Aaron Salomon

The main difference between consequentialism and contractualism is that the latter does not aggregate well-being when determining the permissibility of an action. Contractualism rules out such aggregation by including an individualist restriction: it only considers the personal reasons that single individuals have for objecting to a candidate moral principle. One influential rationale for the individualist restriction is that it is apparently required to explain how it can be possible to wrong another in particular. I undermine this rationale for the individualist restriction by reflecting on how contractualists must justify constraints against bringing about the most good—requirements, for instance, not to kill one to save five. I argue that contractualism faces a puzzle when it comes to identifying who is wronged by the violation of a constraint. And the most plausible solution renders the individualist restriction otiose in an account of wronging. The upshot is that we get a novel argument for Parfit’s contention that “contractualists and consequentialists are climbing the same mountain on different sides.”

An influential and troubling objection to contractualism and rule consequentialism is that they cannot account for the fact that sometimes actual, imperfect social practices—such as, for example, our property conventions—can determine what we are morally required to do. My main aim in this paper is to argue that this objection is mistaken because it relies on an implausible interpretation of the possible worlds in which different candidate principles are to be assessed in contractualist and rule consequentialist moral reasoning. Rather than imagining possible worlds in which we have always lived under these principles, we should imagine worlds in which we have switched to living under these principles from our once prevailing social morality. My secondary aim is to defend the account of natural property rights that emerges from this “switch interpretation.” The switch interpretation provides the natural rights theory of property with the resources to overcome two challenges that some conventionalists have taken to be decisive—namely, that the natural rights theory can neither explain why historic injustice can sometimes be superseded nor why the conventions in place in our community sometimes have the authority to make our rights to certain resources determinate.

Orthodox contractualists and rule consequentialists think that, for any action, the consequences of everyone performing that action determine whether that action is permissible. For them, “what if everyone did that?” is the fundamental moral question. By making “what if everyone did that?” the fundamental question of good moral reasoning, these moral theories can easily justify prohibitions on free-riding. But it also makes them face the ideal world problem. I argue that it was a mistake for moral theorists to generalize from an objection appropriate to cases of free-riding to all of morality. In short, we should understand the question “what if everyone did that?” to give expression to one, and only one, kind of objection to one’s action—namely, that, by performing that action, one would be making an exception of oneself. If we limit the scope of “what if everyone did that?” in this way, we can justify prohibitions on free-riding while avoiding the ideal world problem.

I argue that, in order to address the ideal world problem while remaining faithful to our concept of morality, Contractualists should no longer determine which actions I must perform by seeing whether they accord with certain principles for the general regulation of behavior. Instead, I argue, Contractualists should determine whether it is right or wrong for me to perform an action by evaluating any maxim that might be reflected by my action. I call the resulting view “Maxim Contractualism.” It states that an agent’s action is morally required just in case any maxim that he might adopt that involves not performing that action is one that someone could reasonably reject. Finally, I argue that, although Act Contractualism also provides us with the materials to solve the Ideal World Problem, it is a worse solution because it cannot account for the fact that, sometimes, what would happen if I performed an action over time is relevant to whether I am permitted to perform that action right here, right now.

Conventionalism about property is the view that all moral duties correlative to property rights depend essentially either on the existence of a convention that assigns conventional ownership of objects, or on the existence of a body of positive law that confers legal property rights. It has been objected that, if Conventionalism about property is true, then it is impossible for someone to have her property right violated by someone who is not a member of the community in which her conventional property right is assigned. But it is possible. When Christopher Columbus sailed up to the island of Hispaniola in 1492, he and his sailors wronged the inhabitants by forcing them off their land. So, Conventionalism is false. This is the Outsider Challenge for Conventionalism. The Outsider Challenge (and its first premise, in particular) receives support from the Benefit Condition, according to which one can be morally obligated to comply with a conventional rule only if one benefits or has one’s interests protected by the convention of which it is a part. Despite its provenance and plausibility, however, I think that the Benefit Condition should be rejected. Doing so in a principled way allows us to square Conventionalism with our moral intuitions and, thus, address the Outsider Challenge. My main aim in this essay is to reject the Benefit Condition in one such principled way by providing a Contractualist answer to the question of when, and why, someone is morally required to respect another’s conventional property right. One is morally required to respect the conventional property rights of another when and because failing to do so would run afoul of the Principle of Established Practices (pep) – a principle for which I give a Contractualist justification. Roughly, the pep requires us to comply with sufficiently just social practices in the absence of special justification, and the fact that one’s interests are not protected by a property convention is not always a sufficiently strong reason for one to violate the duties assigned by that convention. Since the fact that one’s interests are not protected by a property convention is not necessarily a special justification for violating the pep, the pep gives us reason to reject the Benefit Condition and, thus, the Outsider Challenge, too.

Directed duties are those duties whose violation would wrong someone in particular. Under what conditions, and in virtue of what, is a duty directed to someone? This is the Question of Direction. In this article, I explore the possibility of providing a Contractualist answer to the Question of Direction—one where the directedness of a directed duty is explained by the way in which that duty is derived in Contractualist moral reasoning. After presenting and rejecting three attempts at such an answer, I arrive at a satisfactory one: An agent has a duty to an individual to perform some action just in case and because, were the agent not to perform that action, the agent would make the individual occupy the standpoint relative to which any principle that permits the agent not to perform that action is unacceptable.