Renegotiating the social contract: Hobbes to Rawls
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2003-12
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls set out different versions of the social contract theory. In this dissertation, these different versions are treated as iterative accounts within an on-going meta-conversation. To facilitate this conversation, a generic social contract is developed that sets out a uniform way to look at the different versions of the social contract. The generic social contract highlights specific features of the contract process for comparison by creating a set of questions that are posed to each theorist. This conversation reveals a series of progressive choices regarding the values and standards incorporated into the moral and political institutions designed to bring about social order. Taken as a whole, the different versions are subsumed under a social contract paradigm that reinterprets the social contract as a diagnostic tool that goes back and forth between assessing problematic moral and political situations and the societal institutions that manage them. The social contract paradigm offers a technique of continuous inquiry that permits renegotiation of the social contract in light of progressive refinement of the demands placed upon moral and political institutions.
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v, 241 pages
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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Philosophy; no. 4399
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