As individuals we stand in many and diverse relationships to one another. We bargain and
we contract; we give or we receive orders; we are variously manager, supervisor, unionist,
colleague, controller, worker, hireling, labourer, neighbour and citizen; in these roles we
request, deny, cajole, entice, implore, excuse, explain or thank one another. To some other
persons we stand in a special relationship like that of daughter, son, brother, sister, mother,
father, friend or lover. Throughout these diverse relationships it is possible to ask one …

cerned with the size and distribution of economic satisfactions. Here Weale employs a
contractarian theory, based on hypothetical choices by imaginary people, making free,
rational and self-interested decisions in an imaginary pre-political world, but unable to know
their eventual places in the political society which will be established by their contract. He
concludes that this method supports utilitarianism as one general principle of social welfare
(ie maximizing the equally weighted sum of individual welfares), but only at this second …