Choosing the Social Contract
Towards a higher good
If there’s one thing I hate about humans, it’s cheating. Not like infidelity cheating—love is love—I mean the penchant humans have for breaking the rules when they think they won’t get caught
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I’ve talked about hierarchies of morality before, but for those who haven’t been here as long as I have I can summarize: being good because of your fear of punishment is pretty much as immoral as you can get. It’s also where my pessimistic brain puts nearly all of humanity. From not washing their hands or embellishing their achievements, to smuggling contraband like illegal fireworks, to recreational drug use and underage drinking, all the way to really serious stuff (think domestic abuse) and beyond, people will commit any harmful behavior they can when they think no one is watching. Even I—a shining example of enlightenment and the living embodiment of the universal good—snuck a beer at age 19 during a power outage.
Certainly not all these things are evil deeds and some of them may even be morally justified. To distinguish between these (and for the duration of this article) I propose the social contract as the binary definition of good and bad. As I am defining it here, the social contract is as follows:
Do no harm (by action or inaction)
Leave no trace or leave things better than you found them
Treat everyone with equal dignity and respect
Listen before taking action; help when you can, support when you can’t
You can substitute your own definition of the contract, or actually any system of morality in here (I’m not the boss of you), but these will be the assumed principles for this article. In fact, they will be used an objective definition of the right thing to do in any given situation, but only for the purposes of this article. Morality and codes of ethics are anathema to my view of being good: they remove the need for introspection and nuance; they just make the logic of this article simpler.
The opposite of the social contract is freedom and choice.
Freedom and choice are wonderful things, don’t get me wrong. I fully support self-actualization, autonomy, independence, and personal liberty. They are the greatest opponents of real evils like dogmatism, blind utilitarianism, and just generally a really important part of social justice. However, freedom and choice defy the concept of a binding contract by nature. Any principle of the contract can be ignored or violated on a whim in the name of freedom and choice.
The trick is to allow as much freedom and choice as possible without infringing on the social contract.
The final note I want to make here is the impact of technology. Spoiler: this is not an article about technology. Technology in this article is a magic wand to solve problems in a specific way in order to look at the ethical considerations of certain implementations of solutions to violations of the social contract. With all that out of the way, let’s get to some case studies.
Case Study 1: Driving over the Speed Limit
If you have driven a car you know the situation. No matter how fast you go, someone is always going faster. Maybe they have a good reason, maybe they are just an asshole; it actually doesn’t matter. The speed limit is one measure of driving too fast, but it is not the only measure—driving the speed limit during torrential rain or on glare ice is certainly not safe. I personally think everyone who doesn’t follow the speed limit adjusted (down only) for road conditions is an agent of evil, but I’m neurodivergent and, again, not the boss of you.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (source) in 2023 speeding killed 11,775 people: a contributing factor in 29% of all traffic fatalities. Certainly many of these were the driver themself, but it also includes bystanders, other drivers, and passengers. Thus, speeding is a violation of the social contract: it does harm by action. It’s a decision that actively reduces your life expectancy and that of those around you.
So how do we convince people not to speed?
One idea I’ve championed since childhood is tattling. This could be reports of witnesses, speed cameras, or sensors built into vehicles themselves. Now, snitching and tattling get a bad rap. Indeed lives have been unjust destroyed by false witnesses (RIP Emmett Till and Jeanne d’Arc). Also, how would car sensors be able to detect speeds AND speed limits? My genius idea is embedding beacons in roads that broadcast the speed to sensors in cars that when in violation in turn send a signal to some sort of roadside connected device that tells on you. But remember, technology is our panacea: it just works. Magic.
Speeding now never goes unnoticed.
Case Study 2: Wage Gaps and Hiring Discrimination
The wage gap in America is real.
When I was young and naive I believed in efficient markets. Surely, if a business could get the same quality of work from an African-American woman (and if you don’t believe that they could, you are a complete piece of shit: Leave Now), then white men would be underrepresented in the market. In fact, black women earn 65 cents on the dollar (source). But wait you say, that’s because they are not employed in high-paying fields; they aren’t the same quality of work! Yes, indeed: the most underqualified white man is still viewed as more qualified than the black woman: that’s hiring discrimination.
Switching populations, 82% of transgender women have experienced discrimination or harassment at work (source). A third of them don’t tell their bosses they are transgender (me!), and 70% mask their behavior: not using the restroom or altering their appearance, voice, or mannerisms to hide who they are. LGBTQ people are twice as likely to have left a job due to harassment. 60% of transgender people make less than $50,000 a year (median earnings for men are $71,090, source). Transgender individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed (source) and 44% are underemployed (25% for the general population).
