QuestionsWhat is a just society?Society is a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born
What is a just society?Tradition

Society is a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born

Burke's conservatism; prejudice; the eternal contract of society

Edmund Burke 1729 · 1797A society is an inheritance: reform it with care, do not redesign it on paper.
See profile
What it claims

The justice of a society rests on its institutions tested by the experience of generations and on cautious reforms, more than on a plan drawn in one stroke by reason.

Why

Inherited customs hold the experience of many generations, richer than one person's reason: correct them with care, do not remake them.

In short

"Society is a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born" is an argument by Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: tradition). Its claim: The justice of a society rests on its institutions tested by the experience of generations and on cautious reforms, more than on a plan drawn in one stroke by reason. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Valid with an implicit premise

In 1790 Burke watches the French Revolution with alarm. The revolutionaries, he says, want to rebuild the state from abstract principles. He defends another idea of justice: a just society is not a plan drawn up by one generation's reason but a tested inheritance, improved piece by piece. He uses the word "prejudice" in his own sense: a handed-down habit of judgement that often holds more reasons than we can see.

P1The reason of each individual, or of each assembly, is a modest stock. Inherited institutions and customs gather the experience of many generations: a "general bank and capital of nations and of ages".
P2Beneath inherited customs there often lies a wisdom we do not see at first glance. To reject them because we cannot see their reason is to throw away the reason with the habit.
P3The state is not a mere contract of interest to be broken at will: it is a partnership in all science, all art and every virtue, between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born. No generation is free to dissolve it.
P4 · implicit premiseA just society is one that preserves this partnership and this accumulated experience. It therefore reforms itself starting from what exists, by small corrections, not by complete reconstruction.
P5Burke does not want a frozen society: a state with no means of change has no means of preserving itself.
Therefore the justice of a society rests on its institutions tested by the experience of generations and on cautious reforms, more than on a plan drawn in one stroke by reason.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where inherited institutions hold much wisdom, and yet a just society must replace them, for instance because their wisdom mostly serves those who gain from them.
With P4 the argument is valid. Without it, the first three premises only say that inheritances contain wisdom. One must add that a just society should therefore be built on them. This is what critics dispute: an inheritance can also contain injustices, and the experience of generations has sometimes been the experience of enduring them.
Analogy. An old language was invented by no one, and no linguist could remake it at one stroke from pure rules. It can be corrected and enriched, but not restarted from zero without losing what millions of speakers have deposited in it.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Thomas Paine 1791 · attacks premise 3

The dead have no power over the living. Every generation is born with the same rights as the one before and may choose its own laws. A contract binding those who never signed it is tyranny from the past.

a defender replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus see the argument
Edmund Burke defender of the argument · 1791
In the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, written after Paine's book, Burke answers that our most important duties do not come from a signed contract. A child did not choose his parents, and yet this bond binds him. In the same way, we are born into a society whose bonds we did not choose, and these bonds create duties.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Paine and Burke agree that a society creates obligations. The core disagreement: are a generation's rights new at each birth, or do we inherit duties we did not choose?
Mary Wollstonecraft 1790 · attacks premise 4

If age alone made a custom just, the slave trade would be just. A tradition can perpetuate an injustice, and reason must be able to judge it from outside.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Burke in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We found no reply by Burke to this book, which appeared a few weeks after his own. His defenders note that he does not defend every custom: he wants careful reform (P5). Wollstonecraft's supporters answer that the great abolitions were won in the name of principles, against custom.
Karl Popper 1948 · attacks premise 2

Popper grants that traditions make social life predictable and give us a framework. But he refuses to treat them as wise by default: a tradition must be examined and criticised, and kept if it survives. The wisdom of a custom is tested, not presumed.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1948, after the author's death (1797).
The debate goes on (our summary) Burke died long before Popper. A year earlier, in 1947, Michael Oakeshott had defended an idea close to Burke's in "Rationalism in Politics": political knowledge is mostly practical knowledge, learned by following a tradition and not wholly contained in written rules. So a practice is criticised from within. Burke too does not refuse criticism: he refuses to do it from scratch.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Popper and Burke agree on the usefulness of traditions and the prudence of reform. The core disagreement: can a tradition be judged from outside, with independent criteria, or only from within, by correcting it with its own resources?