What Do We Owe Each Other? The Puzzle of the Social Contract

Imagine you and your classmates are given a group project. Everyone gets the same grade. You quickly realize that if everyone works hard, the project will be excellent, and you’ll all get an A. But here’s the problem: if you slack off while everyone else works, you’ll still get the A—plus you’ll have had free time to play video games. And if everyone thinks that way, nobody works, the project is terrible, and you all get an F.

This is a trap. The smart thing for you as an individual is to let others do the work. But if everyone does the smart individual thing, everyone loses. So what’s the right thing to do? And why should you do it, if it means sacrificing your own interests?

This kind of puzzle is where social contract theory begins. Philosophers have long asked: if we’re all basically self-interested, why would anyone agree to follow rules that sometimes require us to put others first? And once we do agree, what keeps us from cheating?

The Basic Idea

The social contract is a thought experiment. Imagine what life would be like without any government, without any moral rules, without any agreements about how to treat each other. Philosophers call this the “state of nature.” Now imagine that people in this situation get together and try to negotiate a set of rules that everyone will follow. What would those rules look like?

The key insight is that even selfish people have reasons to cooperate—as long as they can trust that others will cooperate too. Think about the group project again. If you could somehow guarantee that everyone would work hard, you’d all be better off. The problem is making that guarantee believable.

Social contract theories try to show that, under the right conditions, rational self-interest actually pushes us toward morality and justice. Not because we’re nice, but because it’s the smartest move we can make.

What Do We Start From?

In the state of nature, there’s no police, no laws, no court system. Everyone just looks out for themselves. Philosophers disagree about how bad this would actually be. Thomas Hobbes, writing in the 1600s during a civil war, thought it would be a nightmare—a “war of all against all” where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Other philosophers thought it might be more like camping: we’d cooperate sometimes, but without any reliable way to settle disputes or enforce agreements.

The important thing is that in the state of nature, there are benefits to cooperating (working together produces more than each person working alone) but also strong temptations to cheat (take the benefits without contributing). This is exactly the group project problem, but applied to all of society.

Who Makes the Deal?

Here’s where it gets interesting. The people making the contract, in the thought experiment, are assumed to be rational and self-interested. They care about their own well-being, not about being “good” or helping others. Philosophers call this having “non-tuistic” preferences—it’s a fancy way of saying: they don’t automatically care about other people’s well-being.

This assumption is crucial. If the theory can show that even selfish people would agree to moral rules, then it’s a really strong argument for why morality makes sense. Nobody can say “morality is just for suckers” if it turns out that rational selfishness leads to the same conclusion.

But there’s a problem. Real people aren’t purely selfish. We care about our friends and family. We sometimes feel spite or envy. We can be generous or cruel. If the theory assumes everyone is a cold calculator, does it still apply to actual human beings?

What Would They Agree To?

Let’s say you’re in a room with a bunch of other people, and you have to decide the rules for your society. You’re all selfish, you all know the others are selfish, and you can’t use violence to force anyone to agree. What rules would you pick?

David Gauthier, a philosopher who worked out one of the most detailed versions of this theory, argued that the rules would be those that minimize how much each person has to give up compared to their ideal outcome. Think of it like dividing a pizza. Your ideal is the whole pizza. But you know everyone else wants the whole pizza too. Nobody would agree to a deal where they get 1% while someone else gets 99%. What people would agree to, Gauthier argued, is the deal where the biggest sacrifice anyone has to make is as small as possible.

This is complicated to calculate, but the basic idea is simple: fair deals are the ones nobody can complain about too much, because everyone feels they gave up about the same amount.

The Cheating Problem

Even if everyone agrees to the rules, there’s still the problem of actually following them. Remember the group project: the temptation to slack off doesn’t disappear just because you all agreed to work hard.

Gauthier’s answer was that rational people would train themselves to become “constrained maximizers”—people who automatically keep their agreements, as long as they’re in a community where most others do the same. Think of it like having a reputation. If you’re known as someone who keeps promises, people will trust you, and you’ll get more opportunities to cooperate. If you’re known as a cheater, nobody will deal with you. So it’s actually in your long-term self-interest to become the kind of person who doesn’t cheat.

But critics say this doesn’t really solve the problem. If you’re truly selfish, why wouldn’t you cheat whenever you can get away with it? And if you’ve trained yourself not to cheat, are you really still selfish?

Who Gets Left Out?

Here’s a troubling implication of the whole approach. The social contract is supposed to benefit everyone who participates. But what about people who can’t really contribute? What about people with severe disabilities who need constant care? What about animals?

