Imagine you are a Consultant for Constructors Inc. , and you have been tasked to create a plan to resolve the negotiation issues (do not consider the 2011 resolution of this negotiation in your plan). Choose to consult for either the players or the owners. You need to conduct outside research to better understand the issues involved. Review the planning processes outlined in Chi. 4 of Negotiation. Write a negotiation plan of no more than 2,500 words and include the following: Define the issues and define how bargaining should progress, including the parties’ various objectives. Define interests, resistance points, and alternatives. Assess constituencies and the social context of negotiations. Define protocol for the negotiation. Determine methods to prevent potential negotiation impasses. Describe methods to manage potential impasses. Format your plan consistent with PAP guidelines Contempt array Approaches to the Social Contract First published Sun Mar 3, 1996; substantive revision Due DCE 20, 2011 The idea of the social contract goes back, in a recognizably modern form, to Thomas Hobbes; it was developed in different ways by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Emmanuel Kant.
After Kant the idea largely fell into disrepute until it was resurrected by John Rails. It is now at the heart of the work of a number of moral and political philosophers. The basic idea seems simple: in some way, the agreement (or consent) of all individuals subject to collectively enforced social arrangements shows that those arrangements have some normative property (they are legitimate, just, obligating, etc. ). Even this vague basic idea, though, is anything but simple, and even this abstract rendering is objectionable in many ways.
Now in the hands of these theorists?and in much ordinary discourse?the idea of “consent” implies a normative power to bind oneself. When one reaches ‘the age of consent” one is empowered to make certain sorts of binding agreements?contracts. By putting consent at the center of their contracts these early modern contract theorists (1) were clearly supposing that individuals had basic normative powers over themselves before they entered into the social contract (a point that Hum [1 741] stressed), and (2) brought the question of political obligation to the fore.
If the parties have the power to bind themselves by exercising this normative power, then the upshot of the social contract was obligation. As Hobbes (1651, 81 [chap xiv,’17) insisted, covenants bind; that is why they are “artificial chains” (1651, 138 [chap. Xix, 95). According to James Buchanan, the key development of recent social contract theory has been to distinguish the question of what generates political obligation (the key concern of the consent tradition in social contract thought) from the question of what constitutional orders or social institutions are mutually beneficial and stable over time (Bibb).
The nature of a person’s duty to abide by the law or social rules is a matter of a morality as it pertains to individuals (Rails 1999, off), while the design and justification of political and social institutions is a question of public or social morality. Thus, on Buchanan IEEE a crucial feature of more recent contractual thought has been to refocus political philosophy on public or social morality rather than individual obligation.
Although contemporary social contract theorists still sometimes employ the language of consent, the core idea of contemporary social contract theory is agreement. “Social contract views work from the intuitive idea of agreement” (Freeman AAA, 17). Now one can endorse or agree to a principle without that act of endorsement in any way binding one to obey. Social contract theorists as diverse as Freeman and Jan Unreason (1988, 148) see the act of agreement as indicating what reasons we have.
Agreement is a ‘test” or a heuristic. The “role of unanimous collective agreement” is in showing “what we have reasons to do in our social and political relations” (Freeman 2007, 19). Thus understood the agreement is not itself a binding act?it is not a formative that somehow creates obligation?but is reason-revealing (Lessened 1986). If individuals are rational, what they agree to reflects the reasons they have. In contemporary contract theories such as Rally’s, the problem of justification takes center stage.
Rally’s revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice hush did not base obligations on consent, though the apparatus of an “original agreement” persisted. The aim of the original position, Rails announced (1999, 16), is to settle “the question of justification by working out a problem of deliberation. ” The social contract in contemporary moral and political theory is an attempt, then, to solve a justificatory problem by converting it to a deliberative problem. At its heart is the “question of justification. As James Buchanan points out, “precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high” (1975, 3). Justifying social arrangements (showing that they have the requisite normative property, see 55 below) requires showing that all (suitably idealized) citizens have reasons favoring the arrangements. Now this would be an otiose requirement unless, to some extent, the reasons of citizens differed. If all citizens had precisely the same set of reasons there would be no point in showing what they all can agree to.
The idea of a unanimous collective agreement only does justificatory work when the reasons of citizens can differ, and so it is an open question what everyone has reason to endorse?what everyone would agree to. Under conditions of reasonable pluralism, we cannot suppose that the reasoning of one member of the public is a proxy for everyone else’s reasoning. Consequently, under reasonable pluralism the requirement that every member of the public has reason to endorse a social arrangement is not implied by one member doing so. . 2 Hypothetical Agreements Given that the problem of justification has taken center stage, the second aspect of contemporary social contract thinking appears to fall into place: its reliance on models of hypothetical agreement. The aim is to model the reasons of tizzies, and so we ask what they would agree to under conditions in which their agreements would be expected to track their reasons. Contemporary contract theory is, characteristically, doubly hypothetical.
Certainly, no prominent theorist thinks that questions of justification are settled by an actual survey of attitudes towards existing social arrangements, and are not settled until such a survey has been carried out. The question, then, is not “Are these arrangements presently the object of an actual agreement among citizens? ” (If this were the question, the answer would typically be “No”. The question, rather, is ‘Would these arrangements be the object of an agreement if citizens were surveyed? Although both of the questions are, in some sense, susceptible to an empirical reading, only the latter is in play in present-day theorizing. The contract nowadays is always hypothetical in at least this first sense.
