The Social Contract and Its Modern Critics | Philosophy Tube

[00:00:00]stay tuned at the end of this episode to find out how you can get tickets to see the prince a new theater show coming to the southwark playhouse in london this september hello my name is abigail welcome to philosophytube a show about ideas on tonight's episode we're going to look at some true crime i've got my makeup ready and my relatable girl next door influencer personality and i'm ready to take you on an exciting journey through the dark cd underbelly of detroit property taxes in the early 2000s for real though it is actually fascinating and quite dark if you own a house you've got to pay taxes on it every year how much you pay depends on how much it's worth if you have a really nice house you pay more if you live in an old ruin you pay less or at least that's how it's supposed to work but starting in 2009 the city of detroit suddenly decided that a lot of old run-down houses in poor neighborhoods predominantly black neighborhoods were actually worth loads of money and raised the property taxes on them by a huge amount a lot of residents couldn't afford the new taxes so they got their homes foreclosed on about a hundred thousand homes in total and obviously this made them miserable stressed poor homeless and even dead and it was illegal michigan has a law on the books that says authorities can't value a home for tax purposes at more than 50 percent of its market value and many of the residents weren't supposed to be paying any taxes anyway because they were living below the poverty threshold so double illegal the truest crime there is but the law was just ignored even after the evidence came out that this was illegal city officials said well just pay your taxes your bums and if you don't you get evicted and what are you supposed to say to that are you going to hire a lawyer or how can you afford one because the city can afford a great lawyer now they've pocketed all the cash they got from selling your house it's free real estate essentially the government of detroit and wayne county michigan stole tens of thousands of houses from poor people mainly poor black people despite the fact that they were allegedly living in a democratic system where there were rules in place specifically to prevent that very thing how did this happen what does it tell us about the real nature of that system what has happened to the social contract to answer that we're going to learn what the social contract is what its weaknesses are and then what's happening to it today if you enjoyed tonight's performance you can sign up at patreon.com philosophytube to pledge a couple of dollars a month to support free educational material like this but i don't think that relatable girl next door is really the appropriate aesthetic for a true crime of this magnitude since we're taking on a devilishly difficult case we are going to need a devilishly difficult lawyer [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey there i'm trixie mephistopheles from the law firm beelzebub beelzebub and jones i'll be preparing your briefs here's the deal the social contract is an idea that's turned up in various philosopher's works over the last 350 years if i explain all of them in detail we'll be here till armageddon as a demon i have forever but as a lawyer i charge by the hour so let me give you the broad strokes we live it has been said in a society how did that happen well philosophers who subscribed to this social contract idea like to imagine a time before society existed when there were no rules or laws yet they call it the state of nature what exactly the state of nature was like depends on who you read the english philosopher thomas hobbes said that it was pretty hellish life in the stated nature was solitary nasty poor brutish and short a war of all against all later philosophers like frenchman jean-jacques rousseau said it might not have been so bad because humans have a natural tendency towards compassion john locke another name we'll be hearing a lot so that there were still some rules some morality placed in humans by god bottom line the state of nature was whatever came naturally to human beings which could have been a lot of things society is everything that got built on top in the state of nature people had some freedoms that they don't have now for instance if somebody steals your stuff in the state of nature you can go and clobber them you can't do that now there's a justice system that's supposed to handle it unless you live in detroit but because the state of nature has some downsides like anybody can clobber you and it's hard to get stuff done people came together and agreed to live in a society that agreement is called the social contract this is a very important detail so it's worth making sure that you get it the idea is that humanity's natural state is freedom that nobody is born having political authority over anybody else one of rousseau's most famous lines was man is born free and everywhere he is in chains the first four words there are man is born free that's going to be important in a moment the outcome of the social contract though is that people gave up some of their natural freedoms in exchange for the benefits of living in a society like okay you can't clobber anyone who takes your stuff anymore but on the flip side you get a justice system and medicine and opera and mobile phones and pork pies and all the other things that humans enjoy in particular john locke said one of the great things you get out of the social contract is your private property gets secured again unless you live in detroit there are a few things hidden in the fine print here that depend on who you read like who made this agreement hobbs said it was individuals lochen russo said it was families and what exactly did they agree on some writers say the social contract created the