It’s not really a brainworm, it’s the fact that people see the government in radically different ways.
My view is that as long as there’s genuine consent, two parties agree to something, no one is coerced, both are of sound mind, two human beings should be able to enter into any contract you can imagine. It doesn’t matter if that’s Gay Marriage or a firearms transaction.
The role of government should only be to ensure that that both parties engaged fairly. The minute you want to start using the government to ban one thing or another based on some moral imperative, is the minute you stopped respecting the autonomy of other people and decided to force your morality on another through collective force.
How do you square that up though with the power differential in employer / employee relations? The employee has to work or be destitute. That gives employers a tremendous amount of power in any contract negotiation.
Coercion doesn't have to be a gun to your head. Every person in the workforce is under a pretty coercive force which is that without gainful employment you are going to go without housing, medicine, transportation, etc. Without any collusion on the part of the employers, the market works to select those employers who can create the contract conditions most favorable to profit production. We shouldn't be surprised that "favorable to profit production" and "disadvantaging the worker" are often closely aligned, every company would like to pay as little as possible for their input and get as much profit as possible out of their outputs. Labor, or Human Resource, as corporations like to call it, is an input and so there's a tremendous systemic pressure to craft contracts in the way that will get the maximum profit out of every employee.
Sure the employee didn't have to sign that unfair employment contract, they could have elected to sign one of hundreds of unfair employment contracts. The fact that they have a large variety of unfair contracts to select from doesn't on its own increase the fairness of the contract. The "collective force" of "you need money to operate in society" means that all workers are coerced to sign "the best deal they can get" which doesn't mean it's going to be a good deal or a fair deal for the worker, just the best that the market has.
The world consists of more than two people. It isn't just about them. Am I misunderstanding your point?
Many individuals care about society as a useful construct -- a construct that is not easily calculable from individual utilities. [1] This would suggest that even utilitarians should care about society -- unless they think they get to define what matters to their precious individuals. [2]
[1] Sure, one can say society is _causally_ derived from individual actions, but... (1) the derivation of what society looks like is not predictable enough for the time scales we care about; (2) individuals are influenced by society, as a matter of perception
[2] If I may attempt some satire, I wouldn't at all be surprised if some utilitarians are a sort of "mini-autocrat" at heart -- in the sense they get to decide what counts in every individual's utility function. e.g. "I value you, individuals!, yes I do!... but I get to tell you what really matters for your happiness! and after I do that I decree that the summation operator is how we put it all together!"
My view is that as long as there’s genuine consent, two parties agree to something, no one is coerced, both are of sound mind, two human beings should be able to enter into any contract you can imagine. It doesn’t matter if that’s Gay Marriage or a firearms transaction.
The role of government should only be to ensure that that both parties engaged fairly. The minute you want to start using the government to ban one thing or another based on some moral imperative, is the minute you stopped respecting the autonomy of other people and decided to force your morality on another through collective force.