Contractualism, Politics, and Morality

Acta Analytica - Tập 28 - Trang 495-508 - 2013
Adam Hosein1
1Philosophy Department, UCB 232, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, USA

Tóm tắt

Rawls developed a contractualist theory of social justice and Scanlon attempted to extend the Rawlsian framework to develop a theory of rightness, or morality more generally. I argue that there are some good reasons to adopt a contractualist theory of social justice, but that it is a mistake to adopt a contractualist theory of rightness. I begin by illustrating the major shared features of Scanlon and Rawls’ theories. I then show that the justification for these features in Rawls’ theory, the centrality of cooperative fairness to social justice, cannot be used to defend their use in Scanlon’s. Finally, I argue that Scanlon has not provided an adequate alternative defense of these features, and show that they create problems when contractualists try to explain major features of our common-sense morality.

Tài liệu tham khảo

Blackburn, S. (1999). Am I right? New York Times, February 21. Brand-Ballard, J. (2004). Contractualism and deontic restrictions. Ethics, 114, 269–300. Dancy, J. (2006). Ethics without principles. New York: Oxford University Press. McGinn, C. (1999). Reasons and unreasons (pp 34–38). The New Republic, May 24. Pettit, P. (1999). Doing unto others (pp 7–8). Times Literary Supplement, June 25. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Scanlon, T. M. (2003). The difficulty of tolerance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scanlon, T. M. (2008). Moral dimensions: permissibility, meaning and blame. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sheinman, H. (2011). Act and principle contractualism. Utilitas, 23(03), 288–315.