Why do you think this social contract persists to this day, or if it ever did? Locke and Rousseau were theorisers. Do you really think governments, least of all the UK government, is founded on the ideas of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness? Even those which claim to be in some way like the US seem to be doing nothing toward these principles. So I think GP's point stands. What relevance does this social contract have when we see it is violated all the time?

>act to secure the natural rights of society.

This is obviously not the case, as evidenced by the fact that governments act against securing rights we previously held, for example censorship and invasion of privacy.

>See natural right #2 - the right to liberty

Natural rights are a funny thing - everyone claims they exist yet I see no evidence that they do (or even should), they change depending on who you ask, and various countries have their own ideas of what they mean. What you call "legitimate" is wholly based on your own opinion of it. Proudhon (whom you must be familiar with) particularly took issue with the right of property in the French republican constitution of his day. He noted that it is unlike the rights of equality and justice, too.

I'm all for theorising and implementing policy based on our philosophical investigation, but it's not clear to me that the investigation is valid, and that it has been implemented to a sufficient degree. To say our governments are based on the ideas of freedom put forth by Locke is as farcical as saying the Soviet Union was based on the ideas put forward on Socialism by Marx in his criticism of political economy.

> What relevance does this social contract have when we see it is violated all the time?

You cannot understand the notion of natural rights without understanding why they are fundamentally theologically based rights.

That doesn't necessarily mean religious theology - which is where it was rooted from ("that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" etc.). In an atheistic context, these rights can also be made unalienable by a firm societal devotion to humanism, or even just belief in the liberating power of free markets.

> What you call "legitimate" is wholly based on your own opinion of it.

Not by my opinion, but by my beliefs, and by the common beliefs of the rest of the society of which I am a part. Opinion and faith are different concepts. To have an opinion is to make a subjective judgement; to have faith is to optimistically take a risk on a productive course of action in the absence of evidence or guarantee.

What relevance does the social contract have? Society's collective faith defines our common ethics. The social contract does not only bind our government in its treatment of us; it binds us in how we treat each other, because our culture is not narrowly limited to our political beliefs but rather defines how we treat each other. Yes, it is rather laissez-faire, but it still firmly binds us to treat each other with mutual respect for our lives, our freedom, and the fruits of our labor. To reject the social contract is to be an anarchist.

> "Today I say: As long as the gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind... ... after these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor. ... We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. ... General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! ... As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom."

President Ronald Reagan - June 12, 1987

>these rights can also be made unalienable by a firm societal devotion to humanism

This seems fair enough, I can understand this, but only from the point of view that if you want rights at all then you need to start somewhere, and there is no position I can see that does not involve some kind of hand wavy "that's just the way that it is", not that I am faulting you on that, but it's how I see the idea, anyway.

>the liberating power of free markets.

Heh, I needed a good laugh today :)

"We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger." -- Peter Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread.

>The social contract does not only bind our government in its treatment of us; it binds us in how we treat each other, because our culture is not narrowly limited to our political beliefs but rather defines how we treat each other.

I'd rather have the social contract detached from government; if it must be attached then I view it as illegitimate, as illegitimate as I view the state which does not seek consent of the governed. It is material conditions that give rise to new concepts of rights, morality, justice and freedom. As Marx said, the Communist views the current bourgeois institutions of rights and morality as a facade, and behind those lurk even more bourgeois prejudices.

>To reject the social contract is to be an anarchist.

I would say, it is to be a certain kind of anarchist. The contracts we have today carry the threat of force to legitimise them; however there are contracts between friends which do not. This kind of contract is in my opinion possible at a larger scale in a stateless anarchist (non-proprietarian) society.

>Yes, it is rather laissez-faire, but it still firmly binds us to treat each other with mutual respect for our lives, our freedom, and the fruits of our labor.

Kropotkin wrote that this is exactly not the case, lamenting how the worker must surrender one third to the capitalist and middleman and one third to the state in the form of tax. The material conditions that influence the creation of these social contracts will also influence the creation of our interactions between each other.

I am no defender of the Soviet Union, but to me it is entirely possible for the USSR's conception of rights and freedoms to be just as valid as those of the US. The wall was a short sighted and silly idea in my opinion. And yet I feel as though behind Raegan lurked his own prejudices as to what rights should prevail, even if his intentions may be noble and in desire of freedom (which I don't believe so much).

It is interesting to me to see the difference between what is moral, what should be legislated, and indeed whether there is any morality and legislation at all (i.e Stirnerist egoism),

The Right to Liberty, which we will secure for you by taking away as much of it as possible.

Rights aren't natural, they aren't inherent, they are assigned (or granted) by a given constitutional context. In some systems there are rights that do not exist in other systems, even very fundamental ones.

Governments are extending their mandate and they are curtailing/"ungranting" certain other rights (principally, the uncodified "right to privacy"). Insofar as Parliament is sovereign in the UK and is the ultimate source of all rights, this is within their remit and requires no exceptional super-majority or constitutional amendment process.

Whether this is desirable or otherwise is quite another matter.

While that may be true, it's not the philosophical basis of our current system of government. The concept of natural law is, though. And in general, the majority of people seem to believe in rights under that definition (albeit more likely due to religious beliefs than having read Enlightenment philosophers).

Philosophy is codified nowhere. Simply the fact that people can operate under a presumed ”philosophy” while, as you admit, the reality of the matter is quite distinct, would seem to confirm that whatever prevalent philosophy may from time to time exist is irrelevant.

But this stuff actually is codified. It's essentially the basis of our legal system. When it's working "correctly", it's working along these lines.

> Right's aren't natural, they aren't inherent, they are assigned (or granted) by a given constitutional context.

Wrong. A government violating your natural rights is not the same thing as those rights not existing. There is nothing immoral or unethical about a government which does not safeguard non-existent rights, it is the act of violation which violates the social contract and makes the government illegitimate.

I'm sorry, but you are absolutely misinformed. If I am a citizen of a country that does not, for example, recognise the right to vote then there is no higher authority I can go to in an attempt to obtain redress, both because there is no higher authority, and because the vote is not a right in this legal system. No rights have been violated, they are simply not extant in this system.

I think you misunderstand fundamentally, GP is saying that no matter the position of the current government there are absolute inalienable rights which is a common position to take (outlined in the founding of the US, for example) and that there is indeed a higher authority than government, morality/religion/philosophy/humanism. Some consider, e.g. the UN declaration of human rights to enumerate rights which can be violated by governments even though you cannot go to the UN for redress.

You are considering a 'right' to be defined as 'a thing the particular current government allows you to do' which is a great technical legal definition in service of blind unquestioning obedience to the powerful and is a nice clean enunciation of the universally rejected philosophical principle "might is right" but is actually the exact opposite of what most people mean when they refer to rights. The law (even highest law of the land) and its enforcers can violate your rights and you can defend your rights by refusing to obey unjust law, for example. The whole point of saying a right exists is to define what it means for a government to be evil or oppressive; to deny natural rights. To say rights are defined by what the government permits is to say no government can ever be evil or oppressive, and that it justifies itself by its power and nothing more, an idea we rejected hundreds of years ago as a race when we moved past the divine right of kings.

Thank you for your explanation but I do not misunderstand. ”Natural Rights” is just a concept political philosophers came up with to suggest there should be some minimal set of identical rights in all legal systems. It is a suggestion, not a source of law.

Case in point: in a thread broadly pertaining to the law in the UK you bring up the US Constitution, and its enunciation of rights in the first batch of amendments (otherwise known as the Bill Of Rights). No such analogue exists in UK law because (despite being a constitutional monarchy) the UK has no explicit written constitution (at least not a single specific document whose amendment or modification requires special supermajority in parliament).

The US Constitution's Bill of Rights famously proclaims US citizens' rights to bear arms. No analogue exists in UK law. What is a natural rights proponent to make of that? That the UK has implemented less of the natural rights than the US has? That bearing arms is not a natural right? That the US allows rights that are not natural rights? These would all be spurious conclusions because rights need not map across legal systems and certainly do not ”inherit” from one golden standard of ”natural rights”.

I think it is easy for us technologically-inclined people to think of various legal systems as differing implementations of a ”natural rights specification”, and come away with a feeling that there are various levels of correctness or preferrability. That's the wrong mindset, though. A better one would be that each legal system is a formal system built up from different and sometimes incompatible axioms, so that some support some theorems and others don't (but support other theorems).