The Public Conscience of the Law

Abstract

The idea that a reciprocal relationship is at the foundation of our normative order is central to the modern social contract tradition, from Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century to the present. According to that tradition, at least as it is commonly understood, our obligation of obedience to the prescriptions of our rulers stems from the consent of the governed expressed in either an actual or a hypothetical contract. Hume subjected the claim that an actual contract binds future generations to withering criticism. And the alternative claim that there is a hypothetical contract, one to which reasonable individuals would consent, and to which one can thus infer that actual individuals do consent, has been similarly scorned. Nevertheless, the idea survives and was given new life by John Rawls in the twentieth century in his essay ‘Justice as Reciprocity,’1 and more elaborately in A Theory of Justice.2