In the first Platonic dialogue, Crito, Socrates convincingly explains why he must remain in prison and accept the death penalty instead of fleeing and going into exile in another Greek city. He embodies the laws of Athens and declares that with their voice he has acquired an overwhelming obligation to obey the laws because they have made possible his entire way of life and even the fact of his very 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. Citizens, when they are adults and have seen how the city behaves, 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 has concluded and obey the laws, in this case by suspending 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. Over the centuries, philosophers like Socrates have tried to describe the ideal social contract and explain how existing social contracts evolved.
The philosopher Stuart Rachels suggests that morality is the set of rules that govern behavior that rational people accept, provided that others accept them as well. The concepts behind the theory of social contracts come from ancient Greek philosophers: Socrates used a theoretical argument to explain to Krito why he must submit to prison and the death penalty in accordance with the law. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes expanded the theory of social contracts during the Enlightenment; Since then, philosophers from different perspectives have contributed to our understanding of the theory. Following Pateman`s reasoning, a number of feminists have also questioned the nature of the person at the center of contract theory. The liberal individual, the entrepreneur, is represented by the Hobbesian man, the owner of Locke, Rousseau`s “Noble Savage”, the person of Rawls in the initial position and Gauthier`s Robinson Crusoe. The liberal individual is supposed to be universal: raceless, genderless, classless, disembodied, and is seen as an abstract, generalized model of humanity that is capitalized. However, many philosophers have argued that if we take a closer look at the characteristics of the liberal individual, we do not find a representation of universal humanity, but a specific type of person historically localized. It .B Macpherson, for example, argued that the Hobbesian man is in particular a bourgeois man, with the qualities we would expect from a person during the emerging capitalism that characterized modern Europe.
Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a specific, historical, and embodied person. (As well as race-conscious philosophers like Charles Mills, discussed below.) Specifically, they argued that the person at the center of liberal theory and the social contract is gendered. Christine Di Stefano shows in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from the point of view of masculinity as it is conceived in modernity. She argues that Hobbes` conception of the liberal individual, which laid the foundation for the dominant modern conception of the person, is particularly masculine because it is conceived as atomistic and solitary, and owes none of its qualities or even its very existence to another person, especially to his mother. Hobbes` man is thus radically individual, in a way that is specifically due to the character of modern masculinity. Virginia Held argues in her 1993 book Feminist Morality that social contract theory is implicitly based on an idea of the person that can be described as an “economic person.” The “economic man” is primarily concerned with maximizing his own individual interests, and he enters into contracts to achieve this goal. However, the “economic man” does not represent all people at all times and in all places. In particular, it does not adequately represent children and those who provide them with the care they need, who have been women in the past.
The model of the “economic man” cannot therefore rightly claim to be a general representation of all people. Similarly, Annette Baier argues that Gauthier`s notion that the liberal individual enters into the social contract to maximize his or her own individual interests is gender-specific because it does not take seriously either the situation of children or that of the women who are usually responsible for caring for those children. .