rules of morality or governments or laws or specific institutions there was a modern philosopher called john ross who had his own version but we're not going to worry about him for today so that's the basic idea in a nutshell you've got your three main ingredients the state of nature where everyone's naturally free the people who came together and the agreement they made to limit their freedom in exchange for civilization now you're very clever so you've probably already realized that that's a load of bollocks that never happened that's completely made up and yes people have been saying that since the beginning here's scottish philosopher david hume writing in 1752 were you to preach in most parts of the world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary consent or a mutual promise the magistrate would soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities 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 in fact even if that whole story about the state of nature was true so what if your ancestors agreed to live in a society what does it have to do with you when you were born was there somebody there from the government going do you accept the terms and conditions no some philosophers like rousseau tried to get around this by saying that if you enjoy the benefits of society you implicitly agree to live by its rules like you might not have signed a literal contract but by continuing to enjoy video games and hummus you do sign an invisible one and if you don't like it there's the door but again hume says that's bollocks can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country when he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires we may as well assert that a man by remaining in a vessel freely consents to the dominion of the master though he was carried on board while asleep and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves her agreement is not how society was formed and it's clearly not how society works now however that's not the point it's not meant to be an accurate historical story social contract theory is meant to give us a nice test to evaluate the societies we do live in we can look at a government or an institution or even a specific piece of legislation and ask ourselves is this the sort of thing that free equal people would agree to live under and if the answer to that is no then we have good reason to reject it with that in mind you can maybe see how from one perspective this was kind of a radical idea at the time human beings are born free and equal and governments are only legitimate if you agree to them that kind of talk could spark a revolution the 17th century philosopher robert filmer said people aren't born free and equal that's ridiculous children aren't born equal to their parents the father naturally has authority and in the same way the king naturally has authority over his people to say that they're born equal is borderline treason filmer was very into the idea of dads having power he wrote a book about his ideas that was literally called patriarcha if this were 2019 youtube i'd make a joke like step on me daddy but i think culturally we're past that now social contract theory says that governments should be established by agreement not force or religion and that is also a revolutionary idea there's a bit of a battle for the human soul going on here because according to rousseau again human beings can come together and agree and make progress government can set people free to do that if it's arranged in the right way but some of rousseau's contemporaries said no you've forgotten about sin humans are inherently wicked they have a tendency towards evil the job of government is to keep a lid on that it should be run by people who know what purity and faith is not set everyone free to indulge their sinful desires and this battle continues to this day there are still people who say no the right to govern does not come from the people at least not ultimately it comes from god and so on behalf of god we will take control of society whether people agree or not whether it's christian nationalists in the usa trying to overturn elections or the taliban and isis this philosophical issue is not ancient history it's happening right now speaking of history though here's some context that might help ground all this abstract theory robert filmer and thomas hobbes both lived through the english civil war a very bloody and bitter conflict between the forces of king charles the first and parliament that was very much about this question who has the right to govern filmer was on the king's side which turned out to be a bad decision because in 1649 charles the first had his head cut off when a british monarch dies that's when the english are at their most dangerous because suddenly anything is possible a dude named oliver cromwell takes over and decides to murder everyone in ireland some random guy named gerard when stanley invents communism on a hill they banned christmas for a while it was a busy time for me but 11 years later everyone calms down a little bit cromwell's dead now so charles's son charles becomes king charles ii now one thing you need to know is that everyone in england at this time hates catholics don't like them why are you having your religious services in latin speak english like jesus did anti-catholic suspicion is rife senator mccarthy has a list of catholics in government there's debate about whether catholics should be allowed in women's toilets the police are stopping people in the streets like is that incense and they're going no it's weed i swear so everything is already really normal and then in 1685 charles ii dies as well leaving no legitimate heir he does have a very special illegitimate daughter but she doesn't count so his younger brother james becomes king james the second and there's an immediate problem because james is catholic but