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Answer:
One troubling aspect of anti-government groups is its underlying ideological message, part of which we accept as freedom lovers, and part of which we reject for its extremism. According to many anti-government groups, we establish governments to perform only a narrow range of tasks, principally protection from foreign invasion. However, the government pushes its authority beyond its established purpose by unjustly restricting people’s freedoms. This justifies resistance, which even the U.S. Declaration of Independence endorses: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends [i.e., rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”
The underlying philosophy of such anti-government groups is that of social contract theory. In its less extreme form, social contract theory is both a legitimate and a historically important account of political and moral obligation. Briefly, social contract theory describes a disease and then proposes a cure. The disease is that humans have unsociable tendencies and are unable to construct and live in cooperative societies. The cure is that we contractually agree to be civil to one another under threat of punishment from a governing body that we establish for this purpose. This mutual contract then becomes the backbone for our moral obligations to each other.
Social contract theory has a long but spotty history. Plato hints at such a theory in his dialogue The Republic. A skeptical character in that work named Glaucon argues that people are naturally inclined to exploit one another. However, since we do not like being exploited, we agree not to exploit others on the condition that others do not exploit us:
When men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. [Republic, 2.358e]
For Glaucon, the mutual contracts that we create are the basis of the rules of justice. Plato himself did not accept this skeptical view of the origins of morality; instead, he argued that moral truths are fixed in a higher eternal realm of the universe. For almost 2000 years, most moral philosophers largely agreed with Plato’s view. In particular, they believed that both morality and governmental authority are grounded in objective natural laws that God himself endorses. During the seventeenth century, a few skeptically-minded philosophers offered alternative explanations of morality that were grounded more in the human than the heavenly realm. One of these was English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who presents the first detailed account of social contract theory. In this chapter we will examine Hobbes’s view and criticisms against it.
Answer:
Social contract theory says that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. Some people believe that if we live according to a social contract, we can live morally by our own choice and not because a divine being requires it.