Rethinking Three Structural Limits of Social Contract Theory: Representation, Translation, and Radical Heterogeneity

Martha Nussbaum organizes Frontiers of Justice around disability, justice across national boundaries, and nonhuman animals. Her analysis challenges contract pictures centered on mutual advantage among approximate equals and develops a capability-based response. This position paper takes those three frontiers as motivating cases for a narrower, paper-specific reconstruction of three possible limits in contract-centered norm generation. The first limit concerns representation. A subject can be affected by a rule, entitled under an independent criterion, or constitutive of a shared practice while lacking an accessible, intelligible, safe, timely, efficacious, and revisable path into norm formation. The second concerns translation. Reasons can move through partial and power-laden maps across human normative systems while losing distinctions required by a declared institutional target. The third concerns identification under radical heterogeneity. Relation-conditioned observations can remain compatible with several models of another subject's interpretation, welfare, drive, or evaluative order. The reconstruction is diagnostic and conditional. It distinguishes contract capacity, affectedness, moral standing, constitutive contribution, and justice relevance. It treats translation as target-relative and allows bounded adequacy. It represents identification through a set of models indexed by observation and intervention. Exact finite witnesses establish four separations. Observed proxy agreement can coexist with different affected-subject influence. A many-to-one translation preserves a target exactly precisely when the target is constant on every translation fibre. Equal observable responses can coexist with reversed evaluative orderings. Separate ordinal rankings can leave a fixed interpersonal utility sum underdetermined under admissible rescaling. Each diagnosis has a distinct countercondition. Proxy representation can supply an effective path under defended authority, fidelity, plurality, contestability, displacement, and revision conditions. Partial translation can preserve a bounded target without becoming globally invertible. Comparative, physiological, developmental, ecological, and intervention evidence can narrow a heterogeneous model set. These responses can also be combined with capability, care, rights, trust, political representation, and precautionary approaches. The paper therefore proposes a plural audit of contract inputs and interfaces. Its formal results organize inferential burdens; justice, standing, duty, precaution, and remedy enter through separately defended normative premises. Historical reconstruction, empirical measurement, translation authority, and institutional comparison remain open parts of the research programme.