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I'm not willing to throw out the contractarian tradition. I struggle with the problem of finding foundations for moral principles and I'm not sure that any of the other ways to provide foundations work very well. I appreciate the point that Fred has made; namely, that contractarianism is an attempt to provide secular people with a way to justify moral principles including obligations. I'm not sure it works, but it may. And I'm not going to throw it out just yet.

It seems to me that if a group of rational, primarily self-interested people gathered together to devise moral principles (or rules of justice including rules of property) they would want to include some sort of insurance against poverty and other major problems.

If we assume for a moment that they bargain behind a Rawlsean veil of ignorance, this seems like a very reasonable thing for them to do. If you don't know what position you will occupy in society (if, for example, you don't know what social class you will be born into), then insurance against poverty, lack of education, and so forth would be quite rational and in your self-interest.

But even if we don't assume a veil of ignorance something similar follows. Let's assume people do know their social class and their individual capabilities, what then? It seems to me that they would still face great uncertainty. Life is unpredictable and they would know that. The solution, again, would be to build some insurance or guarantees into the basic rules of justice and property. That would mean guarantees for the poor, the handicapped, the unlucky, and those who encounter other major problems.

In either case, I think that rational parties would include a system of insurance and guarantees into their basic institutions. For me, that's the moral basis of social democracy.