Contractualists characterize morality as fundamentally concerning how people relate to one another. Insofar as someone treats others in a way that they can accept, her actions are permissible. If someone’s actions cannot be justified to others, she acts wrongly. By relying on this idea of justifiability to others, contractualists can account for the wrongness of acts by appealing to a wide variety of reasons. For instance, contractualists can explain why murder is wrong by appealing to the death of innocents and (...) explain the wrongness of plagiarism in terms of the importance of authenticity and originality. Someone can reasonably reject letting people act on principles that allow murder or plagiarism, at least in part, for those reasons. While this flexibility is a strength of contractualism, it also complicates explaining how the fact that an act is wrong itself provides a reason against doing it. Put differently, if the death of innocents explains the wrongness of murder, why take the .. (shrink)

Despite an impressive philosophical pedigree, contractualism (or contractarianism) has only been properly developed in two ways: by appeal to the idea of an instrumentally rational bargain or contract between self-interested individuals (Hobbesian contractualism) and by appeal to the idea of a substantively reasonable agreement among individuals who regard one another as free and equal persons warranting equal moral respect (Kantian contractualism). Both of these existing models of contractualism are susceptible to apparently devastating objections. In this article, I outline a third, (...) `deliberative' model of contractualism, which is based on the idea of a deliberatively rational agreement and which, I argue, represents a significant improvement on the Hobbesian and Kantian models in certain important respects. Key Words: contractualism • contractarianism • deliberation • deliberative rationality • Scanlon • Gauthier. (shrink)

Public reason theories are characterized by three conditions: constructivism, representation, and stability. Constructivism holds that justification does not rely on any antecedent moral or political values outside of the procedure of agreement. Representation holds that the reasons for the choice in the model must be rationally explicable to real agents outside the model. Stability holds that the principles chosen in the procedure should be stable upon reflection, especially in the face of diversity in a pluralistic society. Choice procedures that involve (...) at least two-stages with different information, as Rawls’s theory does, will be path-dependent and not meet the condition of representation since it will not be globally coherent. Attempts to solve this problem without eliminating the segmentation of choice in the procedure will run afoul of constructivism or stability. This problem is instructive because it highlights how public reason theories must evolve in the face of increased concerns about diversity. (shrink)