Social contracts, as well as racial and sexual ones, are attempts to establish equal relationships between people irrespective of their background, ethnicity, or gender. However, all these contracts are only illusory and do not meet the goals for which they were developed. The supremacy of a certain race or gender has been rooted in humanity for many centuries, which eventually raised logical questions of eliminating discrimination and gaining fairness for all.
Yet philosophers are unanimous in the opinion that the social contract in all its forms does not bring about the expected results. For instance, the social contract tradition states that the moral contract presupposes “preexisting objectivist morality” (Mills 14). As such, any society or country should live by a set of moral rules, even if there is no judicial system to control their fulfillment.
However, discrimination based on race, age, gender, and social status prevails in any society to varying degrees. Hence, it is impossible to agree that the presence of the social contract indeed makes societies pleasant environments for every person living in them. The notion of white supremacy, which is well-known but not officially recognized as a political system, hinders the efforts of many representatives of other races to succeed in life (Mills 1).
Meanwhile, in the sexual contract, women are only the subject, without being its party. The leading role of patriarchy has been ingrained in all societies for so many centuries that the sexual contract has become “a story of subjection” (Pateman 2). The contracts hold in the modern day, affecting how people live, communicate, and exercise their rights.
For instance, women do not receive the same pay as men for absolutely equal responsibilities. At the same time, since they are the only ones who can bear children, they are limited in their right to continue working. Moreover, they are often deprived of the right to stay at home and look after their children. Many companies deny females the right to maternity leave, while many others fire pregnant women without allowing them to provide for themselves financially. These cases bring up the question of the sexual contract once again, since political rights are primarily based on conjugal rights, and this fact has been grounded in history for ages (Pateman 3). The question of abortion is one more critical issue since by prohibiting women from making choices on whether to terminate pregnancy, societies violate their right to control their body and their lives.
What is more, on many occasions, the abortion policies and regulations are controlled by men, who are responsible for pregnancy as well as women, but do not bear the burden of actually carrying the baby. It is not the material property that matters most of all regarding the social contract. In fact, the real value that ultimately matters is a person’s ability to control their own lives and not be told by others what they should or can do (Pateman 5). Therefore, there is a pressing need for an emancipatory reconfiguration of the social contract overall and its respective subtypes (Keating 108). Instead of excluding people with low incomes, women, and people of color from the social contract, it is necessary to actively include them to create a truly equal society for all individuals.
Works Cited
Keating, Christine. Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India. Penn State University Press, 2011.
Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.
Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press, 1988.