Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World
Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World

Author: Ryan Muldoon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-14

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1134793618

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Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. Listen to Robert Talisse interview Ryan Muldoon about Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World on the podcast, New Books in Philosophy: http://tinyurl.com/j9oq324 Also, read Ryan Muldoon’s related Niskanen Center article, "Diversity and Disagreement are the Solution, Not the Problem," published Jan. 10, 2017: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/diversity-disagreement-solution-not-problem/

Evolution of the Social Contract
Evolution of the Social Contract

Author: Brian Skyrms

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1107434289

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This new edition further develops the application of evolutionary game theory to an analysis of the origins of social contracts.

The Dynamic Social Contract: An American Case Study
The Dynamic Social Contract: An American Case Study

Author: Andre Smith

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 164889657X

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This book continues an exploration begun by Charles Mills and Carole Pateman with their examinations of the nuisances of the Western social contract. The work examines the social contract within the variable of space or proximity and incorporates concepts first proposed by Benedict Anderson, that of concepts of shared communal belonging or imagined. The social contract is explored as a dynamic sociopolitical instrument that is influenced by the context of human interactions, specifically, space. Space or proximity exists as a variable, either increasing interactions and challenging sociopolitical norms, or decreasing interactions and reinforcing sociopolitical norms. We can trace proximity within a sociopolitical model, with connections becoming more and more abstract as proximity increases and group membership becomes more abstract — global, global region, nation, religion, ethnicity, national region, city, town/village, and kin. We accept that kinship or hereditary connections are the most atomistic. And within this tree of proximity, as proximity increases the ties of group membership become more tenuous, and the incentive of collective action decreases production is the binding glue of the world economic system, and the framework of the study, but it is within the bounds of the productive system that the challenge of proximity and membership collide. The collision occurs as the proximity of production increases, and the reaction is a dynamic response within the social contract, witnessed as a retraction.

Towards a Natural Social Contract
Towards a Natural Social Contract

Author: Patrick Huntjens

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 3030671305

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This open access book is a 2022 Nautilus Gold Medal winner in the category "World Cultures' Transformational Growth & Development". It states that the societal fault lines of our times are deeply intertwined and that they confront us with challenges affecting the security, fairness and sustainability of our societies. The author, Prof. Dr. Patrick Huntjens, argues that overcoming these existential challenges will require a fundamental shift from our current anthropocentric and economic growth-oriented approach to a more ecocentric and regenerative approach. He advocates for a Natural Social Contract that emphasizes long-term sustainability and the general welfare of both humankind and planet Earth. Achieving this crucial balance calls for an end to unlimited economic growth, overconsumption and over-individualisation for the benefit of ourselves, our planet, and future generations. To this end, sustainability, health, and justice in all social-ecological systems will require systemic innovation and prioritizing a collective effort. The Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI) framework presented in this book serves that cause. It helps to diagnose and advance innovation and spur change across sectors, disciplines, and at different levels of governance. Altogether, TSEI identifies intervention points and formulates jointly developed and shared solutions to inform policymakers, administrators, concerned citizens, and professionals dedicated towards a more sustainable, healthy and just society. A wide readership of students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in social innovation, transition studies, development studies, social policy, social justice, climate change, environmental studies, political science and economics will find this cutting-edge book particularly useful. “As a sustainability transition researcher, I am truly excited about this book. Two unique aspects of the book are that it considers bigger transformation issues (such as societies’ relationship with nature, purpose and justice) than those studied in transition studies and offers analytical frameworks and methods for taking up the challenge of achieving change on the ground.” - Prof. Dr. René Kemp, United Nations University and Maastricht Sustainability Institute

Social Contract, Free Ride
Social Contract, Free Ride

Author: Anthony De Jasay

Publisher: Collected Papers of Anthony de

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780865977013

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This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic 'free riding' it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group co-operation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, co-operating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair are a principal cause of the poor functioning of organised society.

A Theory of Justice
A Theory of Justice

Author: John RAWLS

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 0674042603

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Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

Consilience
Consilience

Author: E. O. Wilson

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2014-11-26

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0804154066

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." —The Wall Street Journal One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.

A Sleeping Giant?
A Sleeping Giant?

Author: Oluwaseun Tella

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 3030733750

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This edited volume explores Nigeria’s domestic and international politics and its implications for the country’s national development and international status. Coinciding with the twenty year anniversary of Nigeria’s return to democratic rule, this volume considers the state of democracy in Nigeria and examines its successes and challenges with a view towards offering possible solutions for the country’s future development. The first half of the volume addresses domestic politics, focusing on current issues such as the 2019 elections, Nigerian federalism, media, state-civil society relations, and Boko Haram terrorism. The second half looks at Nigeria’s relations with its African neighbors, discussing the relationships between Nigeria and South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, and Cameroon, among others. Engaging the full spectrum of the politics of a rising African power, this volume will be of interest to students and researchers of comparative politics, international relations, foreign policy, African studies, regional politics, peace, security, conflict, and development studies, as well as African policymakers.

The Pleistocene Social Contract
The Pleistocene Social Contract

Author: Kim Sterelny

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0197531385

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"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--

The Social Contract in Africa
The Social Contract in Africa

Author: Osha, Sanya

Publisher: Africa Institute of South Africa

Published: 2014-06-19

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0798304448

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This book employs the event of the Arab Spring revolution of 2011 to reflect on the event itself and beyond. Some of the chapters address the colonial encounter and its lingering reverberations on the African sociopolitical landscape. Others address the aftermath of large scale societal violence and trauma that pervade the African context. The contributions indicate the range of challenges confronting African societies in the postmodern era. They also illustrate the sheer resilience and inventiveness of those societies in the face of apparently overwhelming odds. What is the nature of political power in contemporary Africa as constituted from below instead of being a state driven phenomenon? What constitutes sovereignty without recourse to the usual academic responses and discourses? These two questions loom behind most of the deliberations contained in this book with contributions from an impressive field of international scholars.