A social contract to keep us in control
Looks like Blair’s “rights with responsibilities” agenda is going to take physical form with a real social contract. We saw some of these ideas floated back in September in Miliband’s doomed wiki experiment, where Dave showed us his environmental contract. But this social contract will extend the idea to health, policing and education. One example given by the Guardian is that you will only have a hip operation if you lose weight.
This idea is different from what a social contract, in the philosophical sense, is meant to achieve. Nosemonkey’s got a good article on this so I won’t repeat it here. Although I do think that Nosemonkey’s wrong in seeing this as a Hobbesian contract. I think it is closer to the Rousseauian idea that Nosemonkey seems to support. Don’t forget that Blair is a big supporter of positive liberty (in the Berlin sense; he even wrote a letter to Berlin explaining his ideas). This social contract seems to be based on self-government, but is the application of the Government’s will instead of the general will. We need to realise what is good for us. Only then can we be free. We will be “forced to be free”.
Although the uses of the social contract to explain how we developed out of the state of nature is interesting (although only as a thought experiment), what worries me about these proposals is that it forces the citizen to do the things that the government believes are good for the citizen to be doing. This is paternalism at its worst. Although you can argue that there is a choice - a person who needs a hip operation can refuse to lose weight and live in pain. This is not a choice that a rational person would choose. Questions arise such as do we have a moral responsibility to treat that person? Or in education, do we have a moral responsibility to teach all children at school? What about policing - shouldn’t we have a right to protection?
I’m sure it won’t be too long before the contract is extended to everything from security to voting. You serve in Iraq and we’ll protect you from terrorists. You vote for Labour and we’ll give you a peerage. - Brown might need the last one to win the next election with policy plans such as these.