Finally, Buddha’s approach to ethics differed substantially from the morality of the ‘social contract’, which appeared forcefully – if intermittently – in Indian thought (for example in the Bhagavadgita) and that has become such a dominant feature of post-Hobbesian and post-Rousseauvian thinking in Western ethics. A social contract takes the form of each contracting party doing specified good things for others on condition that the others must also do what they owe to everybody else.
