Daniel Webber

Contractualists often claim that their theory can account not only for monadic moral phenomena like rightness and wrongness, but also for directed or relational phenomena like owing and wronging. It has proven difficult, however, to formulate a contractualist theory of “what we owe to each other” that is fully satisfactory. This chapter suggests a possible diagnosis: contractualists have been trying to account for _relational_ owing and wronging by appealing to what is _monadically_ permitted or forbidden by the principles that no one could reasonably reject. An alternative strategy would be to allow for candidate non-rejectable principles that have relational content: when contractualists deliberate about which principles could or could not be reasonably rejected, they could consider not only monadic principles like “Lying is permitted” and “Lying is forbidden,” but also relational ones like “You owe it to others not to lie to them” and “You owe it to your mother not to lie to anyone.” They could then say simply that you owe it to someone to do something when the non-rejectable principles say that you owe it to them to do it. This chapter explores the prospects and implications of this deceptively simple account of relational morality.

Many metaethicists hold that particular moral facts must be explained in part by general moral principles, but they have struggled to give a satisfactory account of the nature of these explanatory moral laws. While the content of the moral laws has always been taken to be a matter of normative ethics, I explore the possibility that we could turn to normative ethical theory for an account of their nature as well. Could it be that the moral laws just are the contractualist’s principles that no one could reasonably reject, or the rule-consequentialist’s optimific rules, or the dispositions of the virtuous agent? I argue that accounts of this kind offer at least a partial solution to the problem: though they may not succeed as fully general accounts of moral lawhood, they show considerable promise as accounts of the deontic laws—the moral laws that explain facts about right and wrong.

When policymakers craft rules for use by the general public, they must take into account the ways in which their rules are likely to be misapplied. Should contractualists and rule consequentialists do the same when they search for rules whose general acceptance would be non-rejectable or ideal? I argue that these theorists face a dilemma. If they ignore the possibility of misapplication, they end up with an unrealistic view that rejects rules designed to protect us from others’ mistakes. On the other hand, if they take misapplication into account, they end up rejecting rules that appeal to what really matters morally in favor of easier-to-apply proxies for these rules. This leaves them unable to say why certain wrong acts are wrong, which in turn may lead them to mistaken verdicts about moral worth and wronging. I show how this misapplication dilemma applies to standard contractualist and rule consequentialist theories, but also suggest how it might generalize to other two-level theories, including those designed to avoid the ideal world objection.