Ethics For Dummies by Christopher Panza

Author:Christopher Panza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Signing on the Dotted Line: Ethics as Contract

In This Chapter

Examining the connection between ethics and contracts

Checking out Rawls’s original position

Surveying the challenges to contract theory

If you’ve ever haggled over the price of an item before, you know what it’s like to negotiate an agreement. No “right” price existed for the item you bought. Rather, your haggling with the seller created the right price somehow. You both agreed that the price of the item was worth the shopkeeper parting with it and you parting with a certain amount of your money.

The same logic may work for a lot more than just haggling over prices. Maybe simple agreements between people also can be the basis for ethics as a whole. This chapter looks at a type of ethical theory called contract theory, which attempts to base ethics on actual or hypothetical agreements between human beings. We examine the contract-based thinking of Thomas Hobbes, who was the originator of modern social contract theory. You can see how he explains the usefulness of contracts using the metaphor of the “state of nature” and how ethics emerges from humanity’s attempt to escape from it. We also touch on John Rawls’s arguments that society can come to agree about the concept of justice and just social institutions using a thought experiment he calls the original position.

Creating Ethics with Contracts

What if the right thing to do didn’t depend on consequences, principles, or virtues but instead on agreements between people? If Ed agrees not to hit Brad and Brad agrees not to hit Ed, then hitting each other would be wrong. If Ed and Brad don’t agree to this arrangement and decide to get into a boxing match instead, no one has done anything wrong.

In other words, ethics literally doesn’t exist until people enter into certain agreements about what one person can do to another person. These agreements essentially are contracts between two people. This way of thinking about ethics is called contractarianism or contractualism. Both of these words are pretty ugly, so for our discussion, we simply call this type of ethics contract theory.

The word “contract” can confuse people, because what immediately enters people’s minds is signing a piece of paper on a dotted line. But written contracts aren’t the only contracts out there. You can use verbal contracts, contracts you seal with a handshake, and so on. Contract theorists take implicit contracts more as models than written contracts. And really, at their essence, contracts are just agreements between people to act in certain ways.

Of course, people could make some pretty screwy contracts with one another. As a result, most contract theorists don’t want to model ethics on the contracts people do make, because those contracts may be exploitative. Rather, they focus on the contracts people would make if they were thinking rationally. Ethics thus depends on the best contracts people could possibly make with one another.

This way of thinking brings ethics down to earth in a way that lots of ethical theories don’t.

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