What of people who do not have a reasonable option to leave? Can the law not be applied to them?

And more importantly, what of people who decide to stay but explicitly confirm that they do not want to be a part of the social contract, benefits or otherwise? The option to leave is important because people staying when they could leave is an indication that they accept the town rules, and that indication could be overruled by an even stronger indication (explicit statement) to the contrary.

If you argue that people should be forced between leaving the state or accepting its laws regardless of their personal consent, then you need a moral justification for that, and we run into the same problem from before.

It's not a Lockean justification for rights, yet contractualists use is to justify a Lockean conception of what natural rights are (moral facts). You are either not properly distinguishing between Lockean arguments and Lockean conclusions, or you really do not see the incoherency between the justification and the idea that it is meant to support. Either way, the inconsistency remains.

If you source moral and legal authority from a social contract, then no, you can't apply the law to people who are not part of that contract. That is what "willing agreement" means.

To prevent people who do not agree with the town rules from entering the town, you need a moral law that allows limiting their freedom in that way. And of course, that law can't be the town rules, because they're not part of the town, and because if that were the case you'd fall into infinite regress.

So if you want to justify applying legal codes outside of willing participants, you need something beyond consent to justify that.

Try Hobbes.

Contractualists don't rely on either type of consent. They try to make rights do things only an argument from consent could jusify. The conception of rights and justifications don't fit each other. Thus, internally inconsistent.

This is Locke's argument for Political Authority, not natural rights.

There is no misunderstanding, the view is internally inconsistent

This is outright false. Locke saw rights as God given natural facts, not based on any kind of consent, implicit or otherwise. You are talking nonsense.

>You can argue the "social contract" is the willing acceptance of a group's rules in order to obtain in-group or social benefits

You can, that would be implicit (or explicit) consent, which is not the view argued in the article (theoretical consent - the idea that people would consent if they were rational).

You can certainly support a view of rights that is based in implicit or explicit consent to a(n actual) social contract, but then you'd run into the problem of not being able to apply those rules and restrictions to people who explicitly do not consent to the social contract.

As for whether modern social contracts maximize personal wellbeing, and whether the survival of such contracts or the apparent mass consent to them is indication of such is an entire discussion to have, and one that I'll not participate in for now, if you can forgive me for that. However, as for the question of whether that Lockean view, it isn't. I'd say your view (and this depends on how you view "benefit" and "unfairness") is closer to Utilitarianism. I'm not familiar with J.S Mill's theory of rights, but I'd guess his position is somewhat similar.

Of course it has. Implicit consent (and other less popular "consent replacements") has been an argued position since Rousseau's time.

I've skimmed over the articles you posted and haven't seen anything to suggest that the view I ascribed to you is inaccurate.

You've done neither in regards to this specific understanding (or rather, simply changing the meaning of a term) of "social contracts".

Your arguments do not fit the position you're arguing for, as they imply an actual contract and not Lockean rights in a poor disguise.

This does not answer the problem. Noting that consent is based on underlying principles doesn't do anything to give authority to hypothetical consent, nor is hypothetical consent the only possible value to base actual consent on.

All you've done is to (again) reduce yourself to a Lockean position in more steps, as the law that you base rights on is agent-independent. And so, the social contract based justifications you give in the article still aren't applicable, and the terminology used is still misappropriated.

For a procedure to create something it must be actual, not hypothetical. If what you call a "social contract" is nothing but an expression of reason, then, again, that's just a Lockean view and the term "social contract" is misappropriated.

Like I said before, your position is self-inconsistent as it tries to use social contract based justifications without including an actual social contract, but simply "something else" (rationality) that you use the words "social contract" for.

If your contractual procedure is hypothetical - a thought experiment for the philosopher to discover rights, then your position is simply that moral rights exist in nature, the same as Locke.

>Not all views of an objective morality pre-existing the state are Lockean

This is certainly true, and it is not my intention to discuss all views of objective morality existing before the state, just yours. Which I insist, is Lockean in its conception and justification, as it sees rights as a natural component of reality that is imposed on agents. It is not surprising, considering (as I'm sure you know), Kant's philosophy was largely a response to the Empiricist school Locke belonged to, and he operated from largely the same groundwork as they did. Kant's view is, in the way that matters for this discussion, Lockean, and it is definitely (even more so than your view) not a social contract based view. Thus, my previous argument, that your justifications are not applicable to your view, still stands regardless of whether you personally trace your inspiration to Kant or Locke.

