ȃȈǿ Partʺʺ: Politics and PhilosophyBuchanan (ȀȈȆȄb, pp.ȀȁȂ,ȀȁȄ) distinguishes between constitutional
and postconstitutional stages of decisionmaking and envisages agree-
ment or “conceptual” agreement at the constitutional stage as authorizing
“apparent coercion” and “apparent redistribution” at the postconstitutional
stage. By such fictions, realities like actual coercion and actual redistribu-
tion are interpreted away. Ļey vanish into the realm of the merely “appar-
ent” by being deemed in accordance with some agreement that may itself
be merely “conceptual.”
Even punishment, in Buchanan’s view (ȀȈȆȄa, p.ȀȈȁn.) implements
a contract. “In a genuine contractarian theory, there is no problem raised
concerning the ‘right’ of some persons to punish others, since, in effect,
individuals who find themselves in the implicit social contract that any
social order presupposes have presumably chosen to be punished as the
law directs when they violate law.” Here the word “presumably” seems to
mean “conceptually” in Buchanan’s sense.
Further evidence of the contractarians’ reliance on fictions is that
Buchanan and many other commentators accept John Rawls’s (ȀȈȆȀ) char-
acterization of his own method as contractarian. Actually, no social con-
tract at all is involved in Rawls’s derivation of his principles of justice.
Instead, Rawls employs elaborate fictions (about deliberations behind a
“veil of ignorance”) in more or less disguising—perhaps even from him-
self—his total reliance on his own intuitions. (It astonishes me how many
eminent scholars swallow Rawls’s own characterization of his approach.
Among the apparent minority who do identify what Rawls actually does
are Hare n.d., and GrayȀȈȆȇ.)
No one need object to fictions if they are heuristically useful—if they
stimulate the flow of ideas. Nor is it necessarily objectionable to employ
fictions and figures of speech for expository and stylistic purposes. But
a doctrine should notdepend on them. Ideas that defy expression in
straightforward, nonmetaphorical language incur deserved doubt by that
very fact.
Contractarians might strengthen their case by occasionally present-
ing it, if they can, without resort to their favorite fictions. In doing so,
however, they would be bound to erase sharp distinctions between their
approach and the supposedly despicable truth-judgment approach. Ļe
version of the latter advocated in this paper does lead to much the same
individualistic values as contractarianism, but its conceptual apparatus and
expository style are quite different—more straightforward, and charier of
fictions.