wait it's okay his daughter mary who is next in line for the throne is protestant so it's all fine it's gonna be okay unless he has a son oh sh he just had a son and oh sh the sun is catholic time for england to become even more normal okay what if what if the prince of a completely different country came over and we just made him the king instead so they did that in 1688 william of orange who was prince of the netherlands came over and kicked james off the throne in the glorious revolution thus ending the reign of the stuart royal family which is why the descendants of charles's illegitimate daughter are making youtube videos now instead of living in buckingham palace i could have been a princess but no my great-uncle james just had to be a catholic and this is the context in which john locke publishes his famous books the two treatises of government the first book which hardly anybody reads now is a sentence by sentence refutation of robert filmer love the pettiness the second one the really famous one contains all of locke's arguments about how governments should be formed by people agreeing lock supported the glorious revolution he thought that james's failures as a king meant that he had reneged on the social contract so the people had the right to take up arms and remove him and it had a big impact less than a century later across the atlantic george washington benjamin franklin and a lot of my most famous clients read john locke and they were like whoa this guy's based we should do a revolution we should get rid of king george and then sing a musical about it i tell the story of this context partly because it's interesting and partly so you understand this philosophy did not come from nowhere it was written in a particular time and a particular place and it bears the marks of its origin and that is going to be very important now as we turn to some of the modern criticisms of social contract theory starting with some radical feminism [Music] bye this book is the sexual contract by carol paintman it's a classic of second wave feminism from 1988.

[00:17:19]paytman studied social contract theory and she has a few notes in this section of the video i'd like to take a detailed look at her work you may not agree with everything she says i certainly don't but it will be provocative paytman's general thesis is that the story of the social contract this supposedly radical idea about free people agreeing is first of all a lie but secondly it hides the truth about how society really operates in particular as a feminist she focuses on the ways in which what happens to women gets buried in the fine print she says there's the official social contract and then underneath there's a second sexual contract the hidden rules which give men the male sex political control over women the female sex this idea of there being a second hidden contract has been really influential in the last 40 years of philosophy especially in critical race theory as we'll see later on remember this state of nature the idea we talked about earlier it's whatever comes naturally to human beings and society is everything built on top well paytman points out that a lot of the classic theorists made some pretty big and pretty political assumptions about the nature of women like a lot of men did back then john locke said that women are natural subjects we're born to do what we're told rousseau said that we can't be rational and objective like men are because we're too bimbo-brained even though the state of nature is supposed to be before society there's some cross-contamination going on here according to the classic theorists the social contract is something that men do men agree to make society women can't that's just our nature so we get to live in it specifically we get to inhabit the roles that we are naturally suited for according to men we get to be their wives and their mothers and that's a crucial detail paintman says this wasn't an accidental oversight these philosophers didn't just forget that women existed the reason we're not at the table is because we're what's on the menu part of society's job she says is to regulate men's access to our bodies for sex and reproduction every man is endowed by his creator with an inalienable right to life liberty and the pursuit of [ __ ] the hidden rule the sexual contract is that women exist for men and she continues if you assume that women exist for men that when naturally suited only for the domestic world not the political one then marriage is the legal embodiment of that assumption think of things like women being given away by our fathers at a wedding taking our husband's last name promising to obey women not being allowed to own property when they're married husbands being legally allowed to rape and beat their wives paytman says the institution of marriage is clearly designed to express and reinforce the assumption that women are secondary now you might want to say hang on a minute husbands used to be able to do all that stuff but marriage has been reformed it's no longer legal to beat your wife for instance so is it still inherently patriarchal paytman says yes if you strip out all the patriarchal stuff it wouldn't be marriage anymore it'd just be a contract for sexual exclusivity or cohabitation or whatever she says marriage would be obsolete without patriarchy but again you might want to come back and say some women choose to get married some of us want to be actress youtuber girl bosses taking over the world but some of us want to be trad wives and stay at home with the apron and the red lip and the thigh highs and the cat ears that's what makes some women happy so is it still patriarchal if you do it voluntarily this question is it empowering if you do it voluntarily is something that women have been asking ourselves for decades about all sorts of things like marriage but also wearing revealing