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Social contracts, constitutions, Pareto improvement and rights

4 important questions on Social contracts, constitutions, Pareto improvement and rights

Rawls’s theory of justice

The social contract is a contract between people in an original position “of total equality” which results from having been placed behind a “veil of ignorance”, which screens out all knowledge about:

•Natural talents •Tastes •Social position •Income •Wealth
all social values are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of these values is to everyone’s advantage

The constitution as a utilitarian contract

Basic idea: Two stages of collective decision making.

Constitutional stage

Political stage

The constitution as a utilitarian contract: critique

Similar to critique to Rawls: in reality, constitutional assemblies that adopt a constitution with unanimity are rare.
The decisions taken there extend to future generations. Can such decisions morally bind future generations?

Sen’s result on the potential conflict between individual rights (personal liberty) and the Pareto principle

There exists no social decision function that satisfies these three requirements:

1.There are certain individual rights that should be respected.
2.The Pareto principle should be respected.
3.The unrestricted domain condition should be respected.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Ethics Class notes

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