Their views, based upon the idea of human progress and perfectibility, led to the conclusion that once perfected, mankind would have no need of coercive institutions such as police, criminal law, property ownership, and the family.
For social life, the key characterisitcs include social division by class, gender, and ethnicity; coercive institutions including law courts, police, and armies; and (sometimes) cities.
All that need be the case is that the basic principles that regulate the coercive institutions be ones that the reasonable members can agree to (Rawls 1996).
He does accept that we have moral obligations to prevent people from starving, being assaulted, or murdered, but these are obligations of a universal 'humanitarianism.' Justice, for Nagel, is a moral value that is necessarily indexed to coercive institutions, as coercive institutions are necessary for large-scale social coordination and cooperation.
John Rawls argues that the liberal principle of political legitimacy requires that coercive institutions be so structured that they accord with the reasonable views of the members of the society.
One of the first four (SEE 2.8) forms of social contract theory to arise was contractarianism, which attempts to justify coercive institutions in terms of pure instrumental rationality through rational bargains among parties dividing social resources.
The most thorough-going of these dissenters have been anarchists proper — that is, those persons who insist that states and governments are wickedly coercive institutions that ought to be abolished.
Libertarians on the right and civil libertarians on the left are distinguished by which coercive institutions they believe constitute the greatest threat to individual liberties and by the methods they employ to secure liberties.
John Rawls' [32] view is that since global citizens cannot be supposed to see themselves as free and equal human beings who should relate fairly to each other, we cannot build coercive social institutions that assume they do.
