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It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while “contractualist” ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents—an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, psychology, economics, biology, and cultural evolution. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others’ utilities (“consequentialist” reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic ethical properties of certain actions (“deontological” reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational approximations of a contractualist ideal. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds—how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology—commonly described in terms of systems in conflict—can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constraint. Our resulting “triple theory” of moral cognition naturally integrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns.

Activists and progressive governments sometimes interfere in the working conditions of sweatshops. Their methods may include boycotts of the products produced in these facilities, bans on the import of these products or tariffs imposed by the home country, and enforcing the host country's laws that aim at regulating sweatshops. Some argue that such interference in sweatshop conditions is morally wrong since it may actually harm workers. The reason is that the enterprise that runs the sweatshop may choose to lay off some workers as the result of effective interference in order to maintain their profit at the desired level. If successful, this argument would prohibit any interference in sweatshop conditions on moral grounds. In this article, I argue in dissent and build a contractualist argument in favor of the moral permissibility of interference in sweatshops. I base my argument on an ex ante interpretation of T.M. Scanlon's contractualism.

This book is an important text in moral philosophy. It follows from the 1984 book Reasons and Persons, one of the landmarks of twentieth-century philosophy. The book presents a new treatment of reasons, rationality, and normativity, and a critical examination of three systematic moral theories — Kant's ethics, contractualism, and consequentialism — leading to a new synthetic conclusion. Along the way the volume discusses a wide range of moral issues, such as the significance of consent, treating people as a means rather than an end, and free will and responsibility. This book consists of four parts. The first part presents critiques of previous work by four of the world's leading moral philosophers. The second part contains responses. The third and longest part is a self-contained work on normativity, and the final part comprises seven chapters on Kant, reasons, irrationality, autonomy — and why the universe exists.

According to T. M. Scanlon's contractualist formula, an action is morally right if and only if it is justifiable to each person, that is, if a principle licensing the action could not be reasonably rejected by any single individual for personal reasons. Frick defended a version of ex ante contractualism that gives a satisfactory response to the problem of social risk, while also avoiding the excesses of aggregative moral theories.

‘Value pluralism’ is a strand of analytical philosophy that posits the plurality of morally significant values. By enabling systematic mapping of the diversity of moral registers within which social policy concerns might legitimately be considered, we contend that value pluralist-inspired analysis can aid constructive policy dialogue. Our argument is founded on four claims: first, as a matter of normative principle, value pluralism represents a defensible ethical standpoint; second, as a matter of fact, people are attracted to a plurality of moral values; third, as a matter of democratic legitimacy, pluralism offers a means of (partially) reconciling rival moral claims; fourth, as a matter of political strategy, pluralism offers a pragmatic approach that can engage protagonists on their own terms. To demonstrate its efficacy, we apply this pluralist approach to the vexed question of welfare conditionality, which we interrogate via six normative perspectives (rights, utilitarianism, contractualism, communitarianism, paternalism and social justice).

Contractualism has a venerable history and considerable appeal. Yet as an account of the foundations or ultimate grounds of morality it has been thought by many philosophers to be subject to fatal objections. This book argues otherwise. It begins by detailing and diagnosing the shortcomings of the main existing models of contractualism, ‘Hobbesian’ contractualism (or contractarianism) and ‘Kantian’ contractualism. It then proposes a novel, deliberative model, ‘deliberative contractualism’, based on an interpersonal, deliberative conception of practical reason. It argues that the deliberative model of contractualism represents an attractive alternative to its more familiar rivals and that it has the resources to offer a more compelling account of morality's foundations, one that can do justice to the twin demands of moral accuracy and explanatory adequacy.

What is it for a belief to wrong someone? Views that have largely shaped the recent literature on doxastic wronging maintain that beliefs that wrong do so in virtue of what is believed. This paper offers some criticisms of these views, as well as a contractualist alternative. On the view I defend here, beliefs can wrong when they stem from inferences licensed by principles to which others would have sufficiently weighty objections. Doxastic wronging, on this account, is not (or is not entirely) a matter of having beliefs with certain kinds of objectionable representational content, but rather a matter of our being unable to morally justify our beliefs to others.

John and Curran have convincingly shown that Scanlonian contractualism is a valuable resource for evaluating pandemic response policies, and that we should reject cost–benefit analysis in favour of a contractualist framework. However, they fail to consider the part of contractualism that Scanlon constructed precisely to deal with the question of when the state can restrict individuals from making choices that are harmful to themselves and others: the value of choice view (VoC). In doing so, they leave it open for opponents of lockdowns to misuse contractualism to justify mistaken policies. This is because the most powerful contractualist objections to locking down are likely to be based on the VoC.When we apply the value of choice view (VoC), we see that a lockdown policy’s justifiability depends on the extent to which particular values of choice are found to be threatened by the policy in question, and what safeguards policy-makers have put in place to increase the value of choice and protect people from the harmful consequences of lockdown. Without the VoC, it is harder to explain why lockdowns, to be non-rejectable, must have certain features. With the VoC, the case for contractualism over cost benefit analysis (CBA) can be made even stronger.

This article examines the relationship between relationality and policy in tort law from an evolutionary perspective. While, as part of the regulatory system, tort law must evolve in response to structural and allocative policy concerns, its ability to do so is limited by the relational normative structure through which it operates and claims moral authority. This tension is often obscured in mainstream tort theory. Drawing on contractualist philosophy—which traces the implications of mutual recognition and respect across structural, allocative, and relational normative contexts—the article develops a principled reasoning framework that avoids rigid hierarchies and ad hoc balancing: negative policy reasons not to adopt tort norms take precedence in choices of regulatory regimes, while positive policy reasons must be diluted and integrated with relational reasons to shape the content of tort norms. This normative framework illuminates tort law’s ability to respond to complex normative challenges while retaining its integrity and unique value as a regulatory tool.

[...]they would also miss on developing a distinctive sense of meaningfulness in life that derives from exerting effort toward the achievement of difficult goals. [...]the challenge posed by self-threats of this kind does not affect such moral theories as contractualism which deny that morality requires from us to acquiesce but instead to act-utilitarianism which affirms the duty to acquiesce in a wide range of cases. Martino’s analysis spotlights the structural uncertainty that underpins public institutions to the extent that they must remain open-ended projects carried out by office holders who stand in complex relationships to each other and the institution’s mandate as a whole. [...]semantic, analytic and normative forms of internal disagreement could inform various strategies for expressing dissent, which in turn help shape the office holders’ shared interpretation of their institution’s raison d’être and appropriate institutional action.