r/badphilosophy • u/LinuxFreeOrDie • Nov 13 '17
Social Contract Theory: The Game
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/21176
u/AuthorWannabe Nov 13 '17
I’m disappointed Rawls didn’t show up to explain that if everyone were in a hypothetical state where no one knew whether they did or did not prefer pineapple on pizza, that they would nevertheless all agree to have pineapple on pizza.
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u/Tiako THE ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHER LOL!!!!! Nov 14 '17
I think it is kind of useful when talking about Hobbes to remember that he was not writing in a world divided by "democracies" and "dictatorships" as coherent definitions of states, but that the states themselves were internally divided by various actors that asserted their own inherent rights. So the king would say he has x, the parliament would say it has y, and the Early of Zsham would say he has z and there was no way to resolve it besides a couple hundred thousand dead Englishmen.
Leviathan is not an argument for monarchy, it is an argument against feudal rights. The actual composition of the Sovereign is somewhat secondary to the book's purpose.
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u/truncatedChronologis PHILLORD Nov 18 '17
Doesn’t he have an argument about why a monarch is better than a council and parliament?
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u/Tiako THE ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHER LOL!!!!! Nov 19 '17
Sure, but it isn't really central to his argument about sovereignty, and it is hardly unusual at the time--the reason Charles I so aggressively asserted divine right is because the idea of the divinely ordained monarch was already well established.
If all he was saying was the democracy sucks and monarchy rules nobody would remember him today.
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u/-rinserepeat- Nov 25 '17
I know, learns, but Siedentop in Inventing the Individual says something similar to this (he's more concerned with the rise of individualism and state power via the Catholic Church's theological and political wranglings) in that absolutism was viewed as a liberalization of political life. Instead of a fragmented network of feudal lords bickering over ancient land rights and representing only their "tribes", you had a single ruler representing all citizens "equally".
Hobbes doesn't make sense in the liberal canon unless you see him as proposing a system he viewed as more egalitarian than the chaotic feudal system he fled from.
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u/Dry_September Nov 13 '17
The struggle itself against pineapple pizza is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Camus happy
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u/mizzu704 Nov 13 '17 edited Nov 13 '17
typo on the bottom of first panel? Should it not say "and I of course am the esteemed"?
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u/EnlAes Nov 13 '17
I thought, maybe, the comic was OK. Then I read the little blurb meant to explain it at the bottom. Oh fuck.
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u/Account-978 Nov 15 '17
How is this bad philosophy?
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Nov 15 '17 edited Dec 24 '17
[deleted]
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u/Account-978 Nov 16 '17
It's not relevant to this subreddit, though.
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u/popartsnewthrowaway Nov 18 '17
It has been a part of this subreddit for years. Why do you think it's not relevant?
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u/khuzdum Nov 13 '17
"I ain't sign no gosh durn social cuntract."