clothing or being a sex worker which peyton also does not like funnily enough there is another academic text that just came out by one of my favorite philosophers which addresses this same question it's kim petras's new album [ __ ] pop on the one hand it's about a woman exerting control over her sexuality as she sings i'm a super power [ __ ] so power empowerment but on the other hand her superpower is making men and the album was produced by dr luke so is it also reinforcing the sexual contract maybe a lot of big feminist questions being asked here it's a very rich text we might say that the album is a seminal work peyton says doing it voluntarily that's how they get you you do it voluntarily but even so the institution of marriage still reflects the idea that this is the only kind of contract you're capable of making the story about free equal people agreeing hides the reality of the exploitation but wait there's more she's also very critical of employment contracts for the same reason imagine that there's a 50s dude named bert mansley and every morning he goes to work in the chrysler dealership from nine to five and every evening he comes home to his cat girl trad wife and he says honey i made a hundred dollars today burt is allegedly a free man he sells his labor power his ability to work to his employer unlike a slave who is themselves bought and sold and again bert does it all voluntarily paytman says that's bollocks you can sell your blood or your hair or anything that can be detached from you but your labor power can't be detached from you if you think it can try sending your labor power to work whilst you stay in bed the idea that we have pieces of ourselves that can be parceled out and sold like our time or our skills is she says a fiction but isn't free in exchange for wages he does as he's told like a good little boy the reason he accepts it is because when he comes home he at least gets to bus around his wife and so she says modern society is not based on free individuals agreeing as social contract theorists might have us believe it is based on the economic exploitation of everyone and the sexual exploitation of women what a way to make them live in so that's paytman and now some questions starting with the big one for the grand prize of one million pounds what is the definition of a woman we're talking here about the female sex and the male sex so who exactly is in which category i can help you out here we can phone a friend the oxford english dictionary defines woman as oh no way am i touching that one chief paytman has quite a flexible approach she says we don't need to obsess about chromosomes or genitals or anything like that to draw out the way in which the meaning of men and women has helped structure major social institutions is not to fall back on purely natural categories that means that whatever physical sex is whether it's a biological fact or a social construct or something in between she just wants to talk about how it gets cashed out politically there are some other clues in paytman's work that indicate a flexible approach for instance she says that marriage is not the only way the sexual contract is enforced in modern patriarchy a variety of means are available through which men can uphold the terms of the sexual contract what is now labeled sexual harassment helps maintain men's patriarchal right in the public world so enforcing the sexual contract doesn't always involve actual sex according to payment it is about controlling us for sex and reproduction but it operates on a more general level for example literally as i was highlighting this section on page 114 i was sitting alone in st james's park in london and a man came up and sat right next to me and tried to chat me up told me how i shouldn't wear a covered mask because i'm too pretty and that i have really really beautiful handwriting he felt entitled to interrupt me to invade my personal space and to demand my attention because i'm a woman he saw me sitting alone working and he must have felt on some level oh this is here for me and this flexible general approach has advantages it means that if somebody can't have children or penetrative sex like because she's too young or for medical reasons then according to paintman she's still a woman she still experiences misogyny she's still assumed to exist for men and here's where i have to reveal my trap card so to speak if this is your first time watching philosophy tube and you didn't already know i'm transgender as we've just seen everything peyton says should apply to me as well i get sexually harassed i experience misogyny i'm in the political category of woman which makes it all the more weird and heartbreaking that the final chapter contains some pretty explicit transphobia payment says that trans women are just men who are pretending which is false and also bigoted and she also seems to be assuming that there are only two sexes and they are definitely biological and unchangeable which spoilers if you're watching in 1988 turns out that's not true either but more to the point that contradicts what she said before having said in chapter one that she's only worried about how sex gets cashed out politically now all of a sudden she seems to be assuming that it is a fact of nature which means she's made the same mistake she's criticizing she realized that the state of nature was a political construction that there was this cross-contamination going on but at the same time she seems to think that her view of what nature is has no politics in it and is definitely just the way things are she writes the state of nature is drawn by each theorist in a manner that enables him to reach the desired solution the political solution he has already formulated and in the margins i've written yeah that's that's what you're doing now it wasn't okay to be transphobic in 1988 or ever but i guess we could