My reason for thinking we'll have to grapple seriously with the "social contract" is the nature of rights: those conditions which, when violated, give rise to the moral use of force. Rights are not asserted against inanimate Nature, but against others like ourselves, who also claim rights. Robert A. Heinlein put it as follows in his novel Starship Troopers:
"What right to life does a man drowning in the ocean have? The ocean will not hearken to his cries."
Rights emerge from our desire to participate in a society with others like ourselves. They are an agreement we attempt to reach with those others about the boundaries each of us is permitted to enforce against others' wanderings and desires.
Liberty, understood in the Lockean rather than the Proudhonian sense, is the right to do as one wishes with that which is rightfully one's own. In short, it is tied inextricably to concepts of property and ownership. But we have extensive empirical evidence that ownership is a contractarian condition, an agreement not to molest the demarcated ownership rights of others if assured of a reciprocal guarantee.
Every nonviolent enforcement mechanism capable of arbitrating disputes over any right is also contractarian in nature. That is, the parties to the dispute must agree up front to abide by the decision reached by the mechanism. This is an implicit contract when one brings a dispute into a government court, or an explicit contract if the parties make recourse to a private mediator.
When we look at situations where no contractarian mechanism commands the assent of all parties, such as international dealings, we see a lack of fidelity to any concept of rights or justice. We see war and chaos. For example, when the UN announced its partition plan in 1947, the Jews of Palestine accepted it. The Palestinian Arabs rejected it. The abrogation of the agreement to abide by the UN mechanism was followed by a bloody war. This is not to say that the UN's decision was necessarily the best, nor that that body was necessarily the right one to rule on the matter. Nevertheless, once the Palestinians abrogated the implicit contract to abide by the UN's decision, war became inevitable.
This isn't an airtight case for social contract theory, just some observations and a suggestion that it will be harder to distance ourselves from it than a naive approach might indicate.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
Bump for Nozick.
According to dictionary.com, a meaning of "assert" is to defend or maintain. That being so, the History of mankind is replete with assertations against Nature (animate and inanimate) of man's right to live.
"What right to life does a man drowning in the ocean have? The ocean will not hearken to his cries."
Stupidity is often a Capital Crime in nature, so it sort of depends on how he came to be drowning, but that aside, he has the same right to life he would have if he was not drowning. It does not matter if the ocean does not hear him. A potential rescuer might. Or he could swim.
Let's rephrase that: "What right to life does a man attacked by a lion have? The lion will not hearken to his cries." The answer is much the same as what I said above. If he has no right merely because he's attacked, he is only prey.