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Poor wealthy dilettantes
What a young con artist tells us about our society
Our laws represent our values as a society. So say Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, who were very influential upon our Founding Fathers with their social contract theory.
According to the theory, the people enter into a contract with each other through which they give up certain of their own rights and privileges to the collective society in exchange for a just and stable government. It’s not by accident that the Constitution is written as a contract, in which “we the people” collectively agree to certain restrictions upon unfettered liberty “in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
In writing those words, our Founding Fathers were putting social contract theory into action. In general, it has worked quite well, catapulting the United States into its current position as by far, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history.
This is a problem for scholars of ethics, however. In discussing ethics, we are conscious of the fact that everyone has a different set of ethical standards. No matter how closely two people agree on their values, there will…