Now, this is clearly a violation of the social contract and people are clearly not being accorded equal respect and also doing harm by action, or inaction.
So how are we going to catch the perpetrators!?
The first step is to make all wages public knowledge. Keeping wages a secret is the easiest way for companies to pay people less since, largely, we don’t know how much are coworkers are earning. Many companies will actually go so far as to penalize sharing salary information—clearly displaying that they know what they are doing is wrong. But if everyone knew you were getting a raise they’d want one too! Cool. If they deserve one they should get one.
Second, all workers across all industries should earn the same base pay. This base pay should be indexed to the rate of inflation and represent the actual cost of living. Feel free to make a graduated scale based on seniority (though that should be based on years employed anywhere). Personally, I’d just do this as a Universal Basic Income, but this is a viable alternative—it just requires additional safeguards for people unable to work.
Third, bonuses and supplemental payments should be paid out based on firmly set and universally applied criteria. For example, an expensive locality might pay everyone working there a certain allowance to combat higher costs of living; dangerous or otherwise odious jobs could set bonuses to attract interest; in-demand jobs or highly skilled jobs could pay additional amounts to lure people to them. Additional bonuses could be paid out for accomplishing certain key performance indicators (commission or coming in on-time and on-budget). The key is, no one earns more because of “merit” or anything else that reeks of bias.
Fourth, interviews and promotions need to be made on objective criteria and made without interference of bias or prejudice. How this might work is that the decision is made by outsiders with the objective facts related to the criteria presented with no identifying marks visible to the people making the decision.
Now that all of these factors are made clearly public it is easy to audit them and ensure that decisions were made fairly and without bias. Technology magic could make this happen with better accounting and documentation and AI to flag discrepancies.
Punishments
Option 1: Fines
If you know me well you know where this is going to go. There is a leftist meme that states “If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the [poor]” (purportedly sourced from Final Fantasy Tactics—it’s not actually in the game; source). It’s something I think about a lot. A friend of mind noted it’s actually worse than that: it’s not a crime it's a transaction. When you see that BMW speed by you, it’s not because BMW drivers can’t read numbers (which is 100% factual), but rather it’s a system like E-ZPass (which in Minnesota is a whole can of worms in itself since enforcement is once again only if you get caught by a state patrol officer and I heard a rumor there is only like 1 in the state…) They pay a certain agreed upon amount of money and they get a benefit of faster commutes.
Obviously this is not acceptable. The fine could scale immensely (losing your car, losing your house, whatever) but it will always impact the poor more than the rich.
Option 2: Losing Time
Time is something that everyone has an equal amount of (sort of: rich people have longer life-expectancies. Unless we eat the rich). It’s definitely more fair than fines, but again it still impacts the poor more harshly: if the CEO of a company is detained by the police for 8 hours when they are supposed to be at work, that’s basically a fine to the company and an annoyance to the CEO; but if a service industry worker misses a day of work they are not only at risk of being fired—they might even get a permanent ban from their industry thanks to shit hiring practices—they will certainly not get paid.
Option 3: Enter the Social Contract
Now here’s where things get interesting!
If the social contract is universally applied and valued, the penalty for violating the social contract is social ostracization. Imagine what this could mean. Social Ostracization that scales with the severity of the infringement.
your family and friends abandon you
you will never be hired again
no one will lend you money
shopkeepers and service employees refuse your money
hospitals refuse to treat you
Now that’s a penalty that impacts everyone.
Justice Tempered by Mercy
Now, if you’ve followed thus far you may have noticed a huge and glaring problem: there is no room for nuance, interpretation, or extraneous factors. This is what we lose by enforcing the social contract mechanically.
Thus, I propose a system of appeals.
If the decisions made doesn’t sit right with anyone involved, they should be allowed to challenge it. For example, if you had to speed up to avoid an accident, you should be allowed to challenge that judgement. If there was no decision you could have made that wouldn’t have violated the contract, that should be appealed. If the decision rendered is clearly nonsensical it should not stand.
There are certainly some challenges to these appeals:
appeals might be abused, so there needs to be a way to penalize those who make spurious and unsupported claims
adjudication of claims is open to bias and prejudice
the timeliness of an appeal might be critical, in which case perhaps the punishment can be delayed where necessary
These are serious challenges and will require more thought than I’m capable of giving them (I’ve been typing for over 2 hours). In fact, perhaps this whole thought experiment is flawed. I am certainly not sure I support it 100%. It clearly doesn’t need to be used for every possible application.
The problem is, human beings can not be trusted to do the right thing, yet. We need guardrails in place to ensure that no one commits a serious infraction of the contract thinking no one will notice.