Bernard Mandeville’s theory of morality – ‘private vices, public benefits’ – provides a frame for comparing Adam Smith and David Hume on utility. Mandeville held that vice, not virtue, is useful for society. For him, the private and public good do not align. What is bad for individuals is often beneficial for society and vice versa. To counter Mandeville’s rhetoric and show the attractiveness of virtue, Hume places the principle of utility at the center of his An Enquiry concerning the (...) Principles of Morals (1751). This placement directs the reader’s attention away from the lack of alignment between private and public advantage and enables Hume to ‘dress’ moral virtue in utility and pleasure. Smith, by contrast, places the principle of propriety at the center of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This is because he is closer in spirit to Mandeville than is Hume in acknowledging a gap between the private and public good. By directing the reader’s attention to this gap in Part IV, Smith tries to show, contra Hume, that the principle of propriety, not utility, better explains and defends praiseworthy action and choice in an imperfect world. (shrink)

The most recent major contribution to the literature on justice as mutual advantage is Peter Vanderschraaf’s book Strategic Justice. In this book, he develops a theory of justice as convention, where justice is those principles that rational, self-interested agents would choose to solve problems of partially conflicting interest. His theory is thus a kind of theory of justice as mutual advantage. A common criticism of theories of justice as mutual advantage is the Vulnerability Objection: if the principles of justice require (...) that resources are only shared with those that are net-contributors to a cooperative surplus, then those that are not net-contributors to that cooperative surplus (so-called vulnerable people) have no claim of justice to any share of the resources. But, the objection states, surely justice cannot exclude people simply because they are vulnerable. Vanderschraaf argues that his theory of justice as convention successfully answers the Vulnerability Objection. However, in this paper, I argue that although Vanderschraaf’s theory successfully demonstrates that it can be to the mutual advantage of rational, self-interested people to agree to share equally even when some people contribute more than others, the problem remains of why such people would share with those that can never contribute more to the cooperative surplus than what they would withdraw from it. Vanderschraaf’s solution is to weaken the requirement that people actually contribute. But that, I argue, undermines the claim that his theory is a theory of justice as mutual advantage. (shrink)

Conventionalism as a distinct approach to the social contract received significant attention in the game-theoretic literature on social contract theory. Peter Vanderschraaf’s sophisticated and innovative theory of conventional justice represents the most recent contribution to this tradition and, in many ways, can be viewed as a culmination of this tradition. In this article, I focus primarily on Vanderschraaf’s defense of the egalitarian bargaining solution as a principle of justice. I argue that one particular formal feature of this bargaining solution, the (...) baseline consistency requirement, may stand in tension with other features of conventionalism as an approach to the social contract and limit the scope of Vanderschraaf’s theory to societies in which de facto an egalitarian sense of justice evolves. It limits the scope of Vanderschraaf’s theory in the face of moral diversity. A similar limitation applies to Vanderschraaf’s theory of democratic political authority. Despite these minor limitations, Vanderschraaf’s theory can only be seen as a major success and significant contribution to social contract theory. (shrink)