As often in contractarianism, the justificatory journey involves a trip up the hill and then back down again.
Political theory still attempts to found the ‘obligation’ to obey the state on an original contract.
The exchange usually goes something like this. To those who seek to justify the state by means of a hypothetical contract, anarchists not unreasonably point out that if de facto subjects had wanted to sign themselves up to some agreement binding them to obey the state, they would probably have done so without the stir of philosophers.
The statist’s standard rejoinder, in so many words, is that if they don’t want to sign up, they ought to want to. Well, maybe, but then you may as well just say that the reason is that they ought to, and stop pretending that it is because they want to. As anarchists can fairly point out, the alternative is not obviously worse than a fictive contract based on a hypothetical desire to act on a suppositious obligation. Newton’s self-admonition – hypotheses non fingo – goes not only for the laws governing the starry firmament, but also for the moral law whose Newton Kant believed himself to be.
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction
Political theory still attempts to found the ‘obligation’ to obey the state on an original contract.
The exchange usually goes something like this. To those who seek to justify the state by means of a hypothetical contract, anarchists not unreasonably point out that if de facto subjects had wanted to sign themselves up to some agreement binding them to obey the state, they would probably have done so without the stir of philosophers.
The statist’s standard rejoinder, in so many words, is that if they don’t want to sign up, they ought to want to. Well, maybe, but then you may as well just say that the reason is that they ought to, and stop pretending that it is because they want to. As anarchists can fairly point out, the alternative is not obviously worse than a fictive contract based on a hypothetical desire to act on a suppositious obligation. Newton’s self-admonition – hypotheses non fingo – goes not only for the laws governing the starry firmament, but also for the moral law whose Newton Kant believed himself to be.
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction
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