Contractarianism initially made its mark, in the seventeenth century, as a sort of theory of everything in ethics. But gradually philosophers became convinced that there were resources available outside contractarianism for settling important moral questions—for instance, ideas of human rights and the moral equality of persons. Then Rawls revived contractarianism with a more modest aim—namely, as a theory of justice. But even this agenda for contractarianism has been called into question, most notably by G.A. Cohen, who contends that we have (...) other tools at our disposal for identifying the true conception of justice. So the question remains: how should contractarianism be construed if it is to provide answers to questions that cannot be answered in some other way? In my essay I offer a very simple answer: contractarianism should be construed as a political morality. I arrive at this answer by starting with contractarianism as a theory of everything and paring away the unappealing layers of contractarianism so understood. I begin by describing what contractarianism is. Then I dispense with contractarianism as a theory of state legitimacy, as a theory of interpersonal morality, and as a theory of justice. Finally, I distinguish political morality from the other already-mentioned areas of morality, and argue that contractarianism is a sensible theory of its grounds. (shrink)

The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of (...) Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise ‘neutral’ democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus’s own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies. (shrink)