say that trans studies as a discipline only really started in 87 and it's not her fault that science and philosophy have since moved on basically i'm not trying to cancel carol paytman she's in her 80s now and she's enjoying a philosopher's retirement which as i understand that mainly involves drinking hemlock i bought the 30th anniversary edition of her book though because i was hoping she might address some of these issues there's a new forward by the author i thought maybe she might talk about some of the philosophy that trans people have written since then or that sex workers have written since then or maybe talk about gay marriage like is a lesbian wedding still inherently patriarchal that's an interesting question unfortunately the new forward is about two pages and it doesn't really add all that much so if you are thinking of getting a copy i'd save your money and just get the original the reason i bring it up though is because paytman's book is itself a great illustration of the things it is trying to critique she realized that the state of nature was a political construction she exposed the hidden rules that enforce subjugation even as we imagine that society is based on free people agreeing and she made the same mistakes but there is some great stuff in here that could go on to inspire something more and that is exactly what happened [Music] we now have everything we need to return to detroit and think about what happened there you'll remember that in 2009 the local government illegally raised property taxes and started evicting people from their homes when they couldn't pay effectively stealing houses from people who are disproportionately poor and black in 2014 they did something similar with water prices jacking the prices up suddenly and disconnecting anyone who couldn't pay this happened despite the fact there were laws in place that were supposed to stop it so how come in 1997 the philosopher charles mills wrote a book called the racial contract inspired by payton remember her idea that women were left out of the social contract not just as an oversight but because we were seen as naturally fit for exploitation mills says the classic theorists did the exact same thing with people of color john locke is a great example remember the idea of the state of nature it's whatever comes naturally to human beings and society is everything that's built on top well locke claimed falsely that indigenous americans had no society and no politics and no concept of property before colonization and therefore it was okay to take their land because they're just living in the state of nature america is a blank canvas a new world so by all means just move in the people living there or they're kind of like animals you shouldn't be cruel to them but fundamentally they and their resources exist for white people in the same way that women exist for men just like paytman said the reason they weren't at the table was because they were on the menu and the same thing happened in detroit the residents had very little say in what was happening to them or the economic conditions that caused it detroit had been declining financially for years because the automotive industry moved overseas and white people fled for the suburbs which shrank the tax base so the city had to make cuts then they went bankrupt in 2013. the guy who was appointed as emergency financial manager wasn't elected he wasn't accountable to anybody he was the one who just decided to shut everybody's water off clearly this was not a system in which people came together and agreed what to do they were not at the table but they were on the menu the idea behind the water shut-offs was to make it easier to sell the city's public water utility to private investors the homes that got foreclosed on were sold at auction which profited wayne county many of them were bought by private investors again who started demanding that their rightful owners pay rent in hell we wish we thought of that in this way we can see that the racial contract has an economic side to it scholar bernadette atwahene coins the term predatory cities cities that when they can't pay their bills start sucking the blood out of their own people for example say you're one of the people whose taxes got illegally raised well you could file a complaint with the city about it but the complaints department has been cut so much that it's now one woman named linda and linda has 15 000 cases you could scrape the money together somehow and pay it but you'll have to take a day off work and go across town and queue for five hours to pay it in person because there's no online billing at a certain point the system becomes a lot better at hurting you than it does at helping you and when that happens it's people who are already vulnerable who get hit the hardest and the racial contract also has a mental side the technical philosophy word here is epistemological epistemology is the study of knowledge for example remember that guy in the park who came up to me he probably thought that he was just being nice because part of what the sexual contract does is it blocks men from realizing what they're really doing if i had said to him can i help you with something why are you interrupting me he probably would have thought that i was the one who was being rude because as a woman my desire for privacy and security was not just secondary but almost unintelligible in the face of his desire to control my time and attention in the same way mild says that the racial contract can block white people from realizing what's really happening in detroit even after the evidence came out that what was happening was illegal and racist city officials kept saying but just pay your bills like they were so invested in the story of the social contract they couldn't see the truth the resident's desire for justice and fairness was almost unintelligible