Diversity and the social contract

The citizens of the world have become increasingly mobile, and formerly separated cultures have begun intermixing with much greater frequency. Social contract theory, as currently conceived, is ill suited to address the political problems brought on by a more diverse society because it assumes a great amount of homogeneity amongst political actors. Though political theory has always attempted to mediate disagreements over preferences of social outcomes, it has assumed that those who disagree have far more in common: everyone sees the disagreement in the same way, and they all fall back on a core set of universal beliefs. This assumption is a fundamental problem for articulating theories of justice in the contemporary context of diverse societies. This project articulates a theory of justice for diverse societies. Key to this aim is the notion of a perspective. Perspective provides a theoretical framework for reframing social contract theory, allowing us to precisely articulate the ways in which people differ in reasoning. It is through the lens of perspective that I develop a novel moral stance: the View From Everywhere. This replaces the universalism of the Original Position and the View From Nowhere with a socially-defined consensus-finding procedure that determines where we have fundamental moral disagreements, and where political unanimity is not suggestive of stable political beliefs. I then leverage this viewpoint to provide an alternative notion of the social contract that is based on minimal agreement. Agents can not only disagree about the desirability of particular outcomes, but also how to define the options. Rather than suppose that people with different core views and values simply cannot productively speak to each other, I outline an approach to political bargaining that creates socially optimal outcomes. The primary consequence of this theory is that it replaces liberal toleration with active embracing of diversity in society. I show that not only should we tolerate the fact of diversity, but that we benefit from the value of diversity. Thus, by properly articulating the notion of diversity in our political theories, we discover its value