Contractualism

Does contractualism imply that we have no obligations to beings who do not understand what it means to enter into a contract? What does your answer imply about the plausibility of contractualism? (2019 Q10)

• Contractualism grounds the motivational force of morality in the idea that an action is justifiable simpliciter if we can justify it to each of the affected parties; it’s the idea that morality is to do with relations of mutual respect among agents.
  • It’s different from contractarianism in that it doesn’t base morality in terms of what people would actually accept as a contract; there are objective standards for what is reasonable rejection.
  • So, this already gives it some resources to dealing with beings who do not understand what it means to enter into a contract – there’s a fact of the matter, independent of the mental states of those beings, of whether or not they have grounds to reject.
    • i.e., we separate grounds for rejection from ability to voice that rejection.
• This covers how we could have obligations to infants and disabled adults.
  • The idea of being incapable of understanding what it means to enter into a contract is really besides the point. But this might be associated with being incapable of understanding what it is to be wronged, etc. And, perhaps that those people lack the ability to have relations of respect with you.
  • You might also apply it to obligations to future people, but this is more difficult – they do not exist (not merely incapable of rejecting), so it’s unclear how a non-existent person would have grounds to reject a principle, or who would reject it on their behalf.
• But there are two problems with this account.
  • First, if we think that there are objective grounds for rejection and it’s decoupled from ability to voice the grounds, then contractualism loses some of its distinctiveness.
    • It no longer seems to be about “what we owe to each other”, as humans, but “what is owed”.
    • And Scanlon thinks that there’s something special about the part of morality between humans – yet on this account, there’s now objective grounds for what, say, nonhuman animals might reasonably object to, even if they can’t voice that objection. So it seems like handling one case entails conceding the other.
  • Second, it undermines the idea that contractualism is about mutual respect.
    • Although we can still argue that it’s about justifiability, it’s not really justifiability *to* someone else.
    • The trustee account, that some other individual safeguards the interests of the nonrational one, looks ad-hoc: what gives them grounds to reject on behalf of another? (cf individualist restriction)
• So if contractualism is to deliver obligations to individuals with reduced mental capacities, then it seems like it must also do so for nonhuman animals, and moreover lose the justifiability to affected parties component.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Can mention the idea that contractualism specifies only a proper subset of our moral obligations; the obligations to animals etc might be outside that.
  • [but ofc this doesn’t deal with disabled or future humans!]
  • With trustees, better to be more precise about Scanlon’s view: he thinks that animals are outside the scope of the theory.
    • Trustees are simply the mechanism to provide representation for the nonrational-but-included.
    • Of course, the pushback is: it’s wrong & arbitrary to draw the boundary at species (an animal that’s cognitively comparable to a disabled human surely has the relevant moral properties).
    • And also, as noted, this undermines the idea that contractualism is about mutual respect.
    • Dilemma: either the trustee objects from the represented party’s perspective, but then we lack justifiability to; or they object from their own perspective, but then we lack individualist restriction.

‘Contractualists tie the wrongness of an action to whether all principles for the general regulation of behavior which permit it can be reasonably rejected. However, whatever explains why those principles can be reasonably rejected can on its own explain why the action is wrong. So, contractualists should drop the talk about reasonable rejection and just talk about what makes actions right or wrong.’ Do you agree? (2020 Q9)

• This is the redundancy objection from Pettit and Blackburn. It is a challenge to contractualism, but their theory is still distinctive – it has its own account of what constitutes wrongness. In practice for decision-making, there’s no need for that extra step though.
• There’s a distinction between what wrongness consists in and what makes an action wrong. (Stratton-Lake 2003)
  • Yes, the wrong-making feature is whatever facts of the matter make the relevant principle rejectable.
  • But Scanlon argues that the inability to justify yourself to peers is what makes an action wrong.
    • This fits with our intuitions about morality as something about relations of mutual recognition with others.
• The cost of the distinction: now the wrong-making feature is no longer what it is to be wrong. So the fact of wrongness doesn’t give reasons; it’s the non-justifiability which means we ought not to do it.
  • You might actually find this attractive, in that the thing that’s meant to give reasons lines up more closely with how we’d actually reason / moral psychology.
  • But overall it seems like we would want a moral theory to have wrongness of X itself giving a reason to not do X.
• Another justification (Ridge): the reasonable rejection grounds are personal, individual, general reasons. They are agent-relative – it’s about why an action is objectionable from my perspective.
  • What contractualism does is explain why these should generate agent-neutral obligations; an impartial standard built from individual complaints.
• [conclusion / further lines of discussion?]

