A Contractarian Path to a Liberal Society

Martin Hames is an economist and writer, author of Winston First and The Crisis in New Zealand Schools.

By Martin Hames

When ideas such as kings ruling by divine right, or the existing social structure being justified because "it had always been there", began wearing more than a little thin among thinking people, one major strand of thinking that emerged was the notion that government was best conceived as a social contract between individuals.

This contract is sometimes seen as explicit but is typically seen as implicit. Rational, self-interested individuals give up any benefits they would gain under a state of nature in exchange for the supposed greater benefits flowing from government.

American political philosopher John Rawls gave this approach a major boost with his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Rawls was opposed to various versions of utilitarianism, under which government involved maximising welfare or satisfaction somehow conceived. For Rawls, utilitarianism did not take seriously the distinction between individuals.

The rules of justice, according to Rawls, were the rules that would be chosen by rational, self-interested individuals in his so-called original position. In the original position, individuals are subject to a "veil of ignorance". They know neither their place in society nor their personal characteristics. They know only the general facts about society.

Thus they might end up being tall or short, bright or stupid, beautiful or ugly, man or women, Maori or Pakeha, master or servant, Christian or atheist, Jew or Gentile, straight or gay, captain of industry or manual worker on the minimum wage. But people in the original position know none of these specifics: they know only the general facts about society.

Starting from this position, it is fairly easy to derive most of the standard classical liberties. After all, if we think we have some chance of becoming a bible-bashing fundamentalist Christian, or alternatively a militant atheist, we would not be too keen on a world in which either one or the other had the chance to impose his view on the rest of us.

The atheist would certainly not want an outcome in which a Christian fundamentalist ruled the roost and made church attendance on Sunday compulsory. The Christian fundamentalist, similarly, would be far from keen on a world in which such attendance was forbidden. Purely out of self-interest, each would converge on the liberal solution of religious toleration.

By similar reasoning, liberal solutions can emerge from a Rawlsian original position in a wide range of areas, from freedom of speech to a basic equality between the sexes, from freedom of movement to the iniquity of social systems such as feudalism or slavery.

Rawls received much greater criticism over another main principle of justice that he claimed would emerge from his original position. This was the idea that inequalities in material goods could only be justified to the extent that they made the least well-off people better off as a result of the inequalities.

That principle struck many commentators as exhibiting an extreme degree of risk aversion on the part of people in the original position. As an alternative, some maximisation of average welfare, subject to a safety net, would seem to provide a better means of protecting the most vulnerable while still making provision for the more general welfare.

Evidently there are many paths to a liberal society. To a utilitarian like John Stuart Mill, liberty possessed enormous utility. A member of the "social contract" tradition might reach broadly similar policy conclusions to Mill, though with a different philosophical framework.