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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

Nobody currently alive actually voted on anything related to the US Constitution, any of the first fifteen amendments, or many important laws, because they weren't alive. I don't see how the Thirteenth Amendment is any different from the many laws which were enacted and last amended before you or I was alive. Either the populace has consented to all of that body of law, or none of it.

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I think that they’re saying that the concept of a social contract does not refer to a literal contract or legal document, or document of any kind, but rather simply a way of treating each other implicit in society.

Notably neither the Constitution nor its Amendments is the “social contract.”

Then those people need to stop calling it a "contract". That's an act of manipulative deception purposefully designed to influence the listener towards accepting it, regardless of whether the speaker is aware of those origins.

It doesn't constitute a "contract" any more than a schoolyard bully demanding another child's lunch money "or else" (implicit threat of initiation of force / violence) constitutes a "contract".

The bully wouldn't become morally justified by calling his dictated orders (under threat of violence) a contract, nor would his act of extortion become any more legitimized, by deceptively referring to the act with an unambiguously incorrect term like "contract".

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