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Need to evaluate the Stratton-Lake vs Ridge responses
• Should engage with Scanlon’s aims in ethical theory. Reasonable rejection is what helps address Scanlon’s goals, to:
  • Capture the distinctive subject matter of morality (what we owe to each other)
  • Explain the motivational authority of morality
  • Justify certain restrictions (individualist, impersonalist) that rule out utilitarian-style aggregation
• The redundancy charge only sticks if you view contractualism as purely a theory to explain what the right action is. But that’s not Scanlon’s goal! He’s trying to create a framework to organise moral thinking.

Are the objections to ‘common-sense’ moral principles that can be made by those in dire straits stronger than the objections to more demanding alternative principles that can be made by the better off? Discuss the implications of your answer for contractualism. (2021 Q11)

• Yes, objections to moral principles which allow people to remain in dire straits (such as global poverty, or be subject to unacceptable risk of extinction) are stronger than objections to alternative principles [which we might prima facie describe as “more demanding”] made by the better off. This implies that contractualism is subject to the so-called demandingness objection that critics also level against utilitarianism. But this itself does not count against contractualism; on the contrary, it would be a significant charge against the theory if it failed to make large demands on the well-off, given the moral emergencies we face. The problem is that contractualism also treats objections that appear to be insignificant as large, and thus makes large demands of agents in all worlds, even morally-near-ideal ones.
• Contractualism criterion of rightness: an action X is permissible if it’s licensed by a principle to which nobody could reasonably reject, where the grounds for reasonable rejection must be personal, individual, and generalisable (but needn’t necessarily be about welfare).
  • So, the relevant principles are those which have the least largest objection.
• Consider the following two principles: (i) “Agents are entitled to spend money they lawfully earn on whatever lawful pursuits they like”; (ii) “Agents with discretionary spending budgets must donate money towards alleviating the suffering of the global poor.”
  • Rich Robbie, Starving Sally’s objections
• Not only welfare: could appeal to autonomy (Kumar).
  • But this seems like it’ll be hard to get off the ground; surely a bigger objection than “I want autonomy” is “I am starving”.
  • Specifically, the individual suffering of the global poor is immense; it’s not merely that there are great many of them and so in aggregate the complaint is large – contractualism wouldn’t permit that.
• So, per Ashford, contractualism generates large demands.
  • It’s wrong to think it’s subject to a demandingness objection though; as Sobel points out this presupposes a distinction between doing/allowing :: demands a theory makes/costs it allows to be suffered.
• What does count against contractualism is how it handles risk, though. It’s here, where it’s seemingly unduly demanding on agents.
  • Airplanes falling on someone who’s never flown; on Scanlon’s account low probability doesn’t discount ex post complaints.
  • Can shift to ex ante contractualism – but then this allows loss of any number of statistical lives – even with 99.9999% chance of each – for an identifiable life (you discount the statistical lives and don’t aggregate, but the identifiable life is a whole life).

