The central idea of social contract theories, as we have pointed out, is that consultation with the parties should model the problem of justifying “you and me.” Now, this pulls the theories of the social contract in two opposite directions. On the one hand, if the considerations of the hypothetical parties are to model our problem and their conclusions are to be relevant to us, the parties must be similar to us. The closer the parties are to “you and me,” the better their deliberations will guide you and me and be relevant to us. On the other hand, the purpose of contractual theories is to advance our problem of justification by constructing parts that are idealizations of you and me, suggesting that some idealization is necessary and beneficial. Recognizing that certain forms of idealization are problematic does not mean that we should embrace what Gaus called “justifying populism,” that every person in a society must actually accept the social and moral institutions in question (Gaus 1996, 130-131). Such a standard would take us back to the old tradition of the social contract based on direct consent. But as we argue in § 3, modern contractual theories are about appeals to our reason, not our self-binding power of consent. Philip Pettit (born 1945) argued in Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997) that the theory of the social contract, which is classically based on the consent of the governed, should be changed. Instead of advocating explicit consent, which can always be produced, Pettit argues that the absence of effective rebellion against him is the only legitimacy of a treaty. A people must decide what the respective roles of these three sectors should be, including: The concept of a social safety net is intrinsically part of the social contract. The social contract should be as explicit as possible about the degree of transparency expected from government, business and civil society. Feminist philosophers like Baier and Held theorize from the emerging tradition of nursing ethics, arguing that social contract theory fails as an appropriate representation of our moral or political obligations.

The theory of social contracts generally only goes so far as to delimit our rights and obligations. But this may not be enough to adequately reveal the full extent of what it means to be a legal person and how to fully respond to others with whom one interacts through addictive relationships. Baier argues that Gauthier, who understands the emotional bonds between people as immaterial and voluntary, therefore does not represent the fullness of human psychology and motivation. She argues that this therefore leads to a crucial error in the theory of social contracts. Liberal moral theory is, in fact, parasitic on the relationships between people from which it seeks to free us. While Gauthier argues that the more we can consider affective relationships as voluntary, the freer we are, we must nevertheless act primarily in such relationships (e.B. of the mother-child relationship) to develop exactly the skills and qualities praised by liberal theory. In other words, certain types of dependencies are necessary above all if we want to become exactly the kind of people who can enter into contracts and agreements. Similarly, Held argued that the “businessman” model does not capture much of what constitutes meaningful moral relationships between people. The understanding of human relations in purely contractual terms represents, according to their argument, “an impoverished vision of human aspiration” (194). It therefore suggests that we consider other models of human relationships when seeking to better understand morality.

In particular, it offers the paradigm of the mother-child relationship to at least complement the model of selfish individual agents negotiating contracts with each other. Such a model is more in line with many of the moral experiences of most people, especially women. Thus, the ultimate goal of social contract theories is to show in the more general than social sense (moral, political, legal, etc.). Rules can be rationally justified. However, this does not distinguish the social contract from other approaches to moral and political philosophy, all of which attempt to show that moral and political rules are rationally justifiable in some sense. The real peculiarity of the social contract approach is that justification is not based on exogenous reason or truth. Justification is characterized by rational consent (or lack thereof in T.M. Scanlon`s version), not for the reasons that generate consent. That is, the fact that everyone in a society would accept a particular rule or principle based on their individual reasoning is the crucial justification for that rule and not certain just or reasonable reasons that would be appreciated by sufficiently rational individuals and, if valued, would lead to an agreement. .