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TheOtherDave comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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Off-hand, I'd say not. What makes that the interesting part of the question, though? I don't know anyone who objects to the existence of voluntarily entered-into contracts, merely to the idea that they supersede or obviate the need for other social/legal/governmental mechanisms.
Really? How about these examples (given in the context of the contemporary common law jurisdictions):
You're allowed to commit suicide. (Assisting another person's suicide is still illegal, but legal penalties for one's own suicide attempt have been repealed for a long time.)
You're allowed to mutilate yourself.
You're allowed to act voluntarily as someone's slave or serf.
You're allowed to make yourself permanently available to someone for sexual acts.
You're allowed to remain permanently an adherent of a specific religion.
You're allowed to stay permanently confined to a small area, or even inside a single house.
All these are perfectly legal choices, and some of them aren't even very unusual. Do you believe that people should therefore be able to bind themselves contractually to make them?
Sort of, yeah. What I actually believe is that if the activity is problematic enough that I should not permit people to bind themselves contractually to perform it, it's not clear to me that I should allow people to perform it at all.
I don't necessarily endorse allowing all of those options in the first place, though.
The problem is for many of the items on Vladimir's list (especially the last 4) allowing the government to force people not to do them is also scary.
Well, OK.
First, let me clarify that my point was simply that if contracts are being relegated to the role of managing agreements among individuals to perform acceptable activities, and something else maintains the responsibility for managing what activities are acceptable, then I have no problem with relying on contracts to perform that role. But it doesn't follow from this that individual contracts can substitute for that "something else."
With respect to your articulation of "the" problem, though: I agree that there are activities that it's problematic to declare unacceptable, whether we do that by governments formally passing laws or by local communities enforcing more informal social norms.
I agree that for some of the items on Vladimir's list, allowing people to be forced not to do them, or to be forced to do them, is scary in some contexts. But whether they are being forced by their government, by a foreign government, by their neighbors, or by an independent commercial norm-enforcement agency, doesn't play a significant role in how scary I find it. If they are being forced by virtue of an arrangement they willingly entered into, I am somewhat more sanguine about it, but not infinitely so.
The objections I am aware of are to specific subcategories of contracts, such as variant marriage terms or multigenerational commitments.