ABSTRACT Social contract theory is one of the most popular approaches to political justification. While the state of nature account in social contract theory is generally invoked to justify the state's authority, I argue in this paper that no extant account succeeds in doing so. The primary reason, I argue, is that extant state of nature theories fail to capture an empirically plausible account of human life under stateless conditions. This failure undermines the justificatory force of these theories. Instead, I argue that extant state of nature accounts are best understood as attempts to justify morality or authority in general.
A.-B. Yang (2026) studied this question.