If the reason to include someone in the contract is that they can help you, then people who can’t help might be left out. This isn’t just a theoretical problem. Eva Kittay, a philosopher who cared for her severely disabled daughter, argued that contract theories can’t properly value either the disabled or the people who care for them. The caregivers sacrifice their own interests, but the theory says they shouldn’t have to—unless someone else benefits enough to make it worth their while.

Some philosophers try to solve this by pointing out that most disabled people can contribute in some way, or that we could set up an insurance system where everyone pays in case they become disabled. But the hardest cases—people who genuinely can’t contribute—remain a challenge.

Can Contracts Be Oppressive?

There’s another, darker use of the contract idea. Some philosophers have argued that certain groups in society have actually made implicit contracts—but these contracts are designed to oppress others.

Charles Mills argued that there’s been a “racial contract” among white people to maintain white supremacy. This isn’t a literal document, but a pattern of agreements—sometimes explicit, often unspoken—that keep power and resources in white hands. Carole Pateman made a similar argument about a “sexual contract” among men to maintain patriarchy.

These aren’t just historical curiosities. Mills and Pateman argue that these contracts shape our world today. The “contractors” benefit at the expense of those excluded from the agreement. And the theories that celebrate the social contract have often ignored how the contract was actually made—by some people excluding others.

This is a powerful critique. If contract theory can justify oppression when used badly, what does that say about using it for good? Some philosophers say the original theory still works, because racism and sexism aren’t actually rational—they harm everyone in the long run. Others say the whole approach is tainted, and we need a different way to think about justice.

So What’s the Answer?

Nobody really knows. Philosophers still argue about whether the social contract is a useful way to think about morality and justice. The debate is alive and messy.

What the contract approach gives us is a clear way to think about a real problem: we live together, we need to cooperate, but we also have competing interests. The social contract thought experiment forces us to ask: what rules would you agree to, if you had to live by them, and you couldn’t use force to get your way? It doesn’t give us a final answer, but it gives us a powerful tool for thinking.

Maybe that’s enough. After all, if there were a simple answer to “what do we owe each other,” philosophers would have found it by now.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
State of nature	The imagined situation before any government or moral rules exist, used to figure out what problems the contract is supposed to solve
Social contract	The imaginary agreement that creates society’s rules; it’s a tool for thinking about what rules rational people would accept
Non-tuistic preferences	The assumption that people in the contract only care about their own well-being, used to show that morality can make sense even for selfish people
Constrained maximizer	Someone who trains themselves to keep agreements even when cheating would benefit them in the short term
Lockean proviso	A rule saying you can’t make yourself better off by making someone else worse off; used to make the starting point of the contract fair
Minimax relative concession	A proposed solution to the bargaining problem: pick the deal that makes the biggest sacrifice anyone must make as small as possible
Prisoner’s dilemma	A situation where each person’s rational choice leads to a worse outcome for everyone; social contracts try to escape this trap

Key People

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): A philosopher who lived through civil war and argued that without government, life would be a nightmare—which is why we need a powerful ruler to enforce the social contract.
David Gauthier (1932–2023): A philosopher who wrote Morals By Agreement, trying to show that even selfish people would rationally agree to be moral.
Charles Mills (1951–2021): A philosopher who used contract theory to argue that there has been an actual, historical “racial contract” among white people to maintain white supremacy.
Carole Pateman (born 1940): A philosopher who used contract theory to argue that there has been a “sexual contract” among men to maintain patriarchy.
Eva Kittay (born 1946): A philosopher who criticized contract theory for leaving out people with severe disabilities and their caregivers.

Things to Think About

The theory says rational people would agree to fair rules. But what counts as “fair” to a selfish person? If you’re stronger than everyone else, wouldn’t you just demand more? And if you’re weaker, wouldn’t that be unfair to you? How do you define fairness without already knowing what’s moral?
The contract is hypothetical—it never actually happened. So why should we feel bound by an agreement we never made? Does it matter that we would have agreed if we were rational? What if you don’t think you’re very rational?
If the theory can’t include people with severe disabilities or animals, is it broken? Or is it okay for a moral theory to say “sorry, we can’t help everyone”? What does your answer tell you about what morality is supposed to do?
Mills and Pateman show that real-world contracts can be oppressive. Does this mean the whole idea of the social contract is dangerous? Or does it just mean we need to be more careful about who gets to make the contract and what they’re allowed to agree to?

Where This Shows Up

Whenever you hear someone say “it’s a social contract” about things like paying taxes or following laws, they’re using this idea—sometimes correctly, sometimes not
Group projects, team sports, and clubs all have the same problem of getting people to cooperate instead of freeloading
Real politics involves constant negotiation about who’s included in “we the people” and who’s left out—exactly the question the contract theorists ask
Arguments about whether companies have obligations to their workers, or rich countries to poor ones, often turn on contract-style reasoning: what would everyone agree to if they were starting from scratch?