According to the story of the prisoner`s dilemma, two people were questioned separately about a crime they are suspected of having committed. The police have strong evidence of a less serious crime they committed, but they need a confession to sentence her to more serious charges. Each inmate is informed that if she cooperates with the police by informing the other inmate, she will be rewarded with a relatively light prison sentence of one year, while her cohort will go to prison for ten years. If they are both silent, then there will be no such rewards, and they can each face moderate penalties of two years. And if the two cooperate with the police by informing each other, the police will have enough to send them to prison for five years. The dilemma then is this: in order to best serve her own interests, each prisoner argues that no matter what the other does, she should cooperate better with the police by confessing. All the reasons: ”If she confesses, then I should confess and be sentenced to five years instead of ten years. And if she doesn`t confess, then I should confess and be sentenced to one year instead of two. So no matter what she does, I should admit it. The problem is that if all the reasons are like this, everyone confesses, and everyone goes to jail for five years. However, if they had all remained silent and cooperated with each other and not with the police, they would have spent only two years in prison.

So let us assume that we have reached a social contract. Depending on the initial problem of justification, it leads to an R result (principles, rules, etc.). who have normative property N – such as justice, morality, authority, obligation, legitimacy, mutual benefit and so on. But suppose that the contract has produced a principle, a rule, etc. with the relevant normative property, what exactly does the fact that this principle or rule was generated by the contractual device show? Epicurus seemed to have had a strong sense of the social contract in the fourth century BC. J.-C., with justice and law rooted in mutual agreement and benefit, as these lines show, among other things, from its main teachings (see also Epicurean Ethics): the social contract models our reasons for supporting and adhering to a set of social rules or institutions. How the theory does this depends on the assumptions made and the specification of the parameters. The theory of the social contract has merits in the context of responsible government. Correct application can bring significant benefits to the population, provided that government officials responsibly meet the established requirements of the population. This agreement would require a level of control over the government that would require the participation of the population in government decision-making. For example, under the current government, most decisions are made by Cabinet (i.e., by high-ranking elected ministers and prime ministers).

This agreement excludes external representation and presence. Social contract theories differ fundamentally depending on whether the parties argue differently or equally. As we saw in Rawls` contract (§2.3), everyone argues in the same way: the collective electoral problem is reduced to the choice of a person. One person`s decision is a proxy for everyone else. In statutes of this type, the description of the parties (their motivation, the conditions under which they vote) does all the work: once we have completely specified the reasoning of a party, the contract has been identified. If we think in terms of decision theory, the doxastic specification indexes the initial state of affairs and the results of the contractual model, while the specification of the evaluation elements gives each representative party a ranking of the results to be obtained from the choice of a particular set of rules. Once these elements are specified, we have a model of the contracting parties. We still need to model how they actually come to an agreement to understand the ultimate reasons why we need to find the contract model normatively compelling. According to Locke, the state of nature is not a state of individuals, as is the case with Hobbes. Rather, it is populated by mothers and fathers with their children or families – what he calls ”conjugal society” (para.

78). These societies are based on voluntary agreements to care for children together, and they are moral, but not political. Political society is born when men representing their families come together in the state of nature and agree that everyone will give up executive power to punish those who transgress natural law and surrender that power to public power to a government. After doing so, they are subject to the will of the majority. In other words, by concluding a pact to leave the state of nature and shape society, they make ”a political organ under one government” (para. 97) and submit to the will of that body. One adheres to such a body, either from the beginning or after it has already been established by others, only by express consent. After creating a political society and a government by their consent, people receive three things that they lacked in the state of nature: laws, judges to pass laws, and the executive power needed to enforce those laws. Every human being therefore hands over the power to protect himself and punish violators of the natural law to the government he created by the Pact. In Pateman`s words, the social contract is first and foremost a ”sexual contract” that keeps women in a subordinate role. The structural subordination of women, which supports the classical theory of the social contract, is inherently unjust.

The other view is that even after specifying the parties (including their rationality, values, and information), they continue to disagree in their ranking of possible social contracts. From this point of view, the treaty has a certain result only if there is a way to respond to the different classifications of each individual in order to reach an agreement (D`Agostino 2003). Four basic agreement mechanisms can be distinguished. In multi-level contract theories such as that of Buchanan (2000 [1975] and Michael Moehler (forthcoming), each stage has its own unique purpose. In Buchanan`s theory, the purpose of the constitutional scene is a system of constraints that allows individuals to coexist peacefully, what Buchanan calls the ”protective state” (2000 [1975]). According to him, the state of nature is characterized by both theft and defense. The ability to engage in productive enterprises is diminished due to the need to defend the fruits of these enterprises against those who would rely on predators rather than production. We all have reasons to unite, Buchanan said, to increase everyone`s overall ability to produce by limiting the need for defense, limiting the ability to engage in raids.

Once the resolution of the predator-production conflict is resolved by the Constitutional Treaty, members of society also realize that if everyone contributed to the production of various public goods, the productive possibility of society would also be increased. This second phase, post-constitutional, includes what Buchanan calls the ”productive state.” Each step is logically different, although there are causal relationships between the changes made in one phase and the effectiveness and stability of the solution at a later stage. .