Social Contract Theory by John Rawls - Essay Example

Social contract theory gives a suggestion of a simple first step in assessing the ethical values that human beings can use to build a just society (Freeman 44). In this case, it elaborates that, people should assume that they do not know their race, age, wealth, intelligence, and gender among other things. This paper will seek to explain, evaluate, and describe the important features of the social contract theory and determine its state of argument as well as its plausibility. Most importantly, one of the social contract theory features proposes two ethical principles.

The first one puts across that, everybody has a title to a certain equal basic rights, which comprise of personal security, freedom of association, and liberty. The second one state that, even though there may be economic and social inequalities between people, people must base these inequalities on what a person does, not whom he or she is, and there must be an equal opportunity for achievement for everyone. Additionally, social contract theory gives an approach based on ethics (51). This approach envisages itself with moral consequences of a person’s actions as opposed to morality of the actions themselves.

For a person who cares about the consequences of his or her actions, lying itself is unethical. However, one must use the consequences of lying to evaluate their ethical implications of lying. The argument As described, the two main features of social contract theory include the state of nature describing nature’s original position and the reasons made by occupants supporting their decisions regarding moral principles. In social contract theory, disagreements take place on both fronts of contractors.

With that respect, one can develop many descriptions of the original position of nature. Given that, Rawls thought why not allow such people some jealousy and make the original position of nature altruistic. In his claims, Rawls set out that people in the original position fail to take risks (57). Nevertheless, they may trust that some risk taking is reasonable. In their original position, people do not take risks because they are greedy and fearful. Social contract theory rests on a sound argument because of the fact that, when people are in self-sufficient state of nature, they become relatively peaceful.

Their problem arises when they cannot characterize which state of nature gives them the best vantage point and/or the best sense of a consent that is philosophically pure. In addition, the second feature of the social contract theory revolves around people’s acceptable principles, which happens to be a genuine problem. Probably, it is possible to define people in the original position as if they would accept a particular set of principles over the others. Implicitly, these people must contain principles in order for this to be the case.

Nonetheless, this begs for the question that people want to discover the proper principles of justice. They want to discover what principles can free, equal, and rationale people can accept. At this point, it is agreeable that, this theory rests on a sound argument due to the setting that, a social contract theory agreement is not actually an agreement. It is however, a philosophically purified agreement that is usually among the hypothetical people (84). It uses the original posi