Right then. Before I start, some random admin, because me not getting straight onto the topic is becoming rather traditional. Firstly, did you know that you can subscribe to posts, in a few ways. There’s a subscribe (atom) button at the bottom of the page, a follow by email button at the side, and if you have a Google account, you can just follow it. So you don’t have to deal so much with my incredibly random update schedule. Second, you can share my posts via twitter, facebook, google, email or your own blog, with the buttons at the bottom of each post. Please do, since I am hopelessly insecure, and judge my personal worth by the number of pageviews this blog gets. Thirdly, you can cet Acanthus on your phone now. Fourthly, Y27Q5NYQTHSJ. No, I’m not going to explain that.
Right then. Government. Where does the authority of government come from? Since we all live in a democracy*, I assume that we’ve all going to agree that it comes from the consent of the governed, rather than from some inherent right of those of superior breeding and intellect to rule over the unwashed masses**. In other words, it’s a social contract – the masses agree to let a certain group rule over them because whilst it’s in everyone’s best interests that there be a set of social rules which everyone else obeys, it’s also in everyone’s best interests not to follow those rules themselves. So noone does, and it’s then in everyone’s best interests to create a governing authority to force everyone to follow the rules. And that’s were government comes from. Hobbes took an entire book to explain that.
A more interesting question is what rights this gives government. One might argue that they have the right to force people to follow their regime, in their own interests, since that’s what they would choose if they really understood the alternatives. One could argue that governments have the right to force people to accept the social contract because the restriction of natural liberty that this involves is less than the restriction of natural liberty of others involved in rejecting it. One might even extend the above argument to say that, since it’s in everyone’s best interests, one can include in the social contract a right for the government installed by the social contract to force people to accept and follow the social contract.
Guess what? I don’t accept that***. You have the perfect right to reject the social contract – just so long as you accept that you’re giving up all the benefits therein, as well as all the responsibilities. You’d have no right to seek reparation if you were mugged, or even if you were murdered****. Shopkeepers could refuse you service with impunity. The fact is that there is almost noone who could, let alone would, reject the social contract. This is helped by the fact that by accepting the benefits of the contract – from the police to the NHS – you are implicitly accepting the social contract. By the time someone’s in a position to reject the social contract, they’ve probably already accepted it, and whilst refusing to accept a contract (or pulling out of a contract you never really understood you were agreeing to) is one thing, trying to pull out of a contract halfway, when you’ve got the benefit from it, and it’s starting to be less good for you, is quite another. Arguably, you should have the chance to pull out of the social contract if it changes significantly, but that begs the question of what, exactly, ‘significantly’ means.
There, is, however, a case where one might be able to reject the social contract without such a criticism applying – when one does so in a group. The interesting thing here is when areas of a country try to declare independence. It is perfectly believable here that one might have rejected the social contract from the moment they understood what the contract was. Since it’s impossible to accept a contract without understanding it (unless you make a conscious decision to accept the contract without understanding it, having been given the opportunity to understand it), that would make it perfectly acceptable for any group or groups to reject the social contract.
Thus, I would argue that in any area where the majority want to have independence from their government, they should be allowed it. One might say that this is a tyranny of the majority, but at least it’s a tyranny of more of the majority than with the alternative. And people do always have the freedom to leave this new country, although I accept that this might come under the ‘freedom to starve’. I still condemn extremist methods such as those of the IRA, but, frankly, I have a lot more sympathy for them than I do for armed minorities who try to force their values on the rest of the world- and depending on my mood, that could include the British Empire as well as Al Qaida.
On a completely unrelated subject, there may be a gap between this post and the next. Blogger is being annoying.
*Except any of you who live in America, obviously.
**Conservatives might not agree, but I’m going to ignore them until they give me an alternative that I think is reasonable.
***Who didn’t see that coming?
****As a side note, it would still be wrong to actually murder someone who had rejected the social contract, it just wouldn’t be in the responsibility of the government to do anything about it.
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