SPECIAL NOTE:
The reader will only be able to understand the purpose and meaning of this annotation and its relationship to the Natural Social Contract (NSC), if s/he has first read the Introduction section of the NSC and its explanatory and elucidating annotation.
1) In spite of the primary responsibility of each human for hirself and the knowledge of each human being mainly about hirself, it is the thesis of the Theory of Social Meta-Needs that sufficient commonality exists among humans that there is a set of Actions that any human can take or refrain from taking, which can have a range of effects on others and hirself all the way from great Harm to enormous Benefit. By discerning ahead of time what are the principles governing such Actions (including the limitations and exceptions to the general rules of such principles - as part of the principles themselves) that will clearly Benefit others or will clearly Harm others, and by persuading others to act according to these same principles toward hir, a human can effectively relieve hirself from much of the need to Estimate the risks and Benefits of every single Action that s/he takes. In addition, if s/he can rely upon other humans to Act in a similar mutually Beneficial manner, then s/he will have reason to more strongly cultivate hir potential to receive Benefit from the Actions of others because s/he can be more certain that the reciprocal potential for Harm will not be realized. (When one opens oneself to Benefiting from InterAction with others by trusting them, one also opens oneself to more easily being Harmed by those same others.) Thus, with such a Social System in place, each human can open hirself up to the Beneficial Actions of others, reduce time spent Protecting hirself from them or seeking Restitution for the Harm from their Violations, and, generally, spend more of hir limited resources on Benefiting hirself and, indirectly, others. This then is the purpose of the Natural Social Contract - to provide the framework under which the Actions of humans will be able to cause the least Harm and enable the most Benefit for one another, and thus, to allow each human to put most of hir resources directly toward the production of goods, services and other Actions which Benefit both hirself and others.
2) The Social order that the NSC seeks to create can be described as one which enables a human to maximize the scope of hir Rational Actions. However, a human's Freedom (Available Actions) is not increased maximally by a Social order that merely prevents others from reducing hir Liberty by means of Social Constraints. It is increased far more by a Social order in which, in addition, the Freely Chosen Actions of others create more Choices for hir. These unseen choices - ones that could have been available - are one of the major phenomena that many people do not take into account when they criticize poor systems of Social order. However, when one fully estimates the likely loss of Potential Actions that have been prevented from coming into Existence, any particular non-optimal Social order can be seen to be far more reductive to one's potential for Lifetime Happiness than it may have even appeared.
3) In addition to maximizing hir Liberty by being free from Compulsion by others, a human needs and wants to be as free as possible from all other Violations so that s/he can direct hir full attention towards applying hir resources to activities that Benefit hirself and others who will return Benefit in kind. To effectively work towards optimizing hir Lifetime Happiness, a human needs to have as much certainty as possible that hir Person and all those Existents that s/he Values will not be Harmed, that hir Possessions will remain safe and available to hir, and that the Stipulations of Contracts that s/he makes with others will be fulfilled. To reiterate, the purpose of the Natural Social Contract is to provide a Social order with just this needed highest possible degree of certainty for those humans who signify that they agree to its terms by completing its Execution Requirements and becoming Freemen.
4) If Harm, Effectively Caused by the Actions of another Freeman (ie. Responsible Harm), does come to a Freeman, the Harm causing Freeman (the Violator), by virtue of being the Responsible Agent of hir own Actions, is completely Responsible for restoration of the Lifetime Happiness of the Harmed Freeman (the Victim) to the State in which it would have been if the Harming Actions (the Violation) had never occurred. If such restoration is among the Available Actions of the Violator, then s/he must take the necessary Actions to complete the Restitution - ie. to effectively reverse the Harm done. If such restoration is not among hir Available Actions, then the Harm is essentially UnRestitutable and the Violator may need to enter some sort of long-term service arrangement with the Victim, or the Victim may simply accept that full restoration is impossible in this case.1 If the Violator refuses all Restitution Requests, then after a Trial makes a Determination, the Violator may be Required to fulfill a Restitution Requirement or be Found by the same Trial to be In Breach of the NSC and become an Ex-Freeman according to the desires of the UnRestituted Victim.
5) In the case of an UnExcusable Breach of the NSC (which includes refusal to sign a Restitution Requirement) by not fulfilling the NSC Requirements, the Breaching Freeman has, in effect, Responsibly Harmed every Freeman who is aware of his Breach (of which every Freeman will very soon be able to be aware since any Charge of Breach is immediately Published) and, moreover, such Harm is fundamentally UnRestitutable because it has negatively affected the Social Meta-Needs, thereby causing a net loss to everyone. In this case, therefore, no response is possible other than taking measures to directly prevent such an individual from again perpetrating this kind of Harm to all Freemen. This is the purpose of Attaching the Status of "In Breach" and effectively Revoking the title of Freeman from the offending individual, thus, removing hir from Full Membership in the Freeman Society. Even then any Freeman is still completely at Liberty to deal with such an Ex-Freeman as long as s/he does so without Breaching the NSC.
6) The Whereas Section of any Valid Contract identifies the Parties to the Contract and describes their relevant background and motives for entering into the Contract. Except for the identification of Parties, a Freeman is not Required to include a Whereas Section in an agreement for it to be a Valid Contract, but it is nevertheless useful to do so because it explains in very general and informal terms why the Contract has been made. For these reasons, a Whereas Section is included in the NSC and considered to be part of its Guidelines.
7) The beginning of the Whereas Section in the NSC identifies the Parties to the NSC (which is hereafter termed The Contract when referring to itself) as:
8) The first statements of the Whereas Section are the two major Social Meta-Needs of any Freeman: first, the need to not be Violated and second, if so Violated, whether by accident or Intent, to be Restituted to the fullest extent possible by the Freeman who is the Effective Cause of the Violational Event, for the Harm from the Violational Event. The reason for the validity of the third Whereas Section statement (that the Executor Benefits from the ouster from the Freeman Society of any individual who Breaches The Contract) was already explained in 5) above.
9) The final two Whereas Section statements are more positive. The first describes the Benefits of important kinds of cooperative Social InterActions with others, particularly the mutual Entitlement to Ownership of Property and of agreement to a System for Settling Disputes if they should arise. The final type of Beneficial Social Action relates to efforts to help others understand the gains to be had from adhering to the behavior described by the Theory of Social Meta-Needs and to encourage them to become Freemen, since the more Freemen there are the greater the Available Actions, Choices and other Benefits produced for all.
For any society to be highly effective at producing goods and services which benefit others as well as their producers, it needs to be of a certain minimum size. In addition, the value of this minimum is highly dependent on the technological stage of advancement of the society, since the more technologically advanced a society is, the more people it requires with unique knowledge specialties for production of the larger numbers of unique goods and services. While it is possible that robot machines of the future may take over much of the production, all this means is that humans will then have more time to learn and perform other tasks that only they can do. By similar reasoning, for any society to be well ordered, it is necessary that a large percentage of its members accept the same basis for the social order. Thus, for the NSC to be effective at meeting the purposes of its creators and those signing it, it is necessary that large numbers of people understand or at least accept its principles, execute it and abide by it. Only by increasing the numbers of Freemen in this manner will anyone who becomes a Freeman attain his goal of more benefits and less harm for himself and everyone else.
1. It is important to realize that the nature of Reality is such that justice is not always attainable. However, there is an important sense in which this is not totally correct, since ultimately, even in the case of an Unrestitutable Violation, the Harmed person is still responsible for hir own fate. In this regard see my essay "Self-Responsibility and Social Order".
