Patriarchal control over women is found in at least three paradigmatic contemporary contracts: the marriage contract, the prostitution contract and the surrogacy contract. Each of these contracts relates to men`s control over women or a particular man`s control over a particular woman. Under the terms of the marriage contract, a husband is granted the right of sexual access in most states of the United States, which prohibits the legal category of marital rape. Prostitution is a typical example of Pateman`s assertion that modern patriarchy demands equal access for men to women, especially sexual access, access to their bodies. And surrogacy can be understood as more of the same, albeit in terms of women`s access to reproductive abilities. All these examples show that the treaty is the means by which women are dominated and controlled. The Treaty is not the way to freedom and equality. Rather, it is a means, perhaps the most fundamental, by which patriarchy is maintained. The purpose of the social contract is to serve the common good or more in order to ensure the sustainability of the system in question and to protect the individuals who compose it. As such, the social contract generally guides moral behavior. For example, according to our implicit agreement, it is wrong to take actions that harm others, such as stealing, cheating, attacking or giving false testimony. The social contract is an essential element of democracy. In a democratic nation, government is supposed to be organized to serve the will of its citizens and, therefore, citizens are obliged to follow the laws and customs of the nation as long as the government fulfills its mandate and the legislation is considered to be in conformity with the social contract.

In the first Platonic dialogue, Crito, Socrates makes a convincing argument for why he must remain in prison and accept the death penalty instead of fleeing and going into exile in another Greek city. He personifies the laws of Athens and declares in their voice that he has acquired an overwhelming obligation to obey the laws because they made possible his entire way of life and even the fact of his existence. They allowed his mother and father to marry and thus have legitimate children, including himself. After the birth of the city of Athens, his laws required his father to take care of him and educate him. Socrates` life and how that life flourished in Athens depend on the laws. However, it is important that this relationship between citizens and the laws of the city is not enforced. When citizens have grown up and seen how the city behaves, they can choose to leave, take their property with them or stay. Staying implies an agreement to comply with the law and accept the sanctions they impose. And after concluding an agreement that is himself just, Socrates claims that he must respect this agreement he made and obey the laws, in this case by staying and accepting the death penalty. It is important to note that the treaty described by Socrates is implicit: it is implicit by his decision to stay in Athens, although he is free to leave. The starting point of most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition without a political order (called by Thomas Hobbes “the state of nature”). [4] In this state, the actions of the individual are bound only by his personal power and conscience.

From this common starting point, social contract theorists seek to show why rational individuals would willingly agree to give up their natural freedom in order to gain the benefits of the political order. Eminent theorists of the social contract and natural rights of the 17th and 18th centuries. Hugo Grotius (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797) approached the concept of political authority differently. Grotius postulated that individual human beings have natural rights. Thomas Hobbes said that in a “state of nature,” human life would be “lonely, poor, evil, brutal, and short.” Without political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the “right to all things” and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and kill; there would be an endless “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free people make contracts with each other to establish a political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they receive all the security in exchange for submitting to an absolute ruler, a man or a gathering of men. Although the ruler`s edicts may be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the frightening anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes claimed that people agree to give up their rights in favor of the absolute authority of the government (whether monarchical or parliamentary).

Alternatively, Locke and Rousseau argued that we receive civil rights in exchange for accepting the obligation to respect and defend the rights of others, while renouncing certain freedoms. 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 always be in such relationships (for example. B, the mother-child relationship) in order to develop the very 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. .