Abstract
The type of contractarianism that we will consider is sometimes called instrumental contractarianism. Its most well-known advocate is David Gauthier. To an instrumental contractarian, a moral code and a legal system are only justified if they could be the result of an agreement made by hypothetical, perfectly rational agents. Morality, from a contractarian standpoint, is any set of voluntarily acquired internal constraints on utility maximizing behavior that it is rational for each agent to adopt, given that other agents adopt the constraints as well.
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Notes
David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 ), p. 61.
Ibid., pp. 233–235.
Ibid., pp. 101–104.
David Gauthier, “Morality, Rational Choice, and Semantic Representation: A Reply to My Critics,” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., Jeffrey Paul and John Ahrens, eds., The New Social Contract: Essays on Gauthier ( New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988 ), pp. 184–185.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 ), p. 416.
Contra Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ( London: Penguin Books, 1985 ), p. 198.
Gauthier, Morals By Agreement,pp. 190–191.
Jean Hampton, “Two Faces of Contractarian Thought,” in Peter Vallentyne, ed., Contractarianism and Rational Choice ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), p. 44.
Ibid., p. 45.
Cf. Gauthier, Morals By Agreement,p. 190 ff.; James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975); Hampton, op. cit.; and Jan Narveson, “Gauthier on Distributive Justice and the Natural Baseline,” in Vallentyne, op. cit., esp. pp. 136–144.
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation ( New York: Basic Books, 1984 ).
I wish to thank Jan Narveson, Sheldon Wein, Paul Viminitz, Malcolm Murray, Susan Dimock, and Bob Bright for their comments on and discussions of the ideas expressed in this paper. I also want to express my gratitude toward the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous support of my research.
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Tucker, C. (2000). A Moral Obligation to Obey the State. In: Narveson, J., Dimock, S. (eds) Liberalism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9440-0_12
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