A/T: Social Contract

Cinco Ranch BA

Blocks (N(A)

A/T: Social Contract (1 min. 5-1 min. 37)1. The Social Contract assumes that people have a choice to enter into the agreement. However, it has been empirically shown that this is not the case. In instances such as taxation, the government can use force to collect dues even when people choose not to give up their money. When the government can force concessions from the people, its obvious that the contract theory is flawed.

(10-16)

2. The Social Contract assumes an alternative to the compact, the state of nature. However, it is impossible to escape the contract, Ronald Dworkin Laws Empire elaborates:

Consent cannot be binding on people, in the way this argument requires,

unless it is given more freely, and with more genuine alternate choice,

than just by declining to build a life from nothing under a foreign flag.

And even if the consent were genuine, the argument would fail as an

argument for legitimacy, because a person leaves one sovereign only to

join another; he has no choice to be free from sovereigns altogether.

(13-22)

3. Historically, states have been formed by social conquest, not by contract. In addition to being a reason as to why the social contract is a failed theory, this argument has additional precedence in round because of the phrase on balance, implying that we should took to the general status quo. David Hume On the Original Social Contract writes:

Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there

remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on

usurpation or conquest, or both, without any presence of a fair consent or

voluntary subjection of the people. When an artful and bold man is placed

at the head of an army or faction, it is often easy for him, by employing,

sometimes violence, sometimes false presences, to establish his dominion

over a people.

(25-35)

4. The Social Contract theory is philosophically invalid because what is given up to the state cannot be relinquished. Murray N. Rothbard ROBERT NOZICK AND THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE STATE continues:

A correct theory of contracts, however, termed by Williamson Evers the "title-

transfer" theory, states that the only valid (and therefore binding)

contract is one that surrenders what is, in fact, philosophically

alienable, and that only specific titles to property are so alienable, so that their

ownership can be ceded to someone else. While, on the contrary, other

attributes of man: specifically, his self-ownership over his own will

and body, and the rights to person and property which stem from that self-

ownership, are "inalienable" and therefore cannot be surrendered in a

binding contract

(17-24)