John Thrasher

The well-ordered society can neither absorb deep disagreement nor change. Dynamic stability replaces it, with constitutional rules fixed enough to protect experimentation and everything below them free to move.

The disagreement that makes a social contract necessary is the same disagreement that makes agreement impossible. This paradox of diversity dissolves once the contract is built at several levels instead of one.

Rawls turned to public reason to solve an assurance problem, but public reason needs a consensus no pluralistic democracy actually has. An indirect assurance mechanism does the job more robustly.

Diversity threatens every contract theory from Hobbes to Rawls. The problem has been misdiagnosed as one of stability when it is really about aiming justification at the wrong target; lower the target to institutions and it goes away.

Gauthier’s theory and the Nash-based ones both require a symmetry condition, and symmetry is a substantive moral constraint wearing the costume of a rationality requirement. Using it to force a unique solution defeats the point of deriving justice from a bargain.

Introduction to a collection on Vanderschraaf’s Strategic Justice, which is in many ways the culmination of the evolutionary and game-theoretic tradition in social contract theory.

Rawls said the theory of justice is part of the theory of rational choice and almost nobody took him literally. Taken at his word, a principle is justified because it is what the parties would rationally choose under specified conditions, and that is where his models part company with Harsanyi’s.

Smith’s pleasure of mutual sympathy has no counterpart in Hume’s general point of view, and it is what lets Smith explain how norms emerge and why they end up locally similar but globally diverse.

The realism debate runs together four separable methodological theses. Pulling them apart, by way of Hume’s two most awkward essays, yields a normative conventionalism that keeps institutions contingent without giving up the right to say which ones are worth copying.

In a public goods game where contributing destroys value, giving subjects the power to punish made them contribute more and left the group worse off. Punishment enforces bad norms as readily as good ones.

Honor killing, revenge, and genital mutilation persist because the people bound by them find them authoritative. A comparative-functional analysis can rank norms without parochialism, at the cost of grading them better and worse rather than good and bad.

Acts get punished more than omissions. Alongside the causal and normative explanations there is a cheaper one: punishing actors takes fewer punishment events than punishing everyone who failed to help.

Robust Samaritanism combined with a rejection of self-ownership yields a trilemma in which rape stops counting as a wrongful taking. What survives is a minimal self-ownership, understood as sovereignty rather than property, that blocks compelled use of a person without entailing libertarianism.

Earlier work found that people treat property as moral rather than conventional, but its cases described one person stealing from another, which builds the answer into the question. Remove the theft framing and ownership norms for external things test as conventional. The conventionality runs out in several places, most sharply at self-ownership, where classmates cannot take your hair even when the teacher says they may.

Self-ownership was discarded along with libertarianism because it was cast as a property right in oneself. Recast as territorial sovereignty over one’s body, it survives the standard objections and is available to people who want nothing to do with libertarianism.

Locke says mixing your labor with a thing makes the thing yours, and Nozick asked why you would not just own the value you added. Across three studies people turn out to be Nozickians: the artist owns the drawing but not the rock it is drawn on.

Across six vignettes and 731 subjects, moral judgments shifted with local consensus, which is exactly what Social Domain Theory says moral judgments should not do. Authority endorsement made almost no difference.

Political philosophy is about real political problems, so it is saturated with empirical claims. Philosophers can neither stay ignorant of the methods that settle those claims nor outsource them to specialists, which makes experiments part of core training rather than a specialty.

Smith is filed as a critic of contract theory and an early utilitarian. Run through contemporary contract theory he comes out a mutual advantage contractarian, which separates his impartiality from Sidgwick’s and Sen’s.

The independence thesis treats capitalism and democracy as separate systems in tension. Smith’s integrated political economy describes their actual interdependence better and is the more useful place to start.

If property rights come from local conventions, colonizers who share none of those conventions cannot have violated them, which looks like a decisive objection. The natural rights reply answers every case at once, and that apparent unity is its whole appeal. The unity is an illusion. Harm explains the devastating appropriations, norm deference the harmless artifact takings, and autonomy the forced relocations, and none of the three needs natural property rights.