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Again, examiners want you to explain motivations behind Scanlonian contractualism, as well as its structure.
• Be sharper on the distinction between (i) as commonsense, and (ii) as (putatively) more demanding

‘When I reflect on the reason that the wrongness of an action seems to supply not to do it, the best description of this reason I can come up with has to do with the relation to others that such acts would put me in: the sense that others could reasonably object to what I do.’ (T. M. SCANLON) How powerful an argument for contractualism is this? (2022 Q10)

• Intro: it’s probably the most powerful argument we have, but not a hugely compelling one.
• What is contractualism: takes this as the criterion of rightness.
• Attractions
  • Captures the idea that morality is a public practice, has to do with others
  • Using the motivational force as the same as criterion of rightness gets around Stocker’s worries about moral schizophrenia.
• Some doubts
  • I don’t share the intuition that I need to justify myself to specific other individuals. Scanlon’s argument doesn’t really motivate the kinds of restrictions he places on reasonable rejection.
    • Cf Parfit on how contractualism is more defensible if
    • Could do thought experiment: 1,000,000 people would object a bit to me doing this thing, I like it slightly more than any one of them. I think that’s a good reason for me to refrain from that action! I couldn’t justify myself to the collective.
• Are there stronger arguments for contractualism? Not really. So this is probably the strongest we’ve got.
  • Other arguments are more comparative, e.g. you prefer its verdicts in Transmitter Room, etc.
• (Maybe Parfit on climbing the mountain…? Idea that this is really the same as Kantian ethics)
• [there must be more to say but I’m not sure where/how]

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• The quote raises redundancy objection.
  • Per Pettit and Blackburn, if Scanlon thinks the action isn’t justifiable to others, then whatever drives that itself seems to supply the wrongness.
• Highlight how the quote is a phenomenological / introspective argument.
  • The argument only really has force insofar as the phenomenology generalises. But many moral philosophers, say, Parfit would not agree.
• What does the argument really support and how distinctive is it?
  • Utilitarianism can say that morality involves special relation to others – promoting their welfare. Kantianism can say that morality involves treating each other as ends, never means.
  • All these are focused on the interpersonal nature of morality; contractualism is distinctive because it’s about justifiability to each individual, but that’s not something Scanlon really motivates in this quote.

‘According to the contractualist, doing wrong violates the terms of a relationship of mutual recognition. But if I’m not in some relationship to start with, I have no reason to act in accordance with its terms. So the contractualist account of the reasons we have to be moral fails.’ Can contractualism be adequately defended from this objection? (2023 Q11)

• It can’t really be defended from this objection – unlike contractarians, contractualism assumes you’re starting off as morally-motivated – but that’s not a concern; we oughtn’t really expect our theories to be able to rebut the amoralist. And other plausible moral theories don’t really succeed in doing so either.
• Is the objection right?
  • Yes, basically.
  • The wrongness comes from the fact that you can’t justify your action to others; they have greater objections to the principle licensing it than you do to an alternative principle.
• Now, if you don’t care at all about justifying your action to others, then sure, you don’t have reasons to be moral.
  • Thought experiment with a nonchalant Nellie.
• But this is not really a worry.
  • First, it’s not really a very plausible account of moral psychology at all. Like, there’s surely nobody who isn’t in any relationships with other people. If there were some such person, then yep, I guess maybe they don’t have any reasons to be moral. [hmm, perhaps they have relations but none of mutual recognition though. And we do want to generate reasons there.]
  • Someone acting in the moral plane, etc (what does Williams say?)
  • Other theories fare no better – e.g. if someone says they don’t care about promoting the moral good, then they don’t have reasons to be moral.
• Maybe one concern about contractualism is it ties up the moral motivation with criterion of rightness [I think? Cf Scanlon above]. Now, overall this is quite an attractive feature – it’s more substantively moral. But a downside is that it makes it look like someone lacking such motivation also lacks reasons to be moral, and that seems false.
• [Other ways contractualists could defend themselves?]

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• As I described, Scanlon isn’t trying to explain why we have reason to be moral
  • To be precise, his goal is to elucidate the nature of our reasons to be moral.
    • And the claim is that this is because we stand in relations of mutual recognition.
• Contractualists hold that acting morally is part of what it is to stand in mutual-recognition relations. And separately, it is plausible that standing in such relations is valuable / constitutes the good life.
  • Insofar as that holds, we do have reasons to be moral. But the contractualist isn’t arguing for this.
• One limitation of contractualism: can’t explain why we have reason to be moral towards animals.
  • So the contractualist account is limited – it can only describe reasons to be moral towards entities with which we have relations of mutual recognition.