in the face of the city's desire to control their property and their resources the federal courts along with state and local government assume the existence of a valid and enforceable contract between black detroiters and the city of detroit undergirded and protected by civil rights law however this contract is a fiction impossible under the current social legal order despite formal guarantees to the contrary we had no right to expect due process responsive or competent government dignity decency or the basic ability to sustain our lives through the consumption of water now i never like to tell a client that that case is hopeless charles mills was optimistic that by including more people in the social contract things could get better like the idea of a system where everyone comes together and agrees what to do is great you just need to actually do it there were some people in detroit who got their water turned back on and their property tax is fixed it is also possible to overcome epistemological blocks it's not like one division where everybody's walking around hypnotized for example we could apply it to this video when i was done writing it i went back and i looked at the script and i realized that i explained patemen and then mills partly because it's chronological but partly because as a white woman it's easier for me to start with something that i kind of get and then build out but that's not true of everybody that's not a neutral way of presenting things that's my whiteness affecting how i gather and interpret knowledge and the fact that i can become aware of that suggests that maybe these blocks can be worked on but paytman is less cheery she says it's tempting to think that if we just include enough people in the social contract it'll get better but in her opinion it's always been built on the exploitation of the people who aren't at the table she says you can try and listen to a diversity of voices but diversity often just means that people get a chance to speak not that they're actually understood or given any power as your lawyer i can only tell you what the books say which strategy to pursue will be up to you but hopefully now that you know the facts of the case you can make a more informed decision and uh speaking of decisions there is the matter of my fee normally i would take your immortal soul to hell but patreon.com philosophytube is where you can sign up to pledge a couple of dollars a month in support of this show and speaking of shows i have a very exciting announcement some of you may know that when i'm not doing youtube i'm a professional actress and i have written a play it's called the prince it's about a bunch of characters in a shakespeare play who start to realize that they're all stuck inside a play kind of like the matrix if it was written in 1600 and it is going to be on in london at the southwark playhouse with me in it from the 14th of september until the 8th of october 8 shows a week a professional london theater run or a show that i have written it's got sword fighting it's got lesbianism the cast is amazing the crew are amazing it is going to be off the chain and if you would like to see it live ticket pre-sales are open now use the link in the doobly-doo to get them although i'd advise moving fast because there's about 5 000 tickets for the whole run and there's over a million philosophy tube subscribers and in two days time they go on sale to the general public when anyone can get them not just people with that special link so go go go this is like a little special exclusive window just for the fans of this show and if you're thinking that sounds amazing i really want to see the prince live but i didn't watch this video until a few days later and now there's no tickets left well don't worry babes because it's going to be professionally recorded and uploaded to nebula and a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of it is going on curiosity stream that's how the play was financed nebula and curiosity stream gave us some money to make it so for the love of god sign up to them as well nebula is a streaming platform that you've probably already heard of i and a few other creators all own a little piece of it there's no ads or algorithms there so it's a great place to try experimental stuff that wouldn't really work on youtube like the prince but if that isn't enough for you there's also a behind the scenes documentary on my nebula page about how philosophy tube gets made curiosity stream are also a streaming service they've got thousands of titles about art and science and history if you enjoyed today's stuff about carol paintman they have an exclusive crash course sociology series about the different waves of feminist theory that you might enjoy if you use the link in the description curiositystream.com philosophytube then you can get nebula and curiosity stream for 15 a year a year you can see a professional london theater show and the behind the scenes documentary about the making of it and all the other stuff that's on both platforms for 15 a year i am so excited for the prince like not only is it gonna be a hell of a show but also like as far as i know nothing like this has really been tried before a streaming service commissioning a play by a new queer writer as well like if this works which is to say if it sells tickets and people will sign up to nebula and curiosity stream then it could be a bit of a game changer for the acting industry so now more than ever click the link in the doobly-doo get your tickets sign up to your streaming services and i will see you on opening night [Music] [Music] the bad days [Music] is [Music] the bad days [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i can't give you more [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes i am [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now [Music] i'm a super proud [ __ ]