Contractualism and absolutism
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Contractualism and absolutism Victor Mardellat1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction According to T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism, “when we address our minds to a question of right and wrong, what we are trying to decide is, first and foremost, whether certain principles are ones that no one, if suitably motivated, could reasonably reject.”1 On this view, a principle cannot be reasonably rejected if and only if the strongest objection that anyone could raise against this principle on the basis of how his or her personal interests would be affected if this principle were adopted is weaker than the strongest such objections that could be pressed from other points of view against any alternative principle—to wit, against any other principle that purports to settle questions of right and wrong in cases where these principles both apply. In Rahul Kumar’s words, a principle that no one can reasonably reject will be the one that, among all relevant alternatives, is “the principle whose implications are most acceptable to the person to whom it is least acceptable.”2 Since contractualism aims to provide “a successful alternative to utilitarianism”3 and other forms of consequentialism, one central question is whether contractualists can develop a plausible rationale for deontological constraints, which maintain that certain courses of action, such as killing or maiming the innocent, may never be undertaken whatever the consequences of a refusal to undertake them. This has long been denied, in part because it has seemed to some critics that Scanlon’s tiebreaking argument must inevitably lead to the conclusion that we ought to kill one
1 T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 169. 2 Rahul Kumar, “Risking and Wronging,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 43, n° 1, (2015), pp. 27-51, p. 31. 3 See T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, ed., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103-127, p. 103; and Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, op. cit., p. 229.
* Victor Mardellat [email protected] 1
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) & Centre d’Études Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron (CESPRA, UMR 8036), Paris, France
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undeserving person when the only way for us to prevent five murders would be to commit one ourselves.4 Scanlon’s tie-breaking argument supports the view that we should rescue as many endangered individuals as we can in situations where the affected parties are all facing the same harm and are all in a symmetrical position in relation to a source of aid (e.g., we do not have to harm one person in order to save others). One frequently discussed case is this: Imagine three boats, the position of each being equidistant from the other two. You are in the largest boat, alone, and your boat is in excellent condition. The other two boats are rapidly sinking; one contains two people (B&C), the other on
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