(b) Contractualists say that an action is wrong if all sets of principles which permit it can be reasonably rejected. Infants and the other animals, though, cannot reasonably reject sets of principles. How, then, can contractualists explain why harming them is wrong? (2024 Q10)

• This is a flaw in contractualism. There are ways to get around it, but they’re ad-hoc and illustrate problems with the reasonable rejection apparatus.
• It is true that animals and infants can’t reasonably reject sets of principles since they lack the mental capacities to do so.
  • For infants, one explanation might draw on the fact that they will in future be able to reject these principles; rather like how specific as-yet-unborn individuals can reject to principles. i.e., potentiality.
  • This doesn’t resolve harming permanently intellectually disabled humans though.
• One approach is to say that they get moral status just by virtue of species.
  • Vindicates view that there’s a special kind of morality about human-human relationships.
  • But this looks dubious; there’s not much reason we should think that species is a morally-relevant natural fact if we believe that, say, ethnicity / sex isn’t.
    • Maybe species membership is related to being the kind of entity we can be in relations of mutual respect with, and that’s all that grounds morality.
• For animals, Scanlon admits that there are moral reasons besides those contractualism accounts for.
  • So he leaves it to those; contractualism is just about what we owe each other.
• But this is not very appealing for contractualism as a theory! It needs to outsource a significant part of morality to some other theory.
• Can also mention non-identity and future people here – another group that contractualism struggles with, because there’s no way for affected parties to offer reasons for rejection.
  • The problem here is the impersonalist restriction on grounds for rejection.
  • Summer vs Winter Child (Parfit)
• Altogether, this strongly suggests there are problems with reasonable rejection as the criterion of right/wrongness.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Evaluate the trustee model: beings who can’t reject principles themselves nevertheless have interests that a trustee can advance on their behalf
  • Extensionally, this seems like it works
    • Principles permitting gratuitous infant-harm or animal-cruelty are rejected by trustees
  • Explanatorily, this looks mistaken though.
    • It’s not wrong to inflict gratuitous pain on animals because the trustee would reject, it’s wrong because of the suffering! And this is exactly what’s wrong in the case of the human. [redundancy repackaged]
  • Also, the individualist restriction looks like it gets in the way.
    • Whose complaint is it? If it’s the trustee’s own, then why? She’s not harmed.
    • If it’s the ward’s, then how? They don’t have the capacity to complain.
• Decouple reasons to reject from ability to offer
  • Idea: the thing that matters isn’t whether someone can articulate a complaint, but whether there exist reasons to support such a complaint were it articulated.
  • This sidesteps the objection, since infants and animals have interests that ground reasons (even if they can’t voice them).
  • But then the rejection apparatus seems less central
• On the standard account, a principle is reasonably rejectable by S iff grounds exist that would constitute reasonable basis for S to object, given S’s interests and situation.
  • So identifiable future people can reasonably reject principles even though they’re not around yet to make the speech-act; infants can’t because they can’t object to anything?

What, if anything, is the difference between justifying one’s action to the parties affected, and justifying one’s action simpliciter? Why, if at all, does it matter? (2025 Q10a)

