got a paper on social contract theory ... got to explain hobbes, rawles and harman's theories and im very lost .. any help would be appreciated

i just dont understand this shit

12/1/2005 9:01:06 AM

Well i would look around on the internet for something to copy then.

12/1/2005 9:45:54 AM

yeah, i'd google each person and try to find an overview on all their personal beliefs. Then you can sorta mesh them together into a paper.

12/1/2005 12:00:35 PM

yea ive been doin that all night, just having difficulty understanding

12/1/2005 12:25:43 PM

Wikipedia is usually a pretty good starting point for overviews of philosophers. Its largely wrong, but it provides enough framework that you can start making corrections to your understandings from original sources, scholarly commentary, & your professors own input of course.

The basic idea is that humans started disorganized and in a state of nature. So natural laws apply and things are alot more crazy and dangerous than what we have today. For preservation, recognition of near equality, or whatever other reason humans started banding together. Give up some rights to things you could do in the natural law state, and have a more organized man made law state. By entering a social contract you now have more moral responsiblites and obligations. And then you watch the evoluation of these nature states (usually there are examples of monarchies and aristocracies and democracies ect thrown in). Its sort of a history of politics on a grand scale, and describing it with different theories.

The philosophers differ in their theories though. For example The state of nature depending on which philosopher you ask has different kinds of natural laws... for some its not all that bad and some of gods laws apply, for others like hobbs its "brutish and short." They also have different theories on why people enter social contracts, and on how and why the evolution (or devolution) of different policatal systems happened.

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Are you just doing a descriptive paper, or a comparison, or are you supposed to formulate your own theory on the transition from state of nature to man made state via a social contract... or is there some other objective with the paper?

Your paper topic sounds alot like politcal philosophy rather than an ethics paper (although from the moral obligations that arise from entering a contract I might see how its called an ethics paper). What class is this for and who is the prof?

12/1/2005 1:04:35 PM

Quote :

"Explain each of the three versions of social contract theory that we have considered— Hobbes’ version, Rawls’ version, and Harman’s version. Make sure to point out what the theories have in common as well as how they differ. Which version of social contract theory do you believe is the strongest? Justify your answer to this question by both describing some problem (or problems) with the other two versions of social contract theory and explaining why your preferred version does not suffer from the same problem or problems."

phi 375

[Edited on December 1, 2005 at 7:41 PM. Reason : asdf]

12/1/2005 7:41:26 PM

so which one did you go for as strongest?

12/4/2005 10:15:30 PM