If your "social" "contract" (which is, as it seems, neither social nor a contract) is a metaphor, then I'm sorry but you've literally got a Lockean view with an extra, unnecessary step. Let me demonstrate:

Here is a classic Lockean view:

1. The laws of morality are imposed on us.
2. Those laws include rights and duties.
3. We have rights and duties.

Here is an actual social contract based view:

1. We agree (implicitly or explicitly, but actually) to a social contract.
2. This social contract includes rights and duties.
3. We have rights and duties.

Lastly, here is your view:

1. The laws of rationality are imposed on us.
2. Those laws require us to exist under a "social contract".
3. This "social contract" includes rights and duties.
4. We have rights and duties.

It is immediately apparent that your view is just an extended take on the first, Lockean view. The "social contract" in your view doesn't actually do any explanatory work, and so can't address the problems of justification and source. Your proposed solution is simply taking the solution that would be applicable in an actual social contract driven view, and trying to apply it in a view that, when examined closely, does not feature a social contract at all. When you start talking about "principles that people would reasonably agree to" rather than "principles that people actually (though perhaps implicitly) agree to", you've completely removed the consent element and thus removed your argument from being applicable for consent-based justifications. This isn't to mean that this position is unjustifiable, but the justification will need to be a Lockean one, as you're arguing for a Lockean view.

Again, since your "social contract" isn't really a contract at all, and basically collapses into "rationality," you inadvertently end up with a Lockean view. Having the words "social contract" in your article isn't enough to disprove this point when you do nothing to show the presence of an actual social contract. All it is is terminology salad.

If what you call the moral universe predates the social contract, then what you have is a Lockean view of natural rights, not a social contract based one.

For a view of natural rights to be rooted in a social contract, it needs an actual social contract to work, not a law of nature disguised as a social contract by inconsistent terminology.

If one is not a part of the social contract, then saying that they "don't have the right to commit crimes" is incoherent as a right/obligation analysis doesn't apply to them.

If the social contract is just a theoretical device for the philosopher to discover the natural rights, then you've just given a Rawlsian-like justification to Lockean natural rights, but you haven't actually shown where those rights come from or what gives them weight.

An undesirable state of being, which can be but isn't necessarily convergent with pain. For example, the muscle pain from an intense work-out wouldn't be called "suffering" by most people, but intense depression would, despite not being painful. This is, incidentally, how most people use the word.

Either way, it's definitely not "pain so intense and prolonged that it makes people avoid it at all costs, including suicide", because in that case, the term "moderate suffering" would be a self-contradiction, and that's just absurd and definitely not common-sensical.

If you're genuinely curious about the question of defining suffering, I can elaborate or offer some reading recommendations, but otherwise, I'd like to go back to topic, which is that existential confusion/dread/suffering (call it as you will, the term is secondary in its importance) is relevant to the majority of mankind regardless of living conditions or physical state, thus your initial claim that the problem is irrelevant to most still fails.

There's nothing "common" about that intuition, and you just invented a new meaning to the word suffering that's in line with your argument, so it's begging the question as well.

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Either way this is a poor game of semantics and the point still stands. If we accept your unusual definition to suffering, then your argument becomes far less relevant, because barely anyone is experiencing that degree of suffering, meaning purpose-seeking is still relevant to the vast majority of mankind. If we do not accept it (which I see no reason to), then your argument is false as people in suffering do have a use for purpose-seeking. So your argument is either false or irrelevant.

A feeling of absurdity and nihilism is a type of suffering. It's not called "existential dread" for the comfy feeling it gives people, after all.

Also, the idea that seems to be rooted in this comment (and other comments that you posted in this thread), that people in poor living conditions or poor physical conditions aren't faced with existential crises or nihilism because "they're too busy getting out of their suffering" is both incredibly condescending and betrays an utter lack of familiarity with said people. In actuality, it is the people who are faced with challenging lives that tend to be the most sensitive to the absurdity of it all, rather than people who happened to benefit from said absurdity.