4 - The social contract
Summary
In chapter 1, we discussed two imaginary countries, Atlantis and Pacifica, committed respectively to egalitarian and inegalitarian conceptions of justice. Suppose that, for a time, Atlantis and Pacifica go to war. After several years of bitter fighting, the war ends in stalemate. There is a peace conference at which both sides, keen to end hostilities, make various concessions and eventually agree on the terms of a treaty to regulate their future interaction.
Some years later, after the horrors of the war have faded from popular memory, a new Altantan government starts making bellicose denunciations of Pacifican “tyranny,” “injustice,” and “oppression.” Influential voices in the Atlantan government start calling for “regime change” in Pacifica: this is justified, they claim, because it is important to eradicate “evil” from the world. The Pacificans respond by calling the Atlantans “arrogant imperialists” whose political society is “degenerate” and morally “corrupt.” The Pacifican regime threatens to roll back the concessions it made earlier. War again looms; but it is eventually averted thanks to the efforts of groups in both societies to remind their governments that they are already bound by the terms of an agreement to which they were themselves parties.
The most important thing to notice about this story is the way in which the existence of an agreement allows proponents of peace to change the topic of conversation.
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- An Introduction to Political Philosophy , pp. 67 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006