Indentured servitude was a contract one would enter into voluntarily with a perceived benefit on the other side. I think you’d have to squint pretty hard to argue that every criminal doing labor today voluntarily signed up for it to brighten their futures.
Well, supporters of state authority could argue that the contract was a prior one, the ‘social contract’. As it happens, I am a philosophical anarchist, so that doesn’t work for me, but most discussants here probably believe in political authority of some sort.
Equating “the social contract” with the type of legal construction involved with actual indentured servitude is some real “a taco is a hotdog” thinking.
Nobody currently alive actually voted on anything related to the US Constitution, any of the first fifteen amendments, or many important laws, because they weren't alive. I don't see how the Thirteenth Amendment is any different from the many laws which were enacted and last amended before you or I was alive. Either the populace has consented to all of that body of law, or none of it.
I think that they’re saying that the concept of a social contract does not refer to a literal contract or legal document, or document of any kind, but rather simply a way of treating each other implicit in society.
Notably neither the Constitution nor its Amendments is the “social contract.”
Then those people need to stop calling it a "contract". That's an act of manipulative deception purposefully designed to influence the listener towards accepting it, regardless of whether the speaker is aware of those origins.
It doesn't constitute a "contract" any more than a schoolyard bully demanding another child's lunch money "or else" (implicit threat of initiation of force / violence) constitutes a "contract".
The bully wouldn't become morally justified by calling his dictated orders (under threat of violence) a contract, nor would his act of extortion become any more legitimized, by deceptively referring to the act with an unambiguously incorrect term like "contract".
The "social contract" would be the only contract in existence for which those subject to the terms of it were not granted the opportunity of consideration and the free choice to accept or reject that contract.
A contract you cannot choose to decline, and that you'll face imprisonment for violating isn't really a contract at all, it's really just a set of orders being dictated to you by a tyrant willing to initiate violence to get their way.
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Indentured servitude was a contract one would enter into voluntarily with a perceived benefit on the other side. I think you’d have to squint pretty hard to argue that every criminal doing labor today voluntarily signed up for it to brighten their futures.
Well, supporters of state authority could argue that the contract was a prior one, the ‘social contract’. As it happens, I am a philosophical anarchist, so that doesn’t work for me, but most discussants here probably believe in political authority of some sort.
Equating “the social contract” with the type of legal construction involved with actual indentured servitude is some real “a taco is a hotdog” thinking.
Nobody currently alive actually voted on anything related to the US Constitution, any of the first fifteen amendments, or many important laws, because they weren't alive. I don't see how the Thirteenth Amendment is any different from the many laws which were enacted and last amended before you or I was alive. Either the populace has consented to all of that body of law, or none of it.
I think that they’re saying that the concept of a social contract does not refer to a literal contract or legal document, or document of any kind, but rather simply a way of treating each other implicit in society.
Notably neither the Constitution nor its Amendments is the “social contract.”
Then those people need to stop calling it a "contract". That's an act of manipulative deception purposefully designed to influence the listener towards accepting it, regardless of whether the speaker is aware of those origins.
It doesn't constitute a "contract" any more than a schoolyard bully demanding another child's lunch money "or else" (implicit threat of initiation of force / violence) constitutes a "contract".
The bully wouldn't become morally justified by calling his dictated orders (under threat of violence) a contract, nor would his act of extortion become any more legitimized, by deceptively referring to the act with an unambiguously incorrect term like "contract".
The "social contract" would be the only contract in existence for which those subject to the terms of it were not granted the opportunity of consideration and the free choice to accept or reject that contract.
A contract you cannot choose to decline, and that you'll face imprisonment for violating isn't really a contract at all, it's really just a set of orders being dictated to you by a tyrant willing to initiate violence to get their way.