Building on the work of Emmanuel Kant, with his presumption of borders for the state,[18] John Rawls (1921-2002) proposed in A Theory of Justice (1971) a contractual approach in which rational persons in hypothetical “position of origin” would set aside their individual preferences and abilities under a “veil of ignorance” and accept certain general principles of justice and legal organization. This idea is also used as a theoretical formalization of the concept of equity. The same goes for McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal Constitution went directly to the people and was not created by the states. It stated that the Constitution was binding on states and could not be denied by states. It again opposed the articles of Confederation created by the states to the Constitution created by the people. [11] According to the history of the prisoner dilemma, two persons were taken separately for questioning, conducted to a crime they are suspected of having committed. The police have solid evidence of a lesser crime they committed, but they need a confession to try them on more serious charges. Each inmate is told that if they cooperate with the police in informing the other prisoner, they will be rewarded with a relatively light sentence of one year in prison, while their cohort is sentenced to ten years in prison. If both remain silent, there will be no such rewards, and they can expect moderate sentences of two years. And if the two cooperate with the police by informing each other, the police will have enough to send everyone to prison for five years.
The dilemma then is that in order to serve their own interests, each prisoner justifies the better to cooperate with the police by confessing. All reason: “If she confesses, I should confess and be sentenced to five years instead of ten. And if there`s no doubt about it, I should confess and be sentenced to one year instead of two. So whatever she does, I should confess. The problem is that if every reason in this way, they confess, and everyone goes to jail for five years. But if they had both remained silent, not cooperating with the police, but together they would have spent only two years in prison. Epicurus, in the fourth century BC, seemed to have had a strong sense of social contract, as justice and law are rooted in mutual understanding and benefit, as evidenced, among other things, by these lines drawn from its main teachings (see also epicurean ethics): the normative social contract, for which Rousseau argued in The Social Contract (1762), aims to respond to this sad condition and to remedy the social and moral dysfunctions that have been caused by the evolution of development. society.