• We might think that the people affected by your action have a special relationship with it, where if they are satisfied by the action, then nobody else would have grounds to object to it. So on this account, they’re the same thing. To justify an action just is to justify it to the parties affected.
• E.g., suppose you take somebody’s bike. Then the person whose bike you took is reasonably aggrieved. But, intuitively, you could claim there’s no reason for some bystander who hears about the theft later to be independently aggrieved.
  • Suppose I justify the action: I needed to get to the hospital urgently, and there were no other means of transport available. If this justification satisfies the person affected, then we might think it should satisfy everybody. [Let us stipulate that there are no second-order effects of this theft – e.g., it doesn’t make it any more likely I steal others’ bikes in future, nor does it reduce the overall lawfulness of the society, etc.]
• Contractualism relies on this intuition. An action X is permissible according to contractualism iff and because it is permitted by principles that nobody could reasonably reject. We say that a principle P cannot be reasonably rejected if there’s no other principle P’ where the largest individual complaint is smaller than that against P.
  • A complaint needs to be grounded in personal, individual, generalisable reasons.
  • But putting all this apparatus together, we have that the permissible actions are exactly those which you can justify to the parties affected. The justification is that there’s no other set of principles which would have a smaller greatest complaint than these ones!
  • Cf Scanlon: when I think about the reasons for an action being impermissible, it simply is that I cannot justify it to others.
• But if an action might be unjustifiable simpliciter even while being justifiable to the parties involved, then contractualism would allow unjustifiable actions – i.e., ones that we morally ought not to do.
• And it seems like these two can come apart.
  • Summer child vs winter child.
    • Child born in winter will be predictably worse-off than one born in summer. But Mary prefers for trivial reasons to have child in winter.
    • Who exactly are the parties affected? Nobody seems to have a complaint – the winter child wouldn’t exist otherwise. The summer child does not exist, but even if we allow her to complain, her complaint that she doesn’t exist isn’t any larger than the winter child’s complaint that she wouldn’t exist if baby born in summer.
  • Also, there’s problems with how contractualism requires the individualist restriction. If we only want you to justify to parties involved in terms of their individual complaints, then I could say to millions of people: well I inconvenienced you slightly, but I made myself a lot better off (e.g., by delaying a Tube).
    • Yet this doesn’t really seem like it is justifiable!

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Worth explicitly mentioning the interpersonal nature of morality / “mutual recognition” / what we owe to each other.
• The key point for the essay is whether Scanlon can show that justifiability-to (JT) is prior to justifiability-simpliciter (JS).
  • He thinks that the principle-rejection is prior to the wrongness. Whereas others might think: if X wrongs someone, that is the reason to reject any principle permitting X.
    • So when giving criterion of wrongness, it’s worth including the impermissibly wrongs someone phrasing, since this makes the connection to individual justification transparent.
  • Although remember that there are two different things we might do when talking about wrongness:
    • What constitutes wrongness – for Scanlon, the principle-rejection
    • What the wrong-making feature is – the rejection-enabling property (i.e. the harm or burden itself).
    • Scanlon needs this to avoid the redundancy objection from Pettit/Blackburn.
    • So don’t say that an action is permissible because it’s permitted by principles nobody could reject. The because is from the harm; better to say consists in.
• There are different ways JS and JT might be connected:
  • JS is derived from JT
    • Then the difference matters; contractualism works and morality has relational structure.
  • Perfectly correlated but both tracking a third thing (e.g. harm)
    • Then the redundancy objection bites
  • Extensionally different
    • Then contractualism is either false or scope-restricted
• Here’s a neat way to explain the connection: I can justify X to S iff I can offer S a principle permitting X that S cannot reasonably reject.
  • And then X is justifiable to all affected parties iff there’s a permitting principle that no affected party can reasonably reject.
    • This is where the idea of mutual recognition comes in – each person is owed a justification that they specifically can accept.
  • It’s not that I’m justifying it to an aggregate of affected parties; it’s that I distributively justify it to each party individually.
• Can note the relevant sense of justification – it needs to be what’s actually justified (whether simpliciter or to the other person).
  • Scanlon’s reasonable rejection is an objective standard. So the difference between the two is not that the affected party might not accept your justification, even if it’s justifiable.
  • (Hobbesian-style contractarianism does rely on this kind of actual-acceptance gloss.)
• Would be worth showing that JS and JT come apart in both directions – i.e., give a case where contractualism seems too restrictive.
  • E.g., it doesn’t let you prevent many cluster headaches for one death.
• The upshot: contractualism can at best explain the relational part of morality.
  • Where there are impersonal goods, animals/nature, or non-identity, justifiability-simpliciter seems to come apart from justifiability-to.