intended for a "moral and religious people" reflects this realization.
Yes and no---"run and gun" tactics more than pure sniping. But this was no mere aftermath; it constituted, I'd say, the majority of the battle. The actual set-piece line battle in Lexington was over in a flash, and in Concord, the British retreated from it---at least on the bridge. The set piece portion of the battles was over long before many of the militias from outside Middlesex county could get there.
But everybody knew that the Colonials couldn't win a revolution by sniping: they'd have to take on the British in real battles. That's where the likes of von Steuben were invaluable to us.
I agree completely. To be fair, though, at Lexington and Concord, and probably at Bunker Hill as well, no one on our side was thinking about winning a revolution. Instead, we were defending our rights as "Englishmen." Hell, entire units of Connecticut militia simply cut out of the Charlestown line when their enlistments were up.
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