Problems with the Social Contract.

There are a couple of problems. The first is, what if the government goes bad? The government can go bad in two ways. The first is to have an individual or group of individuals gain control of it. In a democracy or representative democracy, this is easy to happen. The Tyranny of the Majority, which John Stuart Mill speaks about, is a classic problem with social contract society’s going bad –beginning to dissolve back into a state of nature. Remember, women only recently in the history of our society gained the right to vote, the right to determine the rules of the social contract. Further, egoists can hide behind corporate power to empower themselves through the government. Current exploitation of the middle-class by corporate executives is rampant in today’s capitalist societies.

The second way is for the government to lose its power of enforcement. For whatever reason, should the government not be able to provide protection to its constituents from harm, the social contract fails and the citizens are returned to the state of nature to defend for themselves, perhaps even against inept powers of the government. If the government cannot protect its citizens from harm and yet requires them to support its existence, the citizens are returned to a state of nature and released from the contract. Which, as can been noted by rational egoist, is a very bad thing. The crux of the problems then revolve around making certain that the government is strong enough to do what it is supposed to do, and in fact does it –namely, protect its citizens from harm.