Social Contract Notes

Social Contract Notes People cannot live together successfully unless there is some basic agreement about the fundamentals of life that can be relied on to give predictability and order. Social Contract – an agreement between the members of a group which both explicitly and implicitly defines the rights and obligations of each member. All social contracts must, in some way, define for all members of the group how they can expect to be treated and how they are expected to treat others. There are various names for social contracts. Some examples include: -

Rules in games Manners in social situations Ethics in professional matters Laws in relation to the state

Freedom & power and equality & hierarchy are four important considerations which in some way are defined and distributed by the social contract. Power – the control an/or authority to act that one person has over another Power can be described in terms of: a) One individual over others b) An institution over individuals c) One country over another **Power is the ability to make others do something Equality - is the state of being equal in dignity, privileges, power, responsibility, etc with others in society. Hierarchy - is any system of people ranked into levels in which the higher levels have more dignity, privilege, power, responsibility, etc than do people in the lower levels.

Using your student agenda, create a list of items that would fall under the category of: a) b) c) d)

Freedom Power Hierarchy Equality

Example: Power

Freedom

Hierarchy

Equality