Contractualism and the paradox of deontology
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Contractualism and the paradox of deontology Victor Mardellat1
Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Scanlonian contractualism rejects the consequentialist assumptions about morality, value, and rationality in virtue of which deontological constraints appear paradoxical. And yet, Jeffrey Brand-Ballard and Robert Shaver have claimed that it cannot succeed in defending the said restrictions. That is because they see Scanlon’s tie-breaking argument as threatening to justify aggregation in paradox of deontology cases. I argue that this claim rests upon a failure to appreciate contractualism’s relational character. Once we take this feature of the view into account, it becomes clear that the tie-breaking argument is ruled out in cases where the only way for us to prevent several killings would be to commit one ourselves. To show this, I provide a contractualist explanation of why our duty not to harm persons is stricter than our duty to help them when they are threatened with harm. I conclude by distinguishing two ways in which this defense of deontological restrictions might bring contractualism objectionably close to absolutism. Keywords Deontology (paradox of) Contractualism Consequentialism Contraquentialism Absolutism Doing versus allowing harm
1 Introduction In maintaining 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, deontological constraints respond to widely shared anti-consequentialist sentiments. However, as Samuel Scheffler has forcefully argued in his book The Rejection of Consequentialism, it is surprisingly difficult to identify a & Victor Mardellat [email protected] 1
E´cole des Hautes E´tudes en Sciences Sociales (CESPRA, UMR 8036), Paris, France
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plausible principled rationale for such restrictions.1 Indeed, it would seem that whatever line of argument one embraces to justify these restrictions, one inevitably ends up trapped in what is known as ‘the paradox of deontology’. The paradox of deontology is the view that it cannot be rational to claim, as defenders of deontological restrictions do, that certain acts are so objectionable that it will never be at least permissible to commit one such act so as to minimize the overall number of its occurrences. For this would put us under an obligation to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways even when violating this obligation would in fact achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction we are supposed to heed. The paradigmatic example involves one agent who can prevent other people from harming several individuals only by inflicting the same harm on someone himself (Scheffler 1993: 84). Although consequentialists believe that, in such a case, harming the one is morally required insofar as this would bring about the best overall outcome impersonally judged (i.e., as few as possible would be harmed), it is worth noting at the outset that paradox of deontology cases were not designed to show th
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