Eudaimonist said:
As judged by who? You? Other formulations have been put forth and been found convincing, at least as possibilities, by others. That's enough.
Good heavens - there's no need to escalate this into rancor.
"Successfully formulated" - as in actually systematized and held up for discussion and debate. Moved out of the larval stage. Whether I or anyone else thinks they hold water is hardly germaine to the point of whether the formulation is successful. I think that Maoism is a travesty in nearly every way - doesn't change the fact that it's a well-articulated philosophy.
Ayn Rand never advocated "greed" in the popular sense of the term.
Ayn Rand argued that all property was private (that there was no such thing as community or public ownership), and that the best destiny of the rational person was in the pursuit of wealth via means of reason and enlightened self-interest. She then defined enlightened self-interest in a way that suited her personal tastes, and a cult grew up around her that resulted in further distortions to her notion of self-interest into something that looked very like common greed and self-aggrandizement.
I am not saying that Rand didn't have anything valuable to say - far from it! Her voice came at a time when it was much needed, when individualism was under attack from both the left and the right. She articulated well a philosophy of personal responsibility and the supremacy of reason.
None of this, however, changes what she became or what her philosophy, in its full flower, became. Her lack of nuance and restraint with regards to her own self-interest turned her movement into something truly monstrous. But I would never try to dissuade someone from reading Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, and from thinking long and hard on the valuable lessons that both books present.
No, there is no need for a "social contract". People can do what they believe to be right because they believe it to be right, and not because they think other people will play along.
You are completely misapprehending what a social contract is. The term "social contract" describes the unwritten law that exists between people and their neighbors in *every culture and society in human history.* Generally speaking, the larger and more metropolitan the society, the more liberal the social contract is. This has nothing to do with only doing the right thing if other people play along. Social Contracts are descriptive, nor prescriptive. Social revolutions change the terms of the contract all the time.
The question underlying all of this is "why do people believe to be right what they believe to be right?" And the answer is far more sophistocated than "it's just so."
Socrates went against moral norms, not with them. Also, I'd bet that much morality originated at the point of a sword, rather than some voluntary agreement. There are plenty of possibilities here.
All societies emerge at the point of the sword - so I hardly see how this is relevant. The fact is that people behave in the way that minimizes their friction in life (thus, voluntary agreement) unless they get a burr under their saddle about something. Humans manifestly have the capacity for moral outrage and revolution, and engage in these pursuits frequently - - these are, in fact, the very means by which social contracts develop, evolve, and are overwritten.
Your criticisms seem very unfocused, but perhaps that is because you took social contract to mean something other than I had in mind. I hope that my meaning is clearer now. The question I had for you is "Can you point me towards any ethical philosophies that are unconnected to a social contract of some sort?" I have never seen one, and I've been doing ethical philosophy for nearly a decade now. I am, however, happy to be proven wrong.
Oh, a point in your column on this one, though is that sociobiology and neuropsychology (Pinker, Wilson, et.al.) are forcing the notions of the starting point for ethical philosophy to be adjusted and rewritten, giving the social contract a biological basis rather than a purely social one. The fun and interesting part comes in the wide variance that is built upon the common biological